Marsh said the purpose of the practice is to help clients address the effects of crises on employees, their families, members of the community and customers.

The Human Impact Practice is designed to help organizations set up crisis management programs before a disaster happens. Marsh emphasized that recovery from a crisis may be incomplete without addressing its impact on people.

“Without effective crisis management, the bond of trust between an organizations leadership and its employees can be broken,” explained Mr. Braverman. “Once that happens, it may never return. These concerns must be addressed in order to retain staff both immediately following a crisis and on a long-term basis.”

The practice will provide a full range of crisis management services to clients, including:

Helping companies assess their existing emergency response and business continuity plans.

Integrating those plans with the organizations security, operations and crisis communications activities.

Assessing the impact of crises on employees, customers, suppliers and communities.

Conducting a full range of exercises to test clients crisis readiness.

However, smaller brokers say they do not see the need to establish in-house practices because of the size of their accounts and their carrier relationships.

Charles L. Ruoff, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for insurance broker Acordia, a subsidiary of San Francisco-based financial services company Wells Fargo, said that while Aon and Marsh clients in the Fortune 1000 see a need for these private practices, middle-market clients do not need this extent of service.

“We are still dealing with the same concerns [in a crisis] as before [Sept. 11, 2001],” said Mr. Ruoff. “What happens if there is a significant event? We have to get the facility up and running. Working with their product teams, in term of production, what do you do if a product is contaminated? All of that [thinking and planning] was going on well before 9/11.”

Since Sept. 11, attention to some questions about client preparation for a crisis has increased, Mr. Ruoff acknowledged, but not to the extent that Marsh and Aon are addressing.

If crisis management is a priority for a client, he said that middle-market brokers are more inclined to turn to outside consultants or to their insurers than maintaining such expertise in-house, either with full-time departments or wide-ranging partnership arrangements.

“Our clients are just looking for solutions,” Mr. Ruoff noted. “We find an organization to look at the problem and to offer a solution. We are not worried about where to turn for answers.”

“We work closely with our clients to make sure they have the proper coverage and protection they need if an incident occurs,” explained Doug Hudson, director of corporate communications and investor relations for Daytona Beach, Fla.-based insurance broker Brown & Brown. “We rely on our carriers to bring their crisis teams together [in a disaster] and remain heavily involved with them. It is a group effort to help the client get back on their feet.”

One insurer helping to make available resources to answer questions on crisis management is New York-based AIG, which announced in October its “Planning and Tracking Response Online (PATROL)” program.

According to the company, the program gives AIG clients access to “a global network of leading providers of business continuity and security-related services,” the company said in a release.

Clients can connect with a global network of “selected crisis preparation and response companies” to order services and “respond to and track crisis developments online.” Services available range from responding to catastrophic events both man-made and natural, to recovery, security, planning, investigations and public relations.

AIG clients can also assess their risk exposure with online tools such as “Threat” and “Vulnerability Risk Assessment,” the carrier noted.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, January 6, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.