Protect your people and keep the doors open
A day of downtime costs revenue. An OSHA citation costs more. An injury that a plan could have prevented costs the most of all. We help businesses and employers build continuity plans, OSHA-compliant emergency action plans, and training that keep your people safe and your doors open when disruption hits.
Most businesses discover their preparedness gaps in the same way: something ordinary goes wrong on an ordinary day. A fire alarm at 10 a.m. and nobody is sure who sweeps the second floor. A water main break closes the building for three days and there is no plan for where anyone works. A ransomware note appears and the backup has not been tested since it was configured.
None of these are catastrophes. They are the events that actually interrupt employers, and they are cheap to prepare for compared to what they cost when they happen unprepared.
The obligations you already have
OSHA emergency action plans
Employers subject to OSHA requirements generally need a written emergency action plan when one is required by an applicable standard, covering how employees report emergencies, evacuation procedures and route assignments, procedures for employees who remain to operate critical operations before evacuating, accounting for employees after evacuation, rescue and medical duties, and who to contact for information about the plan. Employers must review the plan with employees when it is created, when an employee's responsibilities change, and when the plan changes. Very small employers may communicate the plan orally under certain conditions, but the substance still has to exist.
Fire prevention plan requirements, hazard communication, and any industry-specific standards layer on top of that. The practical question is usually not whether you have a document but whether the document matches your current building, your current headcount, and your current shift structure.
The general duty obligation
Beyond specific standards, employers have a general obligation to provide a workplace free from recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm. Workplace violence has increasingly been treated as falling within that scope, particularly in sectors with known exposure such as healthcare, late-night retail, and roles involving public contact or cash handling. A documented threat assessment and response approach is the reasonable response to that.
Continuity is the part most employers skip
Evacuation planning answers how people get out of the building. Continuity planning answers what happens on day two, when the building is unusable and payroll still runs on Friday. For most businesses it is the higher-value work, and it is usually the part with no owner.
The core of it is identifying which functions genuinely must continue, how quickly each has to resume, and what each depends on: a system, a vendor, a facility, or often one specific person who is the only one who knows how a process runs. That last category, single points of failure in people, is the finding that most often surprises leadership and the one that is cheapest to fix through cross-training. Our guide on continuity planning walks through the method, and it adapts directly to a private employer.
Training that is proportionate
Most employers do not need a training program. They need their people to know four things: how to report an emergency, where to go, who accounts for whom, and who can make the call to close or evacuate. That is achievable in a short annual session plus a posted one-page guide, and it will outperform an elaborate program nobody completes.
Where more depth is warranted, usually for floor wardens, facilities staff, security, and the leadership group who would make decisions, a facilitated tabletop is the efficient format. Two hours with the leadership team and a realistic scenario will surface more than a year of policy review.
What this is worth in practical terms
Preparedness work is easy to defer because its return is invisible when nothing happens. Three places where it shows up concretely:
Insurance and contracts. Carriers increasingly ask about continuity planning, and larger customers, particularly in government contracting, healthcare supply, and financial services, ask about it in vendor due diligence. Having a real answer occasionally wins work and sometimes prevents losing it.
Downtime. The gap between a business that resumes in two days and one that resumes in two weeks is almost never the severity of the event. It is whether anyone had identified the dependencies and the alternatives in advance.
Liability posture. Documented planning, documented training, and documented drills are the evidence that an employer took reasonable steps. That documentation is difficult to create after an incident and straightforward to create before one.
Sized to the company
A twenty-person office and a four-site manufacturer need different things. For a small employer this is often a single engagement producing a compliant emergency action plan, a short continuity plan, and a training session. For a larger or multi-site organization it usually involves site-level annexes, a more rigorous dependency analysis, and an exercise program.
We scope to what your organization can realistically maintain. A binder nobody updates provides no protection, legal or practical.
Workplace preparedness, answered.
Does every employer need a written emergency action plan?
It depends on which OSHA standards apply to your operation, and some standards trigger the requirement while others do not. Employers below a certain size may be permitted to communicate the plan orally in some circumstances. The practical answer for most employers is that a written plan is both required or advisable and cheap to produce, and it is what you will be asked for after an incident.
What is the difference between an emergency action plan and a business continuity plan?
An emergency action plan covers the incident itself: reporting, evacuation, accounting for people, and immediate safety. A business continuity plan covers what happens afterward: which functions must resume, how quickly, and how you run them without your normal facility, systems, or staff. Most organizations need both and have only the first.
How long does this take?
For a single-site small employer, typically a few weeks including a site walkthrough, a working session, drafting, and review. Multi-site or higher-hazard operations take longer, mostly because the dependency analysis involves more people.
We have a plan from years ago. Is it worth reviewing?
Almost always, and it is inexpensive relative to starting over. The common failures are a plan describing a building you have since left, evacuation assignments held by people who no longer work there, and no reference to systems your business now depends on. A short review will tell you which of those apply.
Can you train our staff as well as write the plan?
Yes. Plans that are delivered without training tend not to change behavior. We usually include a staff briefing and a leadership tabletop, because the gap between a written procedure and a practiced one is where most real-world failures sit.
Would your business keep running after a bad day?
Let's build a plan that protects your people and your operations. Your initial consultation is free.
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