Leading People Through Disasters: An Action Guide: Preparing for and Dealing with the Human Side of Crises

September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, and other recent tragedies have shown that most organizations are woefully unprepared to contend with catastrophic events. After interviewing CEOs, managers, and countless others who dealt directly with organizational hardships resulting from catastrophes, authors Kathryn McKee and Liz Guthridge concluded that all workplace disasters share one important need — a human resources department trained to lead others through the turmoil. This book helps HR professionals anticipate the emotional and psychological aspects of disaster and outlines an effective three-pronged approach for dealing with disaster's human side: creating an emergency plan that focuses on both human and business issues; preparing the department to take action and assume a leadership role; and knowing how to adapt and improvise on the fly. Adopting this approach enables organizations to act with courage and avoid the costly lessons learned by others.

Intended for human resource managers, this handbook offers guidelines for writing a business continuity plan and contingent HR policies for responding to emergencies, and outlines practical steps for taking care of employees and getting back to business. The appendices list books and websites for more information, and provide sample emergency response procedures. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Finding that the advice available to HR professionals didn't deal with the human side of catastrophes, this book states that the human side requires special care, consideration, and actions outside of the processes and patterns that typically constitute disaster-preparedness.