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Most resilience plans protect systems and facilities. Here's how to make sure they also protect the people running them.
Most resilience plans protect systems and facilities. Here's how to make sure they also protect the people running them.
Sustainability teams are increasingly tasked with climate adaptation: preparing the business for weather impacts we know will happen. Most adaptation planning concentrates on physical assets, operations, and continuity of supply, but the workforce is often overlooked. The people who keep the business running during a heat wave, wildfire, or flood can't succeed if they're unsafe, displaced, or simply unable to get to work.
Sustainability leaders are well-placed to make sure worker health and safety are built into resilience and continuity plans from the start, not treated as a detail to improvise around once an event is already underway. This guide aims to help you build your people into your adaptation plan, whether you're starting from scratch or updating what you already have.
Map where people are exposed, not just where assets are. Take the physical climate risk map you have and add a workforce layer. Work with HR and occupational health and safety for each site to note how many people work there, what kind of work they do (indoor or outdoor, physical intensity, climate-controlled or not), how they get there (where they commute from, and whether the site is transit-dependent), and which populations are most vulnerable. This output gives you a view of where people, not property, are most at risk. The CDC's Heat and Health Tracker and FEMA's National Risk Index can be useful tools to see which conditions your sites and people are most likely to face.
Inventory the protections that already exist. Before designing anything new, find out what solutions individual sites and managers have already improvised. Does the plant already send crews home on smoke days? Has a site shifted its summer hours to cooler parts of the day on its own? Do managers unofficially let office staff work from home on poor air quality days? Cataloging what's already working gives you building blocks to start with, surfaces your internal champions, and spares you from designing a program from scratch when you could build on what some of your operations are already doing.
Put a cost on heat or poor air quality days you've already had. Pull last summer's staff records for your two or three most exposed sites and ask finance and HR what the hot or smoky weeks cost: hours lost, overtime to cover them, absenteeism, turnover in the months after, workers' compensation claims. That data can help you make the case for acting now, and it gives you a baseline to measure against once you do.
Convene the functions that each hold a piece. Workforce resilience spans sustainability, HR, occupational health and safety, risk, and facilities, and no single function sees the whole picture. Sustainability is well-suited to pull these teams together in a cross-functional group, with a named lead, a shared risk map, and a quarterly rhythm. While the other functions own pieces of the response, sustainability has potential to own the enterprise climate picture that connects them.
Solution Spotlight: The Climate and Worker Health Scorecard helps sustainability, risk, and occupational health and safety teams assess where the organization stands today and where to focus next.
Run a tabletop exercise for your most exposed site. Gather the handful of people who would manage a crisis and work through a realistic scenario— a five-day heat wave, a week of wildfire smoke, a flood that closes the roads. What is the hazard? Who is exposed? What makes them vulnerable? What threshold triggers action? Who owns the decision? What happens next? What happens to workers hour by hour? A short, structured exercise surfaces the gaps a real event would otherwise expose the hard way.
Build On It
Extend business continuity planning to people. Most continuity plans cover systems, data, and facilities, so add a workforce component to answer the questions a crisis will pose: Who has to be on-site during an event, and how do we keep them safe? Who can work remotely, and how do we switch them over fast? What happens to workers whose own homes are impacted or if they have to evacuate? How do we reach people and support them during and after? Pre-answering these questions can help you build a plan and prevent a scramble.
Train the managers who'll actually run the protocols. A heat plan saved to a shared drive changes nothing if the site supervisor doesn't know when to act, or doesn't feel truly authorized to stop work when conditions call for it. Ensure frontline managers who make real-time calls understand the heat plan's thresholds and what action each one triggers. And make clear from leadership that stopping work in these conditions is expected, not just permitted. That way, managers can act with confidence instead of weighing the triggers against pressure to keep going, or waiting for permission that may not arrive in time.
Define resilience indicators for different operating conditions. Resilience indicators are “specific targets to be achieved or operated within.” Work across functions to determine how your workforce shows up in normal operating conditions vs. during severe weather conditions (e.g., on-site plant engineer vacancies not greater than 10% during normal conditions, but not greater than 1% during severe weather conditions). Once you've defined these, use them to create a single resilience score for each work site. Track these over time to assess extreme weather readiness and see which sites need more investment.
Model the full ROI of an adaptation strategy. Often, estimated ROI for adaptation projects only include the costs of avoided loss and damages. But the economic activity that an investment enables and its broader social and environmental benefits often add up to more than the avoided losses alone. Work with your finance team to capture the full value of adaptation.
Fund cooling and clean air as core infrastructure, not extras. Companies plan and budget seriously for capital projects like flood barriers and backup generators. Cooled break areas, shade structures, and air filtration for workers deserve the same treatment. A workforce that can't safely function during hotter and smokier conditions is as much a continuity risk as a flooded floor. Sustainability leaders can advocate for including these in the capital plan, rather than the discretionary spend pile.
Factor in worker safety and well-being when investing in emissions reduction. Many investments can reduce emissions and protect your employees at the same time. For example, building redundancy into your energy portfolio with onsite renewables and storage can cut emissions while also keeping the air conditioning running for workers when the grid fails. Trees and permeable paving around a facility store carbon while also reducing surface heat in the parking lots and yards where people load trucks. When you build the business case for a mitigation project, don’t forget to price in the worker protection benefit.
Lead the Field
Account for workers in your future climate risk modeling. When your company models climate scenarios for risk planning, include people alongside assets. For example, in a mid-century warming scenario, estimate the added days per year above dangerous heat thresholds at each site, projected decline in outdoor labor productivity, and expected disruption days. This forward-looking analysis helps drive capital decisions and feeds into what you disclose.
Screen your growth plans for climate feasibility. Before you expand, build, or hire in a new location, check it against climate hazard projections over the next five to 10 years. Determine whether you'll be able to staff the site, at what wage premium, and for how many workable days per year. A site that looks fine today can become a costly place to keep a workforce healthy in 10 years, and it's far cheaper to plan for that now than to retrofit later.
Redesign the work, not just the protections around it. Instead of only shielding workers from worsening conditions, explore whether the work itself needs to change. Can work be conducted remotely or at different hours? Can certain high-risk tasks be automated instead of performed by a person in extreme conditions?
Extend resilience past the workplace. Workers' communities also flood, burn, and lose power, and job-site protections can’t help them if they can’t leave their homes or the roads are closed. Look for ways to support resilience where your workforce lives: help fund a cooling center or backup power project, provide generators to a shelter, or cover transport during an evacuation. This work can also feed into the community-impact reporting your team likely already does.
Workforce readiness requires coordination across teams. Explore guides designed for more functions at your organization, and learn more about the Extreme Weather + Work initiative.
Human Resources (HR) Readiness strategies for HR focus areas including benefits design, leave policies, people analytics, and more.
Extreme Weather + Work Home Learn how your organization can support workers before, during, and after extreme weather.
About Extreme Weather + Work
Extreme Weather + Work is an initiative of the Health Action Alliance. We bring together leaders who rarely sit in the same room and connect them with peers across industries, giving them the research and tools they need to support their people before, during, and after extreme weather.
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