If one of your teammates falls ill, is someone prepared to step up? How to minimize the “bus factor.”

I know this specific article is a bit more programmer focused, but I think there's a lot of good stuff in it. Most of it applies to all workplaces.

However, it’s wise to develop contingency plans for short-term disruptions, too, such as when an employee is out for two weeks with the flu or goes on a long vacation.

Is this not a thing that everyone does? There's four people in my department. We all make sure that we at least know the basics of everyone's job and have written instructions for the extremely important functions.

There's no job that only one person in our department can do.

Take an inventory of applications being used by teams or individuals and make note of the log-in information.

Emphasis mine. I cannot tell you how important this is. I've been trying to get my department to adopt a shared password manager for a while now to avoid a situation where someone changes a password and forgets to update the rest of us.

Just as you test data backup procedures – you do, don’t you? – you should test your short-term recovery processes often.

This is something that gets overlooked a lot. You can have all the contingencies in the world, but they don't mean much if they aren't real world tested. The four people in my department all do one another's regular tasks every once in a while. I do almost exclusively video work, but occasionally I'll do a press release, just to make sure I know the process and it stays fresh should I need to step up in an emergency. It also helps to catch anything that's changed since the last time I did it.

I can tell you that over the last two months, this preparedness has become invaluable.