Leading your team through catastrophic weather events

You can never fully predict when an emergency will hit, but the way you lead a team through a catastrophic weather event is absolutely critical for the safety of aged care facility residents and staff.

Australia has always had experiences with different extreme weather, including hail storms, cyclones, flooding, and bushfires.

According to the Department of Health and Aged Care, so far 50% of local government areas (LGAs) have been impacted by a high risk weather event this year. 

Additionally, Australia is heading into a warmer season with the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) expecting an above average risk of cyclones in eastern states, prolonged flooding, and a risk of bushfires in central, south, and north west Australia.

Over the last couple decades, the severity of some of these events have increased. Only recently rural and remote Victoria and New South Wales experienced extreme flooding – which has left aged care facilities cut off from supply lines or requiring full evacuation.

Aged care providers Baptcare and RSL LifeCare have had their fair share of experiences with extreme weather events, more recently the flooding in New South Wales and Victoria. Both organisations say it is critical that organisations have crisis management plans in place to lead staff through difficult scenarios.

Below are key elements you should consider to help you prepare for emergencies, understand what good leadership looks like, and work together for the safety of all impacted by the event.

Preparing for emergencies

Before an emergency has even hit, your whole facility or service team should be prepared to run through any emergency scenario – no matter if it is a flood, bushfire, electricity outage, or hail storm.

Grant Davis, Chief Risk Compliance and Safety Officer at RSL LifeCare, said that chaos can arise when people don’t know what they are doing or if things are not communicated effectively.

Geraldine Lannon, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Baptcare, agrees, she said prior planning for catastrophic weather events can make a huge difference during an actual emergency.

To avoid confusion and chaos during an extreme weather event, you need to be commanding and controlling your team so that everyone feels confident that their leader is managing the situation appropriately.

“If you have people running off in ten different directions doing their own thing, that is when things get very quickly out of control and lead to bad outcomes,” explains Mr Davis.

There are a number of ways to ensure your residents and staff are prepared for these events:

• Always have contingencies in place

No matter the catastrophic emergency you face, you should have relevant scenario planning in place and this should be understood across every team level.

Having appropriate contingency planning in place ensures that you have a clear course of action to follow during an emergency.

This can be highly beneficial to staff as they have a clear protocol to follow to keep residents safe. Additionally, it takes away the added pressure of an emergency. 

• Run scenarios with your teams and residents

Your staff should be prepared for disaster scenarios through regular crisis simulations, and this should also include your residents.

Mr Davis explains that RSL LifeCare runs exercises on an annual basis for localised emergency events and also simulates regular crisis situations to ensure that staff and residents have a good understanding of what they need to be doing during an emergency. 

Additionally, your residents should be prepared prior to an emergency with a ‘grab bag’, which holds important documents, clothes and medication they need if they have to evacuate a facility quickly.

• Make connections with your local community

During an emergency, your organisation should be aware of who to call for assistance. You should be making grass root connections with emergency services and community organisations in your area prior to a catastrophic weather event.

It could involve getting your local volunteer fire department and State Emergency Service (SES) out to your facility annually for a walkthrough so they understand its layout, or connecting with local bus operators or charity groups to get access to transportation during emergencies.

Ms Lannon said that these community connections can make a huge difference during an emergency and enables you to have access to the latest and best information.

• Know where residents can be brought to safely

Whether it is moving residents between your own facilities or making connections with other organisations, you should map out what avenues you have available to safely relocate residents.

Mr Davis explained that providers should be encouraging strong connections with each other to ensure the safety of residents, no matter the emergency situation.

• Make sure everyone has the relevant training

If your staff don’t have the proper training, they won’t be able to react to a disaster scenario confidently.

The Federal Government recommends that providers ensure everyone has the ability to make decisions during emergencies.

This could be training through response scenarios and what their role is during an emergency, fire or flood safety, care delivery during an emergency, or first aid.

When a crisis hits

When a catastrophic weather event affects your service or facility, you need to consider whether this issue can be dealt with by staff on-site or whether it needs to be escalated to your crisis management team.

Mr Davis said escalating an emergency to your crisis management team as soon as possible is an important step for facilities and services to take, as that team will be best resourced and experienced in handling stressful situations.

It also ensures that there is an overarching group looking at every element of an emergency, not just specific departments or tasks, and nothing is missed.

This allows your team on the ground to focus on what they need to do to ensure everyone is safe and are able to undertake emergency management successfully, rather than focus on making key decisions.

These critical decisions could include:

• Does the facility need to evacuate?
• Should we move high-risk residents only?
• If we are staying, do we have resources, food, and medication to last the emergency?
• Can service and care still be delivered?

These decisions need to be made by a person with authority, so when the crisis management team is in charge they can start overseeing the success of a response plan and ensure all the tasks and gaps are filled.

Keeping your workers calm

It can be hard to keep calm during a catastrophic weather event, where lives can be on the line.

