BCP (Business Continuity Plan) Call Tree

Silex7 said:

I have a question here, if a company is already made its own BCT , how would they ensure the proper information delivery to ' no access ' employee / operator ?

I guess the failure of many organizations in handling effective crisis management and Business Continuity correct scheme is their lacking of effective communication and information reporting. During Covid-19 tens of of meetings and decisions are being made without proper confirmation of information/ decisions output delivery to everyone, and yet, every top management keeps confirming that 'everyone is speedily informed'. I have seen many troubles raised from such situations.

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I ask my clients to have a call-in number that is known to all. When called, updated information is repeated so the called is kept abreast of the latest developments or instructions from the management. The same information is transmitted to official social media channels.

A call tree is only as good as the efficiency of the system and the timeliness of the phone numbers being kept up to date.

What you're using is a "Notification Call Tree" which is fine until you have a break in the chain after which everyone down from that break gets nothing.

What Jim is alluding to is an "Automated Call Tree" whereby there is one message to all simultaneously.

Whatever the method, it has to be tested and validated in a timely fashion

Silex7 said:

I have a question here, if a company is already made its own BCT , how would they ensure the proper information delivery to ' no access ' employee / operator ?

I guess the failure of many organizations in handling effective crisis management and Business Continuity correct scheme is their lacking of effective communication and information reporting. During Covid-19 tens of of meetings and decisions are being made without proper confirmation of information/ decisions output delivery to everyone, and yet, every top management keeps confirming that 'everyone is speedily informed'. I have seen many troubles raised from such situations.

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I agree with you. Even our current procedure did not take this into account:
No one person should call more than 3 names. By keeping each call to less than 3 minutes, 20 people can be contacted in less than 15 minutes. If person is not available, leave a message for the person to return call. If leaving a message is not possible, call back every 5 minutes. If uncontactable for 20 minutes, call the next person that this person is assigned to notify. Thereafter, report uncontactable persons to the respective team leader.

Silex7 said:

I have a question here, if a company is already made its own BCT , how would they ensure the proper information delivery to ' no access ' employee / operator ?

I guess the failure of many organizations in handling effective crisis management and Business Continuity correct scheme is their lacking of effective communication and information reporting. During Covid-19 tens of of meetings and decisions are being made without proper confirmation of information/ decisions output delivery to everyone, and yet, every top management keeps confirming that 'everyone is speedily informed'. I have seen many troubles raised from such situations.

Click to expand...

Excellent explanation, all to the point.

Reading the comments , I believe people are confusing Call Tree with day to day Operational communication.

Call Tree is a mechanism to convey and receive critical information , updates & feedbacks usually but not limited to response teams in case of an emergency.

By its very nature there would be a different Call Tree for Crisis Management Team, Incident Response team etc. including call trees for critical communication between Leadership & Staff. Based on the need there could even be a call tree setup within teams.

The type & nature of all these call trees would change based on the purpose & scope for which those trees were designed.

A good call tree also makes use of multiple channels of communication be it phones, emails, WhatsApp to account for communication medium failures during crisis.

Note: Remember Call Tree is a two way communication and there is a little difference between Call Tree and sending mass one way notification to your staff .

With social media text broadcasts such as Whatsapp group chat, Telegram channels, etc. there is the capability to execute a call tree message broadcast to all staff by including them in the group chat broadcast. This reduces the need for a pyramidal hierarchy of sending messages as the structure is flat. However, it must be made clear that there would be a limited number of people in the chat where official information is regarded as official from the organization.

A couple of drawbacks would be if everyone in the organization is on the chatgroup or has even added it to their smart devices, so individual responsibility is needed to make sure that each and everyone is on the broadcast. The second, is if emergency broadcast messages are received timely, as sometimes people do indeed shut off their devices and so are not informed of the emergency.