Planning for disruption: strikes, weather and the partial workforce
The day half your people can’t work
Most planning assumes the workforce turns up. Then a rail strike, a snowstorm, a flood, a power cut or a pandemic arrives and a large slice of your people simply can’t — and the question stops being “how do we hit service?” and becomes “what do we do with the half we’ve got?” Disruption planning is the discipline of answering that question before the day, rather than improvising it at 7am when the trains have stopped. The operations that cope have a playbook; the ones that don’t have a very long, very public bad day.
Triage, not heroics
When capacity is suddenly far below demand, the instinct is to ask everyone to work harder, and it doesn’t scale — you can’t heroics your way out of losing forty per cent of the floor. The workable answer is triage: decide in advance what you protect and what you let go. Protect the contacts that genuinely matter — the vulnerable customer, the safety issue, the regulated deadline — and deliberately defer or deflect the rest, with honest customer communication so people aren’t left waiting on a promise you can’t keep. That means a prioritised routing plan, a reduced-scope service you can switch to, and a clear hierarchy of what gets answered when there isn’t enough of anyone to answer everything. Distributed and home working changes the exposure here too — a home workforce survives a site becoming unreachable, but is vulnerable to a wide-area power or network failure — so the plan has to name which kind of disruption it’s for.
Write the playbook before you need it
The whole value is in doing the thinking when you’re calm. Agree the tiers of service — what’s protected, deferred and deflected at, say, 80%, 60% and 40% of normal capacity — so that on the day you read the plan rather than invent one. Pre-write the customer communications and the routing changes so they can be triggered in minutes. Build in mutual aid where you have more than one site or a flexible home workforce, so a local hit can be partly absorbed elsewhere. Decide the decision rights in advance: who calls the disruption, who can flip the service to reduced scope, who signs off the customer message. And rehearse it occasionally, because a playbook nobody has read is only marginally better than no playbook at all. You can’t stop the snow or the strike; you can decide, while the sun’s out, exactly how you’ll run the day it lands.
Pair this with real-time playbooks, hybrid and home working, and planning for vulnerable customers.