Business Continuity Leadership for HSE Managers Training Course

Course overview

HSE managers are often expected to protect people, the environment, critical assets and regulatory obligations during events that disrupt normal operations: a major spill, fire, severe weather event, utility failure, industrial action, cyber outage or loss of a key contractor. Yet emergency response plans alone do not show how operations will be stabilised, essential controls maintained, environmental harm prevented, or safely recovered over days and weeks. This course addresses the leadership gap between incident response and business continuity, helping HSE professionals turn risk information into tested continuity arrangements and defensible recovery decisions.

Participants learn to build and lead an HSE-informed business continuity management system aligned to ISO 22301 and connected to ISO 14001, emergency management and organisational risk processes. They conduct business impact analyses, identify time-critical HSE activities, define recovery time objectives, assess continuity risks, map dependencies, develop response and recovery strategies, and write practical continuity plan sections. The course also covers incident leadership structures, crisis communications, contractor continuity, environmental compliance during disruption, exercising, post-incident review and improvement tracking.

Instruction combines focused tutor-led sessions with applied workshops based on realistic HSE disruption scenarios. Participants work with business impact analysis templates, risk registers, recovery strategy matrices, stakeholder maps and exercise evaluation forms. By the end of the week, each participant leaves with an HSE Business Continuity Action Pack: a scoped impact analysis, priority activity register, continuity strategy outline, incident exercise design and a 90-day implementation plan that can be adapted for their site, function or business unit.

The course is particularly suited to HSE managers who contribute to resilience planning, lead incident preparedness activities, support operational recovery or need to integrate safety and environmental controls into wider organisational continuity arrangements.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Conduct a business impact analysis for HSE-critical activities using impact categories, maximum tolerable periods of disruption and recovery time objectives
• Map personnel, utility, contractor, equipment, data and regulatory dependencies that could interrupt safety or environmental control measures
• Develop continuity risk scenarios using likelihood, consequence, control effectiveness and residual-risk evaluation
• Define recovery strategies for essential HSE functions, including alternative work locations, delegated authority and manual workarounds
• Draft an HSE business continuity plan section with activation criteria, roles, action checklists and escalation routes
• Apply ISO 22301 requirements to connect business continuity governance, documented information, exercising and continual improvement
• Design and facilitate a tabletop exercise for an HSE disruption scenario using injects, decision logs and evaluation criteria
• Produce a 90-day business continuity implementation roadmap with owners, milestones, evidence requirements and review measures

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• HSE Managers — who must maintain critical safety and environmental controls when normal operations are disrupted
• Health and Safety Managers — who lead incident preparedness and need to connect emergency arrangements to operational recovery
• Environmental Managers — who must protect permits, monitoring, waste controls and pollution-prevention measures during disruption
• Business Continuity Coordinators — who need credible HSE input for impact analyses, continuity strategies and exercising
• Operational Risk Managers — who integrate enterprise resilience decisions with site-level safety and environmental risk controls
• Site Managers and Operations Managers — who are accountable for safe restart decisions after an operational interruption

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical experience in an HSE, operational risk, emergency response or site-management role and understand their organisation's basic safety management arrangements. Familiarity with risk assessments, incident reporting, emergency response plans, environmental aspects and legal compliance obligations is assumed. Participants should be able to read simple risk matrices and use Microsoft Excel or equivalent spreadsheet software for workshop templates. Prior experience with ISO 22301, formal business impact analysis or business continuity software is not required; these methods are taught from first principles and applied to HSE scenarios.

Training methodology

The course is delivered through instructor-led briefings, guided analysis and scenario-based workshops rather than lecture alone. Participants use a simulated multi-site industrial disruption to complete business impact analysis fields, dependency maps, recovery strategy matrices and continuity-plan checklists. Small groups test decisions against environmental permit conditions, safety-critical maintenance needs, contractor constraints and communications pressures. The facilitator provides structured feedback against ISO 22301 expectations. On the final day, each participant converts workshop outputs into a site or function-specific 90-day application plan.

Course outline

Day 1: HSE continuity leadership and disruption priorities

• Business continuity, emergency response and crisis management distinctions
• ISO 22301 business continuity management system structure
• Integration with ISO 14001 and safety management systems
• HSE manager responsibilities in continuity governance
• Safety-critical and environmentally critical activity identification
• Disruption scenarios affecting HSE controls and compliance
• Continuity policy, scope and interested-party requirements

Workshop: Participants scope a continuity programme for a simulated operating site and produce an HSE-critical activity inventory.

Day 2: Business impact analysis and dependency assessment

• Business impact analysis interview and data-collection methods
• Maximum tolerable period of disruption determination
• Recovery time objective and minimum service level setting
• People, plant, utility and information dependency mapping
• Contractor, laboratory and waste-management dependency analysis
• Environmental permit, monitoring and reporting obligations
• Impact prioritisation using safety, environmental and operational criteria

Workshop: Participants complete a business impact analysis worksheet and dependency map for a loss-of-utilities scenario.

Day 3: Continuity risk treatment and recovery strategies

• Continuity risk register design and residual-risk scoring
• Bow-tie analysis for disruption pathways and control failure
• Recovery strategy options and feasibility evaluation
• Alternative staffing, delegation and competence arrangements
• Manual workarounds for monitoring, inspection and reporting
• Supplier and contractor continuity assurance methods
• Safe restart criteria and recovery decision gates

Workshop: Teams develop and rank recovery strategies for a disrupted hazardous-waste operation, producing a strategy selection matrix.

Day 4: Plans, communications and incident coordination

• Business continuity plan architecture and document control
• Plan activation thresholds and incident classification
• Incident command roles and continuity coordination interfaces
• HSE action checklists for the first operational period
• Crisis communications stakeholder mapping and message approval
• Regulator, insurer and community notification considerations
• Decision logs, situation reports and recovery action tracking

Workshop: Participants draft an activation checklist, HSE continuity action card and stakeholder communication map for a major spill scenario.

Day 5: Exercising, assurance and implementation

• Tabletop exercise objectives, scope and scenario design
• Exercise injects, facilitator prompts and participant briefing packs
• Observation criteria for HSE control performance
• Decision logging and exercise evidence capture
• After-action review and root-cause analysis methods
• Corrective-action tracking and management review reporting
• Ninety-day continuity implementation planning

Workshop: Participants run a tabletop exercise, evaluate the response using an observation form and produce a 90-day HSE continuity implementation roadmap.

Tools & standards covered

ISO 22301:2019, ISO 14001:2015, BowTieXP, Microsoft Excel

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions