Business Continuity Planning for Condominium Managing Agents in Sri Lanka: Resilience during Pandemics

Abstract

Business Continuity (BC) of condominiums is being greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is highly contagious, imposing a huge risk on community-based environments in which residents share different common facilities such as lifts, recreational areas, swimming pools, gyms. Besides, the apartments are mostly used as closed units without a solid connection with the environment. Such settings may heavily contribute in spreading any contagious disease, justifying the strict care extremely demanded at residentials. As the caretaker, the Facilities Management (FM) service provider, also known as the Managing Agent (MA) must continue its operations while facing the pandemic with a huge risk. Rather than being reactive towards the emerging struggles, it is more effective to have a proactive approach in combatting a pandemic. Business Continuity Planning (BCP) allows an organisation to be equipped with all mandatory plans and strategies which can be implemented before the pandemic strikes. Hence, this paper proposes a Pandemic BCP model for MAs which can be utilized for the on-going COVID-19 and future pandemics. Data were gathered using literature, expert interviews, site observations and document review. It was observed that none of the organisations had BC plans prepared for a pandemic. However, most experts admitted the importance of BCP in this context. They mentioned that the remote working culture already established in MAs, heavily contributed in adapting to the situation. Further, satisfactory accommodation facilities provided for the on-site staff was witnessed during the site observations. The documents review revealed the comprehensiveness of prompt action taken by MAs to resume operation of the critical functions. The proposed model consists of six stages and the paper discusses the factors to be considered under each stage of the model. MAs can utilize this plan effectively in adapting to the current and future pandemics to ensure solid BC.