How to Communicate during a Natural Disaster with DeskAlerts

Natural disasters can happen unexpectedly, or with a small amount of notice (from a few days to a few hours beforehand). Whether you’re dealing with an earthquake, storm, wildfire, hurricane, tornado, tsunami, mudslide, flood or another event, your business needs to have procedures in place for dealing with an emergency situation.

Your employees especially need to be kept informed when a disaster strikes or is about to hit. While each situation is unique and you will have different timeframes to work with, it is critical you keep your staff updated with information about the emergency situation and what actions they need to take to both ensure their own safety and help the business get through the disaster.

DeskAlerts is a remarkable internal communications tool that can help you to keep your employees informed during a natural disaster.

The system works by sending a notification in the form of a pop-up window to every single employee’s desktop PC. The message cannot be ignored or minimized and will appear even if a screen is locked, in screensaver mode or in sleep mode.

Other ways of communicating aren’t always effective. Emails at the best of times can go ignored in cluttered inboxes, and also rely on staff looking at email at the critical moment. You could call everyone, but if time is of the essence, can you afford to take that risk when lives are potentially at stake?

By sending emergency alert notifications with DeskAlerts you are much more likely to get their attention.

If you have sufficient notice that a natural disaster is coming, for example a hurricane, you can send your employees information about your company’s plan to get through the crisis. This can include instructions on actions they can carry out ahead of the event such as protecting computer equipment. You can also instruct them to stay home when the disaster is expected to hit.

However if there is little to no warning, you can quickly send messages to employees with advice on what to do next in the situation. For example if there is an earthquake that has affected their building, send instructions of actions that can be taken to ensure everyone’s safety.

A great feature of DeskAlerts is its statistics module– you can see who has seen DeskAlert messages and who hasn’t. In the event of an emergency situation, management can determine which staff members haven’t received the emergency notification and follow up directly with those staff to ensure that they are located and are safe.

Of course when the dust settles – both literally and metaphorically – and your organization has been directly affected by a natural disaster, resuming business operations will be a priority to ensure the future viability of your firm.

DeskAlerts will help you to keep your employees informed throughout this process as well. You can use it to send them regular updates so they know how your recovery efforts are going, and what key messages they can give to your clients and other stakeholders.