As property and facility managers strive to maintain their client base, maintaining the infrastructure of their building is critical to tenant retention. The electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and HVAC systems must perform so as to allow the tenant to be as productive as possible in their space. Indoor air quality is very important as well and with the flu season gearing up with the H1N1 virus, building owners and managers need to plan now for the “what if” situations when their staff calls in sick. With a global pandemic of the H1N1 virus being announced by the World Health Organization June 6, 2009, it would serve the property/facility manager well to reference the Proactive Steps for Businesses the Building Owners and Managers Association has published.

While planning for a flu pandemic should begin at the C-suite level, a successful approach must involve representatives from human resources, communications, IT, facilities, and perhaps legal and compliance as well. From a facility perspective, crucial questions to ask are:

• Which building systems are mission-critical and what is the bare minimum staff required to support their operation?
• Which mission critical systems can be operated remotely?
• What supplies are needed for the support of critical facility functions?
• Which employees are currently trained to operate critical systems and what specific skills make them qualified?
• Which non-facility personnel perform functions essential for facility operations (i.e. purchasing)?
• What vendors or contractors perform essential functions?
• Which employees perform tasks that cannot be performed off-site, and where are these employees located?

Pandemic planning should address interventions from the minor – whether and when to close down a coffee station or water cooler – to the extreme, such as how to equip a facility with days or weeks worth of food and supplies in case key employees need to quarantine themselves and possibly their families. Communications plans should be spelled out well in advance and e-mail lists established for staff, vendors and contractors.

To be effective, pandemic action plans should be practiced. Some companies are having pandemic exercises where they are going to have 20 percent of their workforce work remotely from home for a week or two and see what issues arise.

Pandemic planning should be incorporated into an overall business continuity plan. A facility manager should not take the “threat approach”; since so many threats exist it would be very difficult to plan for each one separately. Rather, it’s more cost effective to look at the impact of the loss of any number of key resources – whether it is staff, key contractors, facilities, technology, or departments – and plan for it. By using the “impact of loss” approach, you will be covered, no matter which specific threat arises.