Responding to the Texas power outage and other physical incidents with Kintaba

At Kintaba, we know any risk to your team’s ability to work safely is as critical as a threat to a server’s ability to accept inbound connections.

Before the pandemic, major employee safety incidents tended to be localized to the workplace, such as the familiar fire alarm, water main break, or building-wide power outage, and response practices to these events were mostly physical as well.  Today that framing might seem quaint as most employees now operate in a remote or work-from-home capacity where all contact between them and their teammates is digital.  

So what happens when there’s a regional event that impacts a large portion of your workforce’s ability to safely complete their jobs?

This week many companies found out, as millions in Texas lost power during an unprecedented winter storm, and company leaders faced not only a loss of connectivity to their employees but also the question of how to quickly react and work to assure their employees’ safety.

Managing this major incident requires coordination and response best practices in the same ways that responding to major unexpected engineering emergencies does, and at Kintaba we believe your incident management solution can help to empower your team as you respond to people-emergencies just like it can for digital ones.

So how can you best prepare for employee-impacting events at your company with Kintaba?

1. Establish non-technical on calls

You probably have on-calls for your frontend and backend systems and services, but what about employee support, physical operations, HR, and legal?  Having these roles defined in Kintaba makes it easier to find the right people at the right moments just like you would with a major technical outage or emergency.

‍2. Have a plan for non-technical incident levels

Just like you might define a technical SEV1 as impacting a certain percentage of customers, you similarly can define SEV levels for employee safety by severity of the incident as degree of risk (to productivity or safety) or percent of employees impacted.

‍3. Create safety and people-oriented response tags and automations

Define nontechnical tag categories for employee safety and then create automations that add responders from your nontechnical on-calls who can best support impacted employees for different types of incidents (ex: weather, connectivity, safety).

We know you care deeply about your teammates, and by following these steps with Kintaba we hope you can more easily translate incident response best practices from your technical teams to your people operations teams to make your company more ready to support your colleagues whether they’re in the office or working from home.

We’d also like to hear from you if you have stories of how your company or team has responded to the Texas power outages or other major events and how we can make Kintaba work better for these types of incidents.

Contact us or log into to your Kintaba instance today.