PERSPECTIVE ON THE NORTHRIDGE EARTHQUAKE : Shaking Up the Workplace : Innovation, compassion, employee empowerment will help businesses survive an emotionally fraught disaster.

I have a bit of fraternal advice to share with all the business owners and managers, big or small, who were devastated by the earthquake. I was chief executive for Burger King Corp. when Hurricane Andrew followed a 17-foot flood tide and ripped apart our world headquarters in south Florida in August, 1992. It then proceeded to devastate several zip codes, leaving half of our employees homeless and everybody facing a period of personal, community and business trauma that still isn’t behind us 18 months later.

We had to virtually start over, and so will many of you.

Although we had prepared crisis plans, the extent of the disaster meant that we had to invent most of our solutions as we went along.

I haven’t written this stuff down before because the scar tissue is still pink and sensitive for a lot of us, but it occurred to me that it may help you avoid having to reinvent everything we had to. I’ll keep it short; here are just 10 things to think about:

You’re facing a million decisions--including some real chunky ones. If you can make those big ones fast--today--it’s a real help. A lot of your people will have had some of their fundamental support structures shattered, and if you can say that you are going to stay and rebuild, and that they will have jobs, say it fast. And say it loud. At about the same decibel level as in a Guns ‘N Roses concert.

Make professional counseling available for your affected employees. Fast. Tell the macho guys who say they don’t need it that it’s not for them, it’s for their families. We had an astonishing take-up and an astonishing level of people who did not then need sustained counseling, compared with other disasters of this magnitude.

You will have to give concessions and help your people, and some people will seem to take too much, just as others take too little. It’s like a breakfast buffet in a restaurant--some people heap their plates, some take virtually nothing. The important thing is that what you offer works in total. That’s all that matters.

Understand from the start that the recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. For the first month or so, when the actual problems seem to be at their worst, a kind of bizarre adrenalin mix keeps everybody going (rather like the first, fast, lap of a marathon), but then the long, slow, grind sets in.

Remember that idea that innovators have been yelling about for some years now? That thing called empowerment? That idea that makes you tense? Relax. Right now you’ve got no choice. Let people manage their own issues--how to manage more flexible working hours, the dress policy for the office, working from home, etc. You will be amazed by how good they are at finding solutions. You will also find that not everybody you thought would be good actually is--and vice versa.

It’s OK to hug an employee. Just this once. Trust me.

Events like this create a huge information vacuum that needs filling and managing. Which doesn’t just mean you constantly giving out information. God gave you two eyes, two ears and only one mouth--that’s four organs to receive information, one to give it out. We found that a pretty good ratio to help us manage our vacuum effectively, so much so that we tried to keep it as a way of doing business.

Don’t lose your humor, however depressing and frustrating the days get. We threw some cheap and cheerful things in the calendar regularly--like a visit from a masseur who took over our meeting room for a day and massaged some tensions away. As a byproduct, a lot of laughter was created.

You employ adults. But many of them have children, and children emerge as the biggest cause of domestic tension and stress in the whole mix. Just recognizing that helps in itself, but if you can throw in the odd day trip for the affected kids it does wonders for the climate. Have you ever lived with a family in a trailer while your home was being rebuilt? Precisely.

Last--the most ironic of all. Don’t lose the benefits of the experience. You will go about business very differently for a while. The status quo is smashed. People begin to do things differently and to challenge you with the obvious (“You know, I really could do this from home”). We adopted a motto: Let’s get back to normal, but not back to being the same.

Do you have to do all of the above to make it through? Absolutely not. Do you have to do any of it? Just as absolutely not. I’m not even sure of the relevance of a post-hurricane experience to that of an earthquake (and it’s now one of my life’s ambitions not to find out), but in dark days when we found it hard to believe that we’d make it back, these helped us believe again.