Unfortunately, safety and security events won’t wait for you to prepare for a tabletop exercise before striking, instead they happen according to external factors like weather patterns, distracted forklift driving, or based on an attacker’s planned timeline.
Having prepared beforehand helps your organization to increase response time and the type of response for the best possible outcome before an event happens.
As more and more employees work and gather together in buildings each month, organizations need to test out their emergency incident response plans, redevelop muscle memory, and ensure that those plans will still work. We’ve heard from clients that whether they’re in a 100% return to workplace, hybrid or staggered model, their emergency response plans have needed adjustments to support the current “new normal” that has changed over time. Tabletop exercises inform you on what works and where improvements are needed, giving your organization the time and power to adapt plans that work better.
Tabletop exercises are most informative and effective when executives attend and participate and when they are not overly prepared for the simulated scenarios. It is critical to run through more than one type of incident and response exercise so that your organization develops a clear line of responsibilities and the game plan for success.
Understanding everyone’s roles by incident type and what their responses and actions should be better prepares the organization for if and when an attack, disaster or other incident type occurs.
With crime up 20% nationwide during the pandemic, now’s the right time to get to work. Emergency incidents and attacks don’t care that it’s tough to schedule a tabletop exercise. Review, update and test out your emergency response plans with a tabletop before an event happens.
Learn from insights we’ve collected from our clients on how they run their tabletop exercises in our Best Practices Guide for Conducting Tabletop Exercises.
Tabletop exercises provide a great opportunity to discuss response-related issues without the stress or urgency of an actual, real-world event. They provide a workshop-like forum for clarifying roles and responsibilities, identifying problems, and brainstorming solutions. Without enough practice, organizations won’t have the time to work through these important issues, especially when it’s in the middle of an actual emergency incident or event.
See how Kogniz can help you automate the tedious aspects of planning, running, and reporting on your next tabletop exercise.