How to Create an Emergency Action Plan in 6 Steps (+Template)

When a fire sparks, the power goes out, or a chemical spills, it’s a safety leader’s first priority to get everyone to safety and keep others out of harm’s way. However, our Employee Safety Report shows that only 38% of working Americans strongly agree they’d know what to do in the event of an emergency at work, leaving 62% hesitating, guessing, or outright not reacting to crisis situations.

If you don’t already have an emergency action plan in place, now is the time to formulate the best possible crisis response procedures and train your people to be ready. It’s an ongoing, iterative process, but we have some clear steps to get things started.

What Is an Emergency Action Plan?

An emergency action plan, or EAP, is a document outlining the actions employees and employers must take in the event of an emergency to protect people and save lives. This plan usually includes parts of other familiar emergency planning practices, such as threat assessments and evacuation routing.

The emergency action plan is not directly concerned with business continuity or loss prevention; it is intended to protect human life, health, and safety. This post outlines ways to keep your people informed of dangers and ways to avoid them. While trained leaders and coordinators will facilitate the execution of the emergency action plan, each employee needs to know what is expected of them to avoid confusion in an actual emergency.

A preview of our template to document your emergency action plan

Does Your Business Need an Emergency Action Plan?

Yes! It is always a good idea to have emergency action plans in place to ensure a safe way to respond to any situation. In fact, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires that all businesses with 10 employees or more have an emergency action plan (section 1910.38 of 29 CFR) documented in an accessible location.

Different organizations are bound to face different threats. And even those that share potential threats might anticipate different likelihoods or levels of impact on safety. Emergency preparedness is a customized, fine-tuned process that continues to improve, making your business safer and more resilient.

Elements of an Emergency Action Plan

All emergency plans will be unique depending on a wide range of factors, but they should cover the following to ensure people’s safety.

Types of emergencies

While you don’t need a plan for every minor incident, focus on risks that could harm your employees physically. Start your planning with a thoughtful assessment of the potential threats to your employees’ safety.

For example, virtually every company must prepare for the risk of a fire emergency, which can occur in almost any location and is by far the most common workplace emergency. However, if your company is an accounting office, you don’t have to worry about hazardous materials accidents like some manufacturing facilities would.

Use your best judgment when determining which scenarios warrant an emergency action plan of their own.

Specified roles and responsibilities

When disaster strikes, people need to know what to do and when. Most of your employees will be tasked only with following the approved exit routes and meeting at the appointed rally spot. Others will have designated responsibilities related to communications systems, directing evacuees, guiding building occupants to safe exits and assembly areas, or making quick decisions when the original action plan is no longer safe. Your plan must have contact information for employees responsible for critical emergency action steps.

Emergency procedures

This is the most straightforward part of your plan, and you might already have evacuation routes in place for situations like fires. Below, you can find an example of a fire evacuation plan for a hypothetical office. Keep in mind that you can also note related resources, such as fire extinguishers and first-aid kits, to keep that information accessible to everyone.

Not all evacuation plans are interchangeable. For example, the path you would take to escape a fire would be different from one intended to avoid an active shooter. Don’t rely on a single escape pattern to cover all possible scenarios; as with the rest of your plan, analyze and determine evacuation routes based on the circumstances.

Training

No matter how well-written your emergency action plan is, if nobody’s familiar with it by the time of an actual emergency, in effect, you don’t have a plan. Different emergencies often require very different response procedures. Even different types of severe weather: A tornado calls for a shelter-in-place response, and a hurricane calls for an evacuation. Reviewing procedures for likely scenarios is the only way to ensure employees—from new employees to safety leaders—will be prepared.

Train everyone on what is expected of them, even if it’s just following an evacuation route. Depending on the structure of your company, decide whether it’s most effective to train individuals, groups, or the entire company at once. Make this training hands-on to give your people the experience they need to stay calm when they’re asked to perform these functions during a real crisis.

Alerting staff and visitors

When a condition triggers one of your emergency action plans, you need a parallel emergency communication plan to broadcast the message to everyone. Public announcement speaker systems, alarms, and mass notification systems are all effective ways to quickly and reliably get everyone’s attention. These systems should also direct people to the correct telephone number or point of contact if additional information is needed.

Reporting to authorities and media

Many emergencies, such as fires, active shooters, and gas leaks, require the intervention of authorities and emergency personnel. Don’t assume someone will have the presence of mind to call 911. Incorporate that step into your plans to ensure it gets done.

When something big and unexpected happens, people naturally have questions. It’s up to you and your team to control the narrative and preempt any misinformation before it spreads. If the emergency you’re planning for might affect the broader community or your brand’s reputation, include steps to reach out to the media and inform them of the situation so they can help you disseminate the message.

Emergency reporting supports real-time response efforts and helps improve future responses by clarifying events in after-action reports.

6 Emergency Action Plan Steps

You can approach a range of emergencies in a similar way. Our emergency response plan template covers every aspect of an emergency action plan in a single document, making it easy to share throughout the organization. It even has sample procedures for a variety of incidents to help get your ideas flowing.

