A big part of being an entrepreneur is learning when to take risks and when to play it safe. Dealing with an emergency in the workplace definitely falls into the latter category.
Whether you work out of your home, have a small retail establishment, or occupy larger facilities, you need to minimize the risks you take. Fires, accidents of all sorts, and natural disasters are just a few examples of how your business can be disrupted by things beyond your control.
One of the most important steps you can take to manage this risk is to have a well thought out and clearly communicated emergency plan. How many ways are there to get safely in and out of your business? Do your employees know about them all? If a fire started near your front door, could everyone get out safely by some other route? Are there known hazards that require special steps to be taken in the event of, for example, a power outage?
The bottom line is that you want to minimize the risks that you and your employees and customers are exposed to, and you want to limit the impact an unexpected occurrence can have on your business. The Workplace Emergency Procedures contain sample emergency procedures that can serve as a starting point for creating your own safety plan.
The file is in rich text format (RTF) that is suitable for use with most word processing programs used in the Windows environment.