Understanding The Hierarchy During Disaster Restoration

company One of the most critical considerations businesses need to make is who should lead employees and operations during disasters and disaster restoration, respectively. According to FEMA, the leader should be able to motivate employees to protect not just themselves but others while having a personality that can provide directions and control the situation effectively.

This is applicable for residential and commercial disaster restoration alike. Fire damage, for example, has a way of creating mass hysteria, a lot of confusion, and all-out panic in a building. People must know who to contact in case of emergency.

This article will consider the hierarchy businesses should implement during a disaster and the desirable qualities that influential leaders should have.

Leaders During Disasters & Disaster Restoration

There are four critical points that the management needs to consider when appointing a leader for disaster and disaster restoration. The leader should be:

• Well-versed in disaster mitigation. It involves trying to mitigate the damage to life and critical infrastructure as much as possible. The primary focus should be on the preservation of life. 
• Individuals should be briefed beforehand. This includes being ready beforehand to handle disasters when they eventually happen. This is extremely important since being caught in an emergency with no plan or resources to tackle it can lead to potentially hazardous results for the staff and family members and be an administrative and financial disaster. 
• Have a strong presence. 
• Facilitate the recovery process by eliminating the impacts of emergencies on the employees and family members to a point where first responders are able to manage the situation. 

While residential areas are usually not as densely populated or as challenging to navigate, commercial areas are more complicated. This means that residential structures may be able to work efficiently with just one leader in a house, but commercial buildings cannot. It is essential to set up a disaster restoration and management hierarchy to deal with an emergency. 

Here is what the hierarchy should include: 

1. Incident commander
2. Safety officer
3. Security officer
4. Public information officer
5. Liaison officer
6. Logistics chief
7. Planning chief
8. Operations chief

Here is what the hierarchy should look like:

This hierarchy represents the basic infrastructure required from an administrative point of view for the organization to manage disasters better. This hierarchy stands true for disaster restoration as well. Without it, there would be a lot of confusion about who to report, who to follow, and what to do. “Heroes” and vigilantism would be established, and the management won’t be able to focus on what’s essential – ; resumption of their services and safety of employees/customers. 

All these individuals respond to the incident commander, who is responsible for handling the emergency as a whole. In the absence of one individual, employees should be trained to follow the other. These key roles are assigned to department heads and other level-headed executives, and their assignments should be announced so that every employee knows who to follow in case of an emergency.

Critical Abilities Of Leaders In Crisis

Some critical behavioral characteristics of leaders during emergencies and disaster restoration include the ability to:

• Assume and demonstrate responsibility. 
• Influence and motivate others 
• Navigate complex and interrelated activities
• Create adaptive strategies that evolve respective of the crisis
• Balance expertise and intuition

• Act decisively 
• Leverage the resources at hand to benefit under unique circumstances
• Adapt and engage with the disaster management and commercial restoration
• Embrace the challenge through resilience and stress management
• Focus on values and life support
• Act urgently and decisively
• Collaborate with existing and remaining networks
• Form new networks to manage employees and residential occupants better

For commercial and residential disaster restoration (especially during a fire or natural disaster), the most crucial consideration for appointing a leader is maintaining their composure during substantial stress, long enough to navigate through the disaster. 

When it comes to disaster restoration, they must be able to manage operations without micro-management operations. It is important to understand that the decisions involved in the restoration process are based on knowledge and experience. Unless the entire direction needs to be changed, interruptions in the process will only lead to delays and slow the operations down. 

By finding the right leader during a crisis, the occupants of a commercial or residential building are not only able to save their lives but, ideally, their property as well. By minimizing losses, it is more than probable that the individuals would be able to achieve the ideal outcome possible. 

Of course, help with finding the right person for the job can go a long way in helping improve disaster management, loss prevention, and disaster mitigation. By focusing on higher missions or values and drawing on the larger community for support, these individuals and disaster restoration companies can work together to achieve better outcomes. 

If you need help finding the right person or the right type of community support, 911 Restoration of Central Mississippi can help. From helping with water damage restoration to all-out storm or other disaster restoration, our IICRC certified experts are trained to help you find the most cost-effective and reliable results – which also includes helping you choose a leader that can help navigate disasters.