Here are the steps you’ll need to take to create a comprehensive emergency action plan:

1. Assess risks

Preparedness is only possible once you understand the risks at hand. Begin with a threat assessment to identify the range of possible threats to your people’s safety and analyze the likelihood and severity of each. This process requires you to take a close look at your critical operations, facilities, people, and external conditions. For an emergency action plan, you’re interested in physical threats to emergency situations.

Once you have an idea of what these threats are, you can quantify their potential risk. In this case, risk is defined as a combination of an emergency’s severity/impact and frequency/likelihood. Plot these two variables in a “threat matrix” to visualize which threats are most significant and which to plan for first.

Here are some examples of emergencies you might plan for:

• Fire
• Bomb threat
• Active shooter
• Natural disaster
• Power outage
• Protests/civil unrest
• Medical emergency
• Chemical leak

2. Research relevant regulations

Depending on your location, your plan might be subject to government regulations. In all U.S. States, OSHA is the primary agency setting rules to keep workers safe. Keep in mind, there might also be local or state laws to comply with.

Once you’ve completed your plan, you can use this handy eTool to ensure compliance with OSHA standards.

3. Manage response plans

Many of your response plans will require evacuation procedures. To create those, find a scale-accurate map of your office or workspace. On this map, mark the following:

• Emergency exits
• Fire extinguishers
• First aid kits
• Arrows designating evac routes to the nearest exits
• Designated assembly areas outside of the building

Once you have the map marked up, make copies and post them in highly visible locations around the office. From there, ensure all equipment is stocked up and evacuation paths remain free of obstructions and tripping/slipping hazards. These paths need to be wide enough to accommodate your employee headcount.

You might want to assign official “hall monitor” roles to some of your employees. Those individuals will be empowered to move misplaced stuff out of important walkways to keep them safe and clear.

Depending on your workspace, you might assign specific responsibilities to some employees to help keep people safe. These emergency coordinators might stay behind for a period of time to accomplish these tasks, including

• Being a point of contact to answer questions about the plan
• Turning off gas and/or power while evacuating
• Helping those with movement disabilities get to safety
• Performing a head count at the assembly point to account for any lost people

It’s important to note that not all emergencies will require evacuation. Certain emergencies, such as tornadoes and some biological hazards, are best dealt with by sheltering in place. Regardless, the process of preparing for that is very similar to an evacuation, but instead of gathering at a point outside the building, you gather in interior rooms.

4. Evaluate resources and tools

As you develop emergency action plans for different situations, list the emergency equipment and resources your team will need to stay safe and secure. You might already have some of the necessary supplies; take stock and identify any gaps in your emergency preparedness.

These tools can include fire extinguishers, automatic fire suppression systems, escape ladders, smoke-blocking masks, other PPE, and much more. Resources can also come in the form of employee knowledge, such as first-aid training or search-and-rescue experience.

Resources can also include phone numbers, emergency contacts, and first responders, such as the fire department, law enforcement, and emergency medical services. Be sure to have emergency numbers clearly documented and accessible at a moment’s notice.

5. Document the plan and update it

Here’s where the rubber meets the road—or rather, where the pen meets the paper. You now know what emergencies might sneak up on your organization and how to handle them safely. It’s time to capture them clearly and accessibly.

As mentioned above, our template provides a fillable form for this information, so you just need to enter your organization’s details. As long as you include everything needed for a safe and effective response, your emergency action plan format can be whatever you and your people find most intuitive. Once you have these details documented, introduce the plan to all current employees and familiarize new hires with it during onboarding.

Just as a business evolves over time, emergency management must also evolve. Review your plans at least once per year to ensure they’re still applicable, and create new ones if your business moves to a new location or undergoes a renovation—or whenever a new potential threat emerges. It’s also best practice to review the plans with all employees whenever the entire plan changes or with certain groups if a section changes that impacts them.

6. Train and prepare

Now you’ve identified the risks, planned your response, and shared it with your team. The final step before implementation is employee training.

As most of your action plans will be centered around evacuating, it’s essential that everyone is familiar with that process so it can go smoothly if you have to put it into action. Run quarterly drills for the entire company to simulate evacuations that correspond to your team’s potential threats.

Pro Tip: Check out our blog on running a fire drill for more tips on evacuation training.

Additionally, identified leaders and coordinators need to practice their assigned responsibilities, such as helping a disabled colleague or guiding evacuating people along escape routes. This practice helps them get used to handling an independent task during an emergency.

Finally, if you have specialized equipment unfamiliar to your people, such as respirators or fire escape ladders, organize sessions for everyone to get hands-on experience so they know how to use them during a critical scenario. Likewise, you can train for scenarios that may call for a different response.

Spring Into Action

When your company is staring down an emergency, it’s past time for planning. Once you identify a disaster, you need to be able to take action—quickly, confidently, and comprehensively—to keep everyone safe. The procedures you have developed will give everyone at the company a clear understanding of what to do in a chaotic situation. Your emergency action plan will be the guiding light that leads everyone to safety when disaster strikes. Even if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the idea of getting started, our template serves as a step-by-step guide to bring you closer to preparedness.