Empowering Your Workforce and Their Families for Uninterrupted Mission Essential Functions

This session, led by an Emergency Management Lead with extensive field experience (firefighter, EMT, FEMA responder) and a Resilience Program Lead (US Army veteran), explores a pivotal, often overlooked, aspect of organizational resilience: individual and family preparedness. Our agency's core mission is ensuring Bulk Electrical System reliability and resilience, a task demanding unwavering focus from our personnel, especially during disruptions. We contend that the preparedness of employees and their families directly strengthens organizational resilience. A compelling narrative illustrates this: During a catastrophic snow storm that caused a widespread regional outage, our team faced an unprecedented challenge. A Substation Operator, whose family had proactively established a community support network in their rural community through our program, manned a remote substation for days and was later evacuated by helicopter when the weather did not improve. Nevertheless, he was able to maintain focus on restoring essential services, confident that his family was safe and supported. Our session will demonstrate how organizations can foster this crucial individual resilience by encouraging employees to leverage and expand existing social networks to create robust disaster preparedness plans. By empowering families with peace of mind through a strong support system, employees are better positioned to dedicate their expertise to mission restoration and continuity.