In medical terminology, a stress test (or exercise test) can be any of a series of tests designed to measure how your your heart and lungs hold up as you put greater and greater demands upon your body.  As a result of the Wall Street bailout, it has been increasingly common to hear of such tests being applied to various corporations.  Mostly we hear about outside agencies performing these tests, but it is possible to conduct them upon your own organization regardless of its size.

For example, if someone takes a day off or is sick, either some tasks go undone, or everyone else has to work that much harder.  By tracking the consequences of these absences (planned and otherwise) you can get a feel for your company’s resiliency.

Unfortunately, it can almost always be worse, so knowing your companies limits can help you make the right call in a genuine crisis.

After any absence that has a clear impact upon the company there are a few things that are especially important to check up on:

• Did anyone feel like they were unsure of what they were supposed to be doing while you were absent?
• Are any vendors or clients awaiting contact from you, and could someone else on the team possibly have handled the communication?
• Was anyone unable to move forward with a project because they were unsure who to contact or because nobody had authority to take the next steps?
• Were all the routine tasks completed?  If not, is it clear who is responsible for the task in your absence and what resources are at their disposal if they’re being overwhelmed?
• In cases where it was inevitable that something would be left undone, were the correct tasks prioritized?

By keeping these questions in mind, you can even make your own vacations work for you.

Going a Step Further

So far I’ve discussed using routine absences (specifically vacation and sick leave) to evaluate your company’s systems.  However, if you have the resources for it, you may want to consider going a step further and set up drills.

These drills can be mild, like giving a key employee who is never sick and rarely uses vacation an unexpected day off.  Or they can be severe, like giving the day off to everyone who lives on the other side of the bay from your office (in order to simulate an unexpected bridge closure).

You  can also set up working drill days - where someone does not perform any of their regular tasks, but are instead responsible for quietly monitoring their own work load to see what does and does not get picked up elsewhere in the system.

Afterward

As I prepare this blog post to go live, I feel that I have a bit of egg on my face.  I wrote most of this entry two weeks ago.  However, I fell ill before I could post it, and have had to spend the past several days getting my legs back under me because I had not laid adequate groundwork for a substitute to come in and take over.

Among the things Marissa and I are now ourselves discussing what would need to go into an emergency handbook for a replacement should one be needed again.