Written by David Leathers, Director of Climate & Extreme Weather, Health Action Alliance, and Steven Levine, Co-Founder and CEO, Health Action Alliance
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a version first published by Training Industry for learning and development leaders in March 2026.
Over the past decade, the U.S. has averaged 20 billion-dollar weather disasters per year, up from just three per year in the 1980s. That means a major disaster now strikes roughly every 19 days. Our latest installment of Duke’s Summer Ready series, The Workforce Risk Extreme Weather Is Creating — and Why Leaders Need to Act Now, made the case that extreme weather is a workforce risk leaders can’t afford to ignore. But recognizing the risk is only the first step. The harder question is: who responds?
In most organizations, the answer is unclear. Safety and crisis response teams generally own these risks. But when wildfire smoke blankets a region, when a winter storm knocks out power for a week, or when a heat dome makes outdoor work dangerous, the impact doesn’t stay inside one department. It touches employee benefits, mental health, operations, communications, and talent strategy. No single function can solve it alone, yet without deliberate coordination, fragmentation is the default: safety handles the incident, HR fields benefits questions, communications pushes out a message, and managers improvise.
For sustainability leaders whose work already connects people, knowledge, and capabilities across the organization to execute a larger climate strategy, this is both a challenge and an opening.
Why Cross-Functional Coordination Matters
When a crisis hits, organizations don’t fail because they lack a plan on paper. They fail because the people responsible for executing it have never practiced working together.
Think about what happens when a major hurricane makes landfall near one of your facilities. Safety issues guidance. HR activates emergency benefits and leave policies. Operations decides whether to pause or pivot. Managers triage needs. IT ensures remote access. Finance tracks costs. And those are just the acute responses. In the weeks that follow, employees may be repairing damaged homes, navigating insurance claims, or dealing with health issues that don’t surface immediately. If the disruption doesn’t end when the weather clears, neither should the organization’s response.
Each of these functions holds a piece of the puzzle. But how often do they rehearse putting it together? The gap isn’t awareness; it’s coordination.
Building the Right Team
Extreme Weather + Work recommends assembling a cross-functional team before a crisis forces one together. The urgency is real: in polling with the HR Certification Institute, nearly one-third of HR leaders cited limited budget or resources as their biggest barrier to protecting their workforce from extreme weather. But most organizations already have people across departments with the relevant expertise.
The key is giving them a shared language, shared priorities, and a shared plan. Depending on your organization’s size and structure, that might include:
- Safety and occupational health teams who bring expertise in hazard identification, emergency protocols, and regulatory compliance. They know what protections are legally required and can help design training that goes beyond the minimum.
- HR and benefits leaders who understand the support systems employees need, from emergency leave policies and disaster relief funds to mental health resources and childcare assistance. They also own the communication channels that reach employees most directly.
- Risk management who can map employee locations against extreme weather hazards, quantify how past disruptions affected productivity and absenteeism, and help factor employee health into broader continuity planning.
- Crisis response teams who bring the operational playbook: how to activate emergency protocols, coordinate across locations, and manage real-time decision-making when conditions change fast. They ensure workforce needs are built into response plans that may have historically focused on facilities and infrastructure.
- Finance who tracks real-time costs during a disaster and manages emergency fund disbursements. Before one hits, they help quantify the cost of inaction and the return on investment in preparedness, which is essential for securing leadership buy-in.
- Facilities managers can reduce long-term exposure by upgrading air filtration and HVAC systems, evaluating lease decisions in disaster-prone areas, and identifying capital investments that minimize future repair costs.
The first job of this group is to take inventory: what plans already exist, where are the gaps, and how do we bring a focus on employee health and well-being into plans that may have been designed primarily around facilities and operations?
Why This Approach Works
A benefits leader, a safety director, and an operations manager will each describe the impact of a hurricane differently. But getting them in the same room and helping them see how their pieces connect moves the conversation from “that’s not my department” to “here’s what I can contribute.”
That’s something we’ve seen consistently in our work building cross-sector coalitions of employers, from COVID-19 response to extreme weather preparedness. The most effective solutions don’t come from gathering people who think alike. They come from bringing together people who see the same problem from different angles. The same dynamic is just as powerful inside a single organization. The question is: who plays the convener role internally?
Where Sustainability Comes In
If you’re in sustainability, you already have the core skills for this work. You create and work towards environmental and social goals that span departments. You build shared frameworks and common language. You take complex, specialized knowledge and make it relevant in a broader corporate climate strategy across roles and levels. That’s exactly what workforce resilience demands.
Here are four ways to start:
- Design shared learning experiences around extreme weather risk. Extreme weather is already central to your materiality assessments, climate disclosures, and risk registers, but workforce impact is often underweighted. Bringing together leaders from safety, HR, operations, and communications to map how physical climate risks translate to employee health and productivity can close that gap.Tabletop exercises and scenario-based simulations are among the most effective ways to build coordination before a crisis. When people have already walked through a scenario together, they don’t have to figure out who does what in the middle of an actual emergency.
- Build common language and literacy. Different functions talk about the same risks in different terms. Safety tracks incident rates. HR tracks leave and benefits utilization. Finance tracks losses. You’re already fluent in translating climate programs and data into business terms — extend that so every function can understand how extreme weather affects employee health, productivity, and organizational resilience, and plan from the same starting point.
- Equip managers to be the first line of response. When a weather event hits, employees look to their direct manager, but many managers have never been trained on when to escalate, what resources to offer, or how to check in after a crisis. Practical, scenario-driven training can close that gap and make workforce preparedness a visible part of your broader climate resilience agenda.
- Champion ongoing readiness, not just crisis response. The most resilient organizations don’t treat preparedness as a one-time event. They reinforce it through onboarding, seasonal reminders, safety campaigns, and leadership development.
Start Before You Need To
The organizations that respond well to disruption aren’t the ones that built their plan mid-crisis. They’re the ones that had already brought the right people together, identified their gaps, and practiced their response.
Consider this: Mercer research finds that 70% of employees expect their employer will support them through a disaster. Yet only 4% of employers have even assessed which workers are vulnerable to which types of weather events.
The work can start with a conversation. Reach out to your safety, HR, and operations peers. Ask what plans are in place and where they see gaps. Look for opportunities to build on existing programs rather than starting from scratch. Sustainability can build that coordination. The time to start is now, before the next disaster arrives.
For more tools and resources to help build workforce resilience, visit healthaction.org/extremeweather.
Sign up for a June 18 webinar to learn how your organization can anticipate disruption, adapt under stress, and recover quickly with less loss.
Steven Levine is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Health Action Alliance. Before co-founding Meteorite, the social impact firm that powers the Health Action Alliance, Steven launched Univision’s social impact brand and previously served as the White House Associate Director of Communications under President George W. Bush.
David Leathers leads the Extreme Weather + Work program at the Health Action Alliance, helping businesses address climate-related risks to workers and build resilience across operations and communities. He previously advanced global sustainability standards at B Lab and led impact measurement initiatives at Deloitte.
