Worcester Business Journal

20 Worcester Business Journal | April 13, 2020 | wbjournal.com 10) Start with a plan. Companies of all shapes and sizes should draft a distinct crisis response plan. Existing disaster recovery plans or business continuity plans might not suffice. 9) Lead with leadership. Pick a small team responsible for your plan. Get buy-in from the top, pull in human resources, finance, IT. Develop policies minimizing disruption but ensuring data security is maintained and regulatory requirements are observed. Appoint a virtual CEO in case leadership falls ill. 8) Plan for every eventuality. Consider how to keep company functions going. Consider how employees will get paid, where they will work, and how they will complete their tasks. 7) Test your plan. No plan is trustworthy unless you test it. Create tabletop exercises and mock incidents to root out and identify problem areas needing patching. 6) Communicate. Set up systems to disseminate the latest information like a messaging app/chat room to convey news and a list of contacts. Get the CEO to issue regular status updates, remain transparent, avoid leaving staff in the dark. Pay special attention to young families and those living with seniors. Use social media & your website to keep customers informed. 5) Train and assess employees. Allow employees to train for substitute roles should the worst happen. Providing step-by-step instructions they can refer to should unexpected situations rise up should help reduce stress. Try to foster a sense of solidarity and community. 4) Work remotely. Employees working from home need to be set up with virtual private networks, SSL and dual-factor authentication. Test your endpoint security. Plan for increased bandwidth demand and beware of staff using personal devices to log-in into the company. 3) Test for stress. Do you have enough capacity? Stress test your network applications for load. Identify which critical applications (hardware & servers) will need additional expansion for handling sudden surges in traffic. 2) Continuous training. Conduct regular cybersecurity user awareness and training to ensure staff can identify and avoid phishing scams, especially during times of crisis when bogus emails, social media memes and cybercrime proliferates. Beware of disinformation campaigns and doctored, so called deepfake, videos. 1) Do fun things! Working remotely from home can be lonely. Pull in human resources to devise fun ways to keep teams socially engaged, such as staging photo contests for best home office, or running a daily lunch hour via online conference. K N O W H O W Build bridges: Why the competition isn't your enemy 10 1: M eetings are certainly looking different in these days of social distancing. Zoom and other online meetings, or conference calls, are popular ways for businesspeo- ple to gather when they can't actually gather. But there are safeguards and polite practices to keep in mind when hosting an audio or video conference call. Get in business mode. Make an agen- da and stick to it, advises Business.com. "People are busy. ey do not have the time to listen to conversations that are not pertinent to their job and the tasks at hand," the site notes, pointing out a recent basketball game or where you ate lunch as off-topic diversions. Keeping the meeting to a set timeframe is im- portant and will boost participation. Secure the situation. If you post your Zoom meeting number and password online, it's vulnerable to bombers who can get into your session and wreak havoc. Cybersecurity expert Jack Moore tells Forbes.com people should try not to use the personal meeting ID num- ber, either, but rather, allow Zoom to generate a random ID number for each session. Users can enable options on Zoom, too, requiring a password to set up meetings or for participants to join by phone (as opposed to embedding the password in the meeting link). Test the connection. Your technical issues on a work conference call take up other people's time. It's best to test your hardware ahead of time, and maybe use one of those quick, online internet-speed tests while you're at it, writes Anita George of ABCNews.com, to be sure your internet connection is up to par. "Even if you do run into issues, it's best to know if your setup has a problem beforehand, so that you can troubleshoot it before your meeting starts," she writes. Many video-con- ferencing apps will help you test your microphone, webcam and speakers. George suggests looking in the settings menu for these functions. 1 0 T H I NG S I know about . . . ...Setting up a crisis response plan BY JULIA BECKER COLLINS Special to the Worcester Business Journal I t's easy to look at everyone in the same industry as you as your enemy, but it's incredibly short- sighted. You will find businesses in your network overlap with your own, but that overlap is rarely complete. It's in these mutual gaps in your services and ideal client profiles where businesses can help one another by building a relationship of education and referrals. It something we've done at Vision Advertising and have been very successful. You need to approach these relations as relationships – give and take on a partnership level. While we pride ourselves on provid- ing a wide spectrum of digital market- ing solutions, many marketing agencies focus on one or two specific services, such as websites, graphic design, pay- per-click, or public relations. In the past we've: • Worked with an email marketing company to provide them with marketing services while testing and referring clients to their email marketing platform. • Partnered with a website development studio, where we've handled the creative-heavy website design and they have handled the technical-heavy construction. • Crafted a thought-leadership relationship between our agency leadership and another's to allow for a sharing of best practices, solutions, and thinking through challenging issues. ese connections are built through networking and referrals, something I'm very familiar with from my years as president and co-founder of the MetroWest Women's Network. It's made it very clear the ones who get the most out of networking and referrals are those who are actually listening and want to help others. Additionally, I purposefully craed a network of local, women-owned marketing professionals from large agencies to small, solo operators to allow for this kind of referral cycle. What kind of relationship-and- referral network you have depends on your industry and array of services. e best connections are ones benefiting everyone: allows you to say yes to a client, helps a client you would normally turn away, and helps the referred business and primes them to assist you. Here are a few common scenarios: • Referring potential clients who aren't a good fit for you. If your business is too small or too big to help a client, ask yourself if you can refer them to your partner. is way, the client is le with a positive experience from both of you, and your referral partner can help a client you couldn't (or wouldn't) have been able to serve. • Mutual education and information pacts. Everyone should continue to learn, especially when they run a business. Look toward building bridges with businesses where you can provide not just support but education to each other, from the basics on where to start to full-on cross-training. • Looking at competition as vendors for complementary services. All industries provide a vast array of services. Do you have gaps in yours? Does another business? See about covering each other's bases. While there's an inherent goodwill in these kinds of partnerships, it's more than just building up than tearing down. We're all stronger together than apart, and rivalries are rarely productive. ink about building that bridge instead of burning it down next time the opportunity presents itself. Julia Becker Collins is the chief operating officer at Westborough digital marketing agency Vision Advertising. She can be reached at julia@vision-advertising.com. BY SUSAN SHALHOUB Special to the Worcester Business Journal By Michelle Drolet Michelle Drolet is CEO of Towerwall, a woman- owned independent data security services provider based in Framingham. You may reach her at michelled@towerwall.com. W W W C O N F E R E N C E C A L L S

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