Emergency management
Emergency management protects life, property and the environment in the immediate response, and it gives the crisis team a stable base from which to manage the longer disruption.
This annex is informative. Annex A names the discipline and does not define it. A finding cannot rest on the annex alone. The guidance it supports is clause 5.8, and the evidence on this page is our interpretation of what that support looks like in practice.
What Annex A says
Annex A names emergency management as a supporting discipline; the standard does not define its scope. In clause 5.8 terms, it covers the immediate actions that cannot wait for a business impact analysis: evacuation, shelter, medical response, containment and the handover to the crisis team. It connects to the health and safety and facilities disciplines, and it depends on clear roles at the site. The resilience contribution is speed and order in the first hour, which buys the organization the time to make the bigger decisions.
Why it matters
Emergency arrangements are often treated as a compliance artifact: a fire drill once a year and a poster by the lift. The resilience question is whether the site can act before head office knows there is a problem. That requires local authority, a practised handover and a way to account for people. It also requires the emergency team to know when to stop being the emergency team and hand over to the crisis team. Poor handover is a common cause of a second, organizational failure after the first physical one.
What good looks like
Define the site emergency roles, the immediate actions and the handover trigger to the crisis team. Keep the people-accounting method simple and test it. Exercise a scenario that starts at the site and escalates to the crisis team, so the handover is practised. Record the time to account for people and the time to hand over. Fix the slowest step.
Evidence a reviewer asks for
There is no ISO certification or accredited assessment scheme for ISO 22316. The assessor here is your internal auditor, a customer assurance team or a consultant.
An assessor will ask how long it takes to account for people and who can authorize evacuation. A plan that requires head office approval for an immediate safety action is too slow.
- Site emergency plan Roles, immediate actions, assembly and containment arrangements
- People accounting The method used to account for staff, contractors and visitors, with the last test
- Handover protocol The trigger and information passed from the site team to the crisis team
- Exercise record The scenario, times achieved and the changes made
Where it commonly fails
- The emergency plan is a fire drill and nothing more.
- Site staff cannot act without head office approval.
- The handover to the crisis team is undefined, so two teams operate at once.
What to do before the second edition
Time the people-accounting step in the next exercise. Then time the handover. The two numbers tell you where to invest.
Read across
- 5.4 Effective and empowered leadership
- 5.7 Availability of resources
- 5.8 Development and coordination of management disciplines
← A.5 Communications managementA.7 Environmental management →