Mark Harbeke

I talk a lot on our blogs about employee engagement and employee engagement activities designed to boost your workplace team building. This is important stuff, certainly, but it is all inside-focused. How does this relate to the outside world?

Last week's Friday Nugget post on the importance of learning touched on this, in the sense that former employees of your company, if they later take on roles at partner or vendor organizations to your own, have the potential of lowering your assocated line-item costs. But what if one of those partner or vendor firms suddenly went south and had to close its doors, leaving you with the opportunity-costing task of quickly finding a replacement?

What if the firm in question handled hosting for your website?

Such was the case for Winning Workplaces, as I found out yesterday morning. You may have noticed that none of the links from our blog to our site are currently working. That's why.

The silver lining in our case was that our staff had put in place a contingency plan for just such a scenario, having seen the warning signs earlier this year: blips in uptime for the typical visitor, as well as hickups in the performance of related back-end software. Thanks to our preparation, we had a short list of replacement firms ready to go, as well as a checklist of what needed to happen to restore all the files and make them "live" again.

We even had staff with no experience in the matter or training needed to get us back up volunteer their time to do just that. While there was little they could do, our own team building efforts appeared to have paid off!

We're happy to report that we're underway with our new host, and hope to have our site live again by Thursday.

Leaders: Do your employee engagement best practices focus at all on using your talent to develop (ahead of time) contingency plans to get going quickly with a new partner or vendor if needed? Or, out of necessity (in the moment) have they naturally jumped into this role? How did it help your business?