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If you held your last fire or emergency evacuation drill more than six months ago, it's time to think about staging another. Careful planning and evaluation can help you get the most out of these exercises, enhancing your employee's chances of a safe evacuation. Bear in mind that unannounced drills give you an idea of how workers might actually react in an emergency situation. On the other hand, announcing drills offer them the opportunity to prepare for and practice specific skill sets they would need. Before a fire emergency arises, workers need to know: How to activate the appropriate alarm system(s). How and when to contact the fire department. What to do before they evacuate—such as shutting down equipment. Their role in the evacuation. For example, they might need to assist disabled co-workers, help contractors or visitors on the premises, bring essential items such as visitor logs that can be used to verify that everyone is out of the building, provide first aid for injured co-workers, or act to prevent or minimize hazardous chemical releases. How to evacuate their work area by at least two routes. The locations of stairwells (workers should not use elevators to evacuate). Places to avoid - such as hazardous materials storage areas. Assembly points outside the building. After the drill, evaluate the exercise to determine which problems need addressing. Ask such questions as:

There are many reasons why your company needs a business continuity plan. Having a strategy – before an event happens – helps to maximize the chance your business can recover while minimizing the loss of property, life and assets. Developing your business continuity plan should be a thoughtful process resulting in a plan that can be beneficial to you if an event occurs. Start by assembling a team of key decision-makers who will lead your continuity planning efforts. Senior management, team leaders and anyone with in-depth knowledge about business operations should be included. Four Steps to Developing an Effective Business Continuity Plan Identify threats or risks Understanding the risks that could leave employees, customers, vendors, property and operations vulnerable is fundamental. Threats can include, but are not limited to natural disasters, malicious attacks, power outages and system failures. Identify the risks most likely to occur based on historical, geographical, organizational and other factors. Then weigh the probability of each event against its potential impact to your business, as well as your readiness to respond. Conduct a business impact analysis Identify the people, places, providers, processes and programs critical to the survival of your business. What functions and resources, if interrupted or lost, could impact your ability to provide goods and services or meet regulatory requirements? Consider who and what is absolutely necessary to restore critical operations. Then prioritize the need to restore each item after the event. Plan to use limited resources wisely. Complementary functions can always be restored later. Adopt controls for prevention and mitigation Prevention and mitigation planning and activities are intended to help prevent an event (such as a fire or explosion from unsafe conditions) as well as to reduce the impact or severity of an event (such as relocating critical equipment to a higher elevation in flood-susceptible areas). Your prevention and mitigation plans should address, among other things, emergency response, public relations, resource management, and employee communications. Test, exercise and improve your plan routinely A business continuity plan is an evolving strategy that should adapt to your company’s ever-changing needs. Test and update it regularly – yearly at a minimum – or any time critical functions, facilities, suppliers or personnel change. Train employees to understand their role in executing the plan, too. Exercises can include discussions or hypothetical walk-throughs of scenarios to live drills or simulations. The key is to ensure the plan works as intended.

People are losing jobs to robots and technology at an accelerating rate. Have you used one of those self-serve checkout stands lately? One was installed at my local CVS only 3 months ago. Awkward at first but seems like old hat now. The manager there told me the new system allowed him to let two full time clerks go. Two jobs lost to robots and their technology that will never reappear. Here's just some of the other jobs that are suffering the same fate as retail clerks: Pharmacists Soldiers Reporters Drivers Fast food workers Assembly workers Bank tellers Secretaries Stock traders Warehouse workers …and there is more Technology alone changes the employment landscape. Objects like the iPhone have the consequence of laying off Kodak workers, as well as workers in the mapping, printing, alarm clock and record industry. I recently listened to an interesting podcast (all Radiolab podcasts are interesting!) about work in a shipping warehouse for online mega-providers, such as Amazon. If you thought stop watches were banned in the workplace at the beginning of the last century, guess what – they're back! Technology, along with its gamification, is reducing worker output to a competitive logarithm using the most minute of performance indicators. Years ago Buckminster Fuller (otherwise known as "Bucky") surmised that the rise of computers and technology would bring use to a place where it is inefficient to have full scale employment. It would actually be cheaper to pay people to stay at home.  And we are getting there. Even in a "good" economy we have 7% unemployment. And we are being asked to pay for those folks who have to stay at home…because there are no jobs. This has more to do with the macro-economics of production than it does anything a politician can influence. While Bucky believed that less is more, most folks don't think that way. In their idleness they will want to be serviced, entertained and otherwise cared for, by a growing service class economy. So the fantasy of growing the middle class back to where it was before all these technology changes is a pipe dream. A political football divorced from reality. There will be a continued division between highly paid knowledge workers and low paid service workers. Sooner or later we will end up paying service workers to stay home or do some form of public service. As we march forward you will either be a highly paid knowledge worker who cannot yet be replaced by a machine or a low paid service worker who cannot yet be replaced by a machine. That's true for your kids' future too! FYI – Looks like John Henry would be out of a job today. Now trains lay their own tracks http://www.wimp.com/traintrack/

(Bloomberg) -- As the final hours of Malaysian Air Flight 370 remain wrapped in mystery, the question of who bears full liability for the jet’s disappearance is also unresolved. This much is clear: Families of the 227 passengers aboard the flight that vanished on March 8 can recover some compensation from Malaysian Airline System Bhd even if the plane isn’t found. The airline is liable under international treaty for as much as $175,000 per passenger, and possibly more. For survivors to capture significantly greater damages, wreckage would probably have to be located and a narrative of the plane’s demise assembled. Several scenarios have been offered for the flight’s disappearance, including hijacking, intentional downing or an on-board fire. Evidence of any of these could open avenues for family members to sue. “The disappearance of Flight 370 remains a mystery. The legal claims against Malaysia Airlines -- those are not a mystery,” said Robert Hedrick, a pilot and air-disaster lawyer in Seattle. “If the wreckage is located, the evidence may establish liability of other parties.” The Montreal Convention of 1999, an international treaty that covers air travel, requires carriers to pay damages for each passenger killed or injured in an accident, even if its cause is unknown. By those rules, the airline’s liability could stand at more than $40 million. Read the entire article here. Content provided by:  http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2014/03/24/jets-mystery-disappearance-leaves-riddles-over-who?eNL=5330756f150ba0af70068ede&utm_source=PC360NewsFlash&utm_medium=eNL&utm_campaign=PC360_eNLs&t=es-specialty&_LID=160558015

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