Ms Lannon said that during these high-stress moments “leadership is crucial – not just from the CEO level, but at every level”.

She explained that during the Kerang floods, leadership was essential, from the managers of head office to the Nursing Manager and Resident Care & Services Manager on the ground.

The chain of command needs to be strong so that if anything goes wrong or the situation changes, all of your teams have a direct line of leadership to approach.

Having strength in your leadership can also provide an added layer of calm to the teams you are managing.

Ms Lannon added that leaders shouldn’t forget the importance of spiritual support for staff and residents during a crisis, which can assist with keeping everyone calm. This extra assistance can play an important role in supporting residents and staff who were personally affected by the flood crisis.

Communication is another tool that can be a big part of ensuring your workers are calm and collected during an emergency.

Any decisions or actions shouldn’t be up for speculation or guessing, if people don’t understand what they should be doing, it can often lead to confusion and panic.

Your communication and messaging should be clear and effective, which will alleviate the stress of your staff and residents.

What does good leadership look like in an emergency?

Ms Lannon and Mr Davis both agree that there are three important things to consider when leading a team through a catastrophic weather event.

Firstly, consideration and compassion for the circumstances of staff is absolutely paramount. In many cases, staff are facing the exact same issues as your organisation is.

Remember that when your facility is at risk of flooding or in the path of a bushfire, it’s quite likely that your workers face similar threats to their own home.

In these cases, your frontline staff need to feel supported with the difficulties they are facing.

Staff support is an absolutely critical element to emergency response, said Mr Davis.

That’s why your crisis management team should include human resources staff, as they can provide the necessary support to your workforce during difficult times.

“We want [staff] to be coming to work and you want them to be focussed on us and leaning in and supporting our residents as best they can. But that can be really challenging at times when they can’t get to work or their own home may be flooded or they may have a bushfire scenario themselves that they are managing,” he explained.

If your staff feel supported, they will be less likely to be stressed and more able to focus on the task at hand.

The second most important element of leadership in an emergency is effective and clear communication.

People are able to work their best when they are given clear, calm, concise communication from the leadership team.

Your teams should know what roles they need to undertake because they have received that communication early on.

Ms Lannon says the communication has to be “pertinent, real and to-the-point”.

“It is also important to make sure the flow of comms is continuous, to prevent frontline staff feeling that they have been forgotten,” she said.

If staff don’t feel resourced, understood or supported, it can lead to confusion – which is not needed in a high-stress situation.

Lastly, implementing suitably resourced crisis management plans is vital for avoiding last-minute decision making.  

You want to avoid making last-minute decisions where possible, as it can leave you with fewer options and can make tasks difficult to implement.

This means you should utilise your prior crisis planning, but tailor it to the relevant situation and data you have.

For instance, RSL LifeCare made a decision to evacuate a facility in 2019 due to bushfires that would have cut off the only road to a facility. That decision was made ahead of time not because the residents were in danger of a fire or the facility was in the bushfire path, but because it would have impacted supplies and isolated the residents. This was the best decision for residents and staff to ensure everyone had access to the care and services they needed.

Whereas during recent flooding in Kerang, Victoria, Baptcare had available modelling that showed their facility would be isolated by floodwaters. In this case however, the facility and town were well equipped to be able to manage the length of the flooding and continue safely delivering care and services so the facility did not evacuate.

In both of these instances, decisions were made based on the relevant crisis management strategies, data, and resources for each facility. 

Understanding what position your facility, residents and staff are in need to be considered in your crisis planning, when making decisions and leading your teams.

In the moment decision making

Whilst preparation is key when planning for emergency scenarios and in the moment decisions making should be avoided if possible, sometimes it is inevitable.

The decisions you make should always be based on risk assessment and what you have set out in your emergency management plan.

Mr Davis recommends following an analytical approach when making last minute decisions. 

What is the severity of the situation? What are the expected outcomes of a decision you make?

Ideally, you want to have time when making these decisions, but in cases of fast-moving instances – like bushfires – time might not be an option.

Gather the information you need to make a properly informed decision and then action that decision.

Mr Davis said the most important thing is not to doubt yourself and the decision you made.

“The worst thing you can do is second guess that. It is the initial call and made for the right reason, then typically it is the appropriate one to make. Everyone should get on board with it accordingly,” he said.

Working together against adversity

Teamwork is incredibly important during a disaster situation.

The role of a leader during a disaster scenario is to direct your teams and ensure every member can play their role in ensuring the safety of residents. 

This means all teams need to be communicating with each other on a regular basis and continuously, so everyone understands where they are at, whether that is in the midst of an evacuation or preparing the residents to stay.

Besides directing your teams throughout a disaster scenario, you should also be checking in on your workforce about how they are going with managing the crisis – this should be in both a professional and personal capacity.

Mr Davis said working together as a team is critical to getting through emergency situations.

“It is always a ‘one team, one response, one approach’ for us in those significant events.” 

What do you think is most important about leading a team through a disaster scenario? Tell us in the comments below.