Stay Level Headed Don't Panic in Business

Every business is designed to run without hitches. All of your departments, members of staff and even your machines are tuned to run like clockwork. Should something break and disrupt the entire chain, the process slows down, you run into bottlenecks, and someone is to blame. But before you go around pointing fingers at what the cause of the slowdown in your business is, people usually enter a state of panic and, as a result, the entire business could collapse for a couple of hours, days or even weeks. Planning for Continuity Let’s say that you run a business that deals with millions of customers around the world and you have their personal information stored on a hard drive attached to your network. It’s stored in a database which gives your employees easy access to all of the information. Unfortunately, the hard drive fails one day and not only have you lost all of your customer information, your business is probably going to collapse as a result and you’re officially in a state of panic. Planning for continuity means that you have a plan B, C, D and so on in case these situations happen. Hard drives failing are not your fault and they are the fault of the manufacturer, but that doesn’t mean you can just blame them because every hard drive has an expected failure rate and they can not be held accountable. To deal with this problem, businesses use backups that are either uploaded to a remote server and kept safe, or they’re backed up on another drive in the office on a nightly or hourly basis. Planning for continuity is one of those business components that not many people get right the first time, but it’s an essential part of dealing with panic situations. Know the Right Contacts You need to have confidence when you are dealing with a business panic, so staying calm is perhaps the most important thing you can do. Take a deep breath and relax for a moment in your chair before you tackle the issues so that your mind is cleared when you do so. The first step you should usually take after regaining control of your thoughts is to contact the right people or services to help you fix the problem. For starters, let’s say a problem happened overnight with your computers and you’ve just realised that your fuel reserves for your transport company’s vehicles are completely dry. Instead of hauling them off to the nearest petrol station, you could contact a company like New Era Fuels for a bulk fuel delivery in the morning while you also hire a computer technician to take a look at why your computer is reading the wrong numbers from your fuel reserves. By knowing the right contacts, you can remove a significant amount of stress and pressure from your job. Professionals are experts in their fields and are paid to deal with your problems so that you don’t have to, so why not give them a chance and make friends with them so that they can help you in your time of need?]]>