How to be Prepared to Work Online During a Natural Disaster

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Have you considered what you would do if faced with a natural disaster or as happened recently a health disaster? Are you prepared when working from home?

As the name suggests natural disasters such as storms, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, bush fires can threaten your virtual business at any time and just as companies and organizations create plans to respond to these disasters, you also need to be prepared for a natural disaster that could potentially disrupt your business.

Are you ready to work online during a natural disaster? This is crucial if you make your money online as a freelancer.

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According to Reliefweb statistics, 315 natural disasters occurred in 2018, affecting 68 million people worldwide. This was at a cost of U$131.7 billion in economic losses.

I don’t want to be the voice of doom so let me help you navigate these natural disasters with some tips and measures that can help you prepare for these natural emergencies as an online worker and help keep your clients happy.

Make Sure to Communicate

As a freelancer, you have deadlines with your clients, contracts to fulfill and work that needs to be completed. When a natural disaster occurs there is usually (fingers crossed), a certain amount of pre-warning.

Make sure to keep an eye on news reports and weather bulletins.

This should be at the forefront of your mind when living in certain regions as it can affect your work and your income as a business owner. This means letting your clients know what’s happening where you are.

Communicate with Your Clients Early

Don’t hesitate, don’t wait, communicate!

Communicating with your clients is of the utmost importance. You probably work with people worldwide and they more than likely know where you are located. Keeping them abreast of any changes is essential.

If there is an indication that your work could be disrupted, you must send an email listing your current work situation.

Communicate to your client If you have any outstanding contracts if you require an extension and also ensure to send out reminders in case you have any outstanding invoices.

Yes, you still want to get that paper during this emergency time as this is when you will need it the most.

Let the client know that you might experience some difficulties and if work could be rescheduled. Hopefully, you would have developed a good rapport and understanding with your client that they will be happy to wait.

Practical Things You Must Do

You can set up a simple action plan to make working online during a natural disaster a lot less stressful.

How To Work at Home During a World Health Scare

Due to the recent health outbreak, I just wanted to note that preparing for a disaster when working at home doesn’t always have to apply to physical natural disasters like earthquakes or flooding but also to health disasters, for instance, a pandemic.

There are so many scenarios that we now have to think of that online working options have to be considered.

Not being able to travel and get home due to a city or a country quarantine lockdown, having to spend longer than expected vacation in a foreign country due to travel restrictions are just some examples. So having the right tools to continue work is very important.

If you already work from home then well done you as you are already at an advantage and should already be prepared and set up to work from home if the disaster affects the health of office staff.

You can readily confine yourself to your home and avoid the further spreading of a virus.

If you are a telecommuter who works from home 1 or 2 days a week, during a situation like this your employer may request that you start working from home on a more full-time basis until the health crisis is over.

Do you have all the necessary things you need in place? Continue reading to check out some of the things you might need below.

Don’t Panic!

One of the easiest things to do is panic and this really does not lead to anything constructive or productive. Take a breath, take a step back and put rational thoughts in place. Just doing this can save you valuable time and money.

In regards to a health crisis if you intend to work from home or already do check out what you already have in your home. I’m not just referring to your work equipment as I go into more details about this later in the post but the basics of home essentials.

Get Basic and Important Home Essentials

What do I mean by basic home essentials? The various health messages promoted worldwide to prevent the spread of any form of virus is to wash hands thoroughly and to avoid non-essential travel.

You already work from home so the advisable thing to do is to make sure that you have the following cleaning essentials in-house.

• Disinfectant (both liquid, spray and wipes)
• Hand Soap
• Tissues
• Hand Sanitizer
• Small Garbage bags/bin liners
• Detergent
• Gloves
• Microfiber Clothes

If you prefer a more eco-friendly method of preparing and cleaning your home then you can make sure to have the following items:

• Baking Soda
• White Vinegar
• Lemons
• Essential oils like peppermint, tea tree, lavender or any citrus oil
• Plus eco-friendly disinfectants

Another sensible idea is to make sure that you sign up with any of the online supermarkets to make your purchases. This is just a precaution to avoid any unnecessary local travel.

Just as a reminder this does not mean that you overspend and buy out the whole supermarket. Just get a few extra essentials.

