Being prepared in advance is a critical step to responding to an emergency and keeping your business and employees safe. Training, testing and exercises are essential components of preparedness. Training ensures that everyone knows what to do when there is an emergency or business operations are disrupted.
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Everyone needs training to become familiar with protective actions for life safety (e.g., evacuation, shelter, shelter-in-place and lockdown). Employees should receive training to become familiar with safety, building security, information security and other loss prevention programs.
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Exercises enhance knowledge of plans, allow individuals to improve their own performance and identify opportunities to improve capabilities to respond to real events. Tests should be conducted to validate that business continuity recovery strategies will work. Tests should also be conducted to verify that systems and equipment perform as designed.