Ask Betsy! Webinar Star Betsy Sayers Answers Your Burning BCM Questions – Work-Life Balance and Moving from ‘Motivated’ to ‘Ready, Willing, and Able’
During our recent Women in BCM – Ask Betsy webinar, we encouraged you to send in your burning questions for our presenter, BCM veteran Betsy Sayers, MBCP, and you delivered! We’re pleased to present another installment in a multi-part Q&A series.
Q: How do you manage manager expectations of your balance between work and personal life when you’re on call 24/7/365 to respond to events/incidents on a global scale?
Betsy: Gosh, on call 24/7/365 globally? There’s no such thing as work/life balance if you are the only one trying to achieve that goal with any brain cells intact!
I was only 24/7/365 across Canada and for a long time struggled – can’t imagine juggling all those time zones internationally as well. I assume you are not in an industry that appropriately compensates you for all this ‘on call’ time either.
Here’s what I did – I hope it’s helpful:
The result: Tremendous improvement to response capability at very little cost to the organization (1 BB and couple of cross-trained staff members who took the BB every 3rd week plus sanity and life balance for you.
Q: Regarding the 4 Generations of Cultural Change, we have two years since we launched the BCM program based on DRI in my organization, but we already have some areas in “The Motivated” field. What hints or tips can you share to move these people to “The Ready, Willing & Able”?
Betsy: I have dealt with this same challenge several times over the years and found it usually was directly connected to two things – lack of budget or skilled resources to do the job.
If my program represented a significant level of resource effort for the service owner, they could never find time to move into the Ready, Willing and Able group. Sadly, those that did find a resource to work on this tended to use it as the ‘special assignment’ for that employee who didn’t quite fit anywhere else in their organization. I spent more time trying to train people on BCM that did not want to be trained and got out of that job as fast as they could that I was spinning my wheels.
Your ability to assist with the ‘no budget’ excuse is confined to any BCM content support and/or rationale for needed $ you can provide.
However, to eliminate the ‘my team does not have time for this’ excuse, I came up with what we called our ‘Blitz’ approach to developing BC Plans. A 3 tier Business Continuity Planning Model as follows:
After conducting the first few workshops, we found a high level of commonality across the organization that meant I could take the results of some workshops and turn them into a generic plan for similar functions in other buildings etc. in turn reducing the level of effort required again.
Functional groups or services with a Recovery Time Objective in excess of 10 business days that demonstrated existing capability to meet needs within the RTO window had the requirement to complete Tier 2 and 3 planning waived. WOW did this ever alter RTOs that service owners were insisting on!
Hope this is helpful… if you attend DRI2019 in Las Vegas, don’t hesitate to say hello!
Take care,
Betsy