Think ahead and be sensible when planning to work online during a natural disaster.

Here a just a few of the major things that you can put in place for your online business emergency preparedness.

Build A Good Support System

As someone who works from home, it can at times get pretty lonely but there are ways to get your family involved or develop online friendships and great working relationships with other freelancers.

In the time of an emergency, these same family members and virtual friends can really help you out.

You could outsource some of your work while you get to grips with handling the emergency.

This could be in the form of a virtual assistant who lives in another City, State or even Country. They could help you with a number of tasks.

Your virtual work from home friend can reply to emails on your behalf, moderate social media pages, write content or create graphics for clients if you are not physically able to do so.

I’ve been in the situation of not having any power in my area so no internet and was quickly able to make my way to my brother’s whose house is fully solar-paneled up allowing me to fulfill my work commitments.

If you have been assigned new projects, rather than starting them and not being able to finish you could recommend to your client that someone else in your network do the project during this period.

Now don’t worry too much about losing out on the work, instead consider that you would prefer to provide a suitable alternative rather than let your client down. This will go a long way in getting great referrals in the future.

You will be first in your client’s mind as no matter what the circumstances you will always get the clients work done or make great suggestions to get the work done.

Building this kind of support with other virtual workers is essential for a time when you need to be away from your work.

>>>You may also be interested to read how to network and collaborate.

Backup Your Data

The best way to ensure your data is protected is to go paperless. You can do this by creating backups of electronic files through apps like Google Drive, Dropbox and scanning physical documents and uploading them into a cloud-based storage system.

This means that you can retrieve these documents from any computer once you enter your username and password.

If it is not possible to go paperless, you can make copies of important documents and store them in a different location for safety.

Plan for Connectivity

During a natural disaster, one of the first things to go is electricity which will affect your internet connection. It, therefore, becomes difficult to stay connected to your clients via the internet. This is why communicating with them early on is important.

In cases like this, you must have a wifi backup system. This can be as simple as finding your nearest internet cafe if they are not affected by the natural disaster but please be aware of privacy issues.

You can also use your mobile phone as a hotspot, otherwise known as tethering or get yourself a portable wifi router in case you need to be on the move for longer periods.

Have Backup Equipment

This rule applies even when there is no natural disaster. As a work from home freelancer, there are essential accessories that you must have in case of emergencies.

Emergency preparedness for your home and your work should not be taken lightly but in this post, I’m only going to focus on what you will need for your online business.

Create an Emergency Freelancer Toolkit

You’ve watched the news and natural disasters are not restricted to only underdeveloped countries. It can happen absolutely anywhere.

Bush fires in Los Angeles and certain parts of Australia, hurricanes in Florida and the Caribbean, flooding in Texas and Venice, blackouts in New York, monsoons in India, and don’t forget the snowstorms and earthquakes elsewhere.

During these times you might be asked to evacuate your home and you will need to move quickly. In situations like this you will need to have your emergency freelancer toolkit ready.

So what kind of things will you need in your emergency toolkit? Here is a list of the main things you will need to still be able to work online during a natural disaster.

Hopefully, you will already have most of what’s on the list but if not you can easily get them through the suggested links below.

A copied list of all your usernames and passwords to all your apps, accounts, affiliates, etc. Unless you have a photographic memory or you use one username and password for everything, which is not advisable you will definitely need this list in the emergency toolkit.

A laptop. If you’re able to grab your laptop and go that’s great. I myself have my everyday laptop and also my old slow one.

Yes, I won’t get rid of that old slowpoke as it has saved me a couple of times allowing me to do some basic tasks when my other laptop decided to freeze for a day. You can find a list of the best selling laptops to buy right here on Amazon.

A tablet. Even though tablets are not the flavor of the year anymore it’s still a great device to have and if you have a good quality one you can do almost everything your pc can do. I’ve even updated my WordPress site on my tablet a few times. Get a great deal on a tablet right now.

A Powerbank. During a natural disaster, you want to make sure that you’re able to recharge your devices in the absence of electricity. It’s essential to have a powerbank or two and make sure to have them fully charged up. You can easily find some great bargains online.

One of the smallest and lightest powerbanks out there is the bestselling Anker. It is seriously highly rated and you can easily order it from Amazon.