In an emergency, there is inevitably a brief delay between the incident and the response from first responders, and those moments can be critical. For organizations, it is imperative to have the ability to quickly and effectively keep staff apprised of developing situations. As a global corporation with offices in major cities across the globe, BlackBerry understands this.
Enterprises, particularly large-scale ones, must be capable of efficiently managing and mitigating emergency scenarios, be they natural disasters or global pandemics.
BlackBerry’s Environment Health & Safety (EH&S) and Enterprise Business Continuity Management (EBCM) teams are dedicated to this. They ensure the organization is prepared to support both employees and the core business in the event of an emergency.
“Our core objectives are fulfilling our duty of care towards staff and maintaining business continuity,” Laura Beattie Director of EH&S and EBCM explains. “When an internally-impacting crisis occurs, we must do everything in our power to get everyone ready and mobilized. Our goal is to mitigate the impact on our ability to serve our customers while also keeping our people safe.”
BlackBerry’s Evolving Approach to Crisis Communication
In BlackBerry® AtHoc®, Beattie and her colleagues recognized an opportunity to significantly improve their crisis response process and immediately engaged the AtHoc team for an internal deployment.
“We recognized how this powerful, two-way crisis communication platform could help us maximize the efficiency of our incident management process in keeping our people safe and business operations seemless,” says Beattie.
Beattie’s teams use AtHoc® Alert for crisis alerts and two-way response collection. They have integrated personnel accountability tool AtHoc® Account to monitor the safety of employees during emergencies. They also coordinate closely with both the Physical Security Operations Center (PSOC) and the Global Security and Travel teams.
This collaboration has been instrumental in protecting BlackBerry’s employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As the situation with Coronavirus has continued to develop, we’ve used BlackBerry AtHoc extensively,” explains Beattie. “We’ve leveraged AtHoc Alerts to notify staff of safety measures, government mandates, site closures, and other pertinent information. It’s proved effective enough that we’re exploring ways to use it for health, wellness, and business continuity checks with internal staff.”
Stability. Reliability. Safety.
Security is about more than protecting infrastructure and data, and reliability is about more than business continuity. It’s about protecting people. About keeping them out of harm’s way during an emergency.
Through AtHoc, BlackBerry has accomplished this, transforming its incident response process and helping stakeholders react more quickly and efficiently to all manner of scenarios – including Coronavirus.
“In any type of emergency, people are looking for direction,” says Beattie. “That’s as true of COVID-19 as anything else. BlackBerry AtHoc allows us to offer thousands of people guidance with the push of a button – it’s been instrumental not just in helping us maintain operations, but in ensuring people have the necessary information to keep themselves and their families healthy, safe, and secure.”
Read the full case study here.
