Shell Real Estate’s team is pictured with Hans Gant (center) of the Metro Atlanta Chamber and consisted of (from left) Mike Napier, John Greene, Jeri Ballard and Jimmy Hunter.

Twenty-four August 2006 marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. Its horrific impact on the residents of the Gulf of Mexico shore region, especially on New Orleans, is only made worse by appreciable setbacks to business and commerce.

There are many compelling stories of how companies based in the Gulf region responded, but one of them in particular stands out. "It's a great story," relates Mike Napier Head of Real Estate at Shell Oil, in introducing the company's disaster response case to the awards judges. "It's a real-time innovation under great pressure."

What makes the story compelling is Shell's quick action to directly assist the 500 employees whose homes and residences were destroyed, in addition to its successful effort to return 1,400 employees who suddenly had no place to work to One Shell Square in downtown New Orleans.

From a real estate management viewpoint, however, there's more: Shell's real estate team played the lead role in the disaster response, setting into motion new protocols that will remain as established processes and procedures for years to come. Simply put, the Shell CRE team redefined the company's global chain of command, at the same time rising to the top of that chain as chief advisor and frequent decision maker.

As a result, CRE inside Shell is now playing an enterprise-wide leadership role, having won respect at the senior management table for its well-orchestrated response to an impossible situation.

"Eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded," Napier recounts. "Like everyone, Shell was severely impacted." Nearly three-fourths of Shell's total output is based in the Gulf, so part of the challenge was to restore MARS, the Gulf's largest oil drilling platform, which Katrina had mangled almost beyond recognition. Shell's ability to bring it back on line within 10 months isn't really the main point of the story, yet it's indicative of the company's ability to move quickly and effectively from a continuity standpoint.

That agility stood out more on the human side.

To illustrate the case, the U.k.-based Napier introduced his State-side Shell Real Estate colleagues from New Orleans and Houston who told the rest of the story: Regional Manager, Americas, Jeri Ballard; Real Estate Manager, John Greene; and Asset Manager, Jimmy Hunter.

Shell has the right governance structure in place before Katrina, with real estate being part of every crisis team within the company. "But the magnitude of the problem was not anticipated," the group relates.

The existing risk-response and business continuity structure incorporated crisis management, points of authority, and team work - balanced against safety and security. Yet, because of the nature of the disaster, "we were in for a role reversal in many channels," the real estate team recalls. Employees in and around New Orleans "knew if they could just get to Shell, we would take care of them."

That "we" turned into the Shell Real Estate, which first accounted for all area Shell employees by 9 September (about 2 weeks after the storm) with thankfully no fatalities. The team then turned to housing, transferring or transporting some employees and their families to Houston where the team had secured 350 apartments.

The team simultaneously turned its attention to the New Orleans headquarters, where by 1 September it began the extraction of equipment from the building to start clean-up and security procedures. The team also reopened an older hotel that before the storm was about to be "moth-balled." This provided relief from the pressing demand for immediate emergency housing for the scores of employees remaining in New Orleans whom Shell would soon need back on the job.

One of their most innovative responses was in housing. The real estate team quietly acquired a local residential real estate brokerage which was about to go out of business due to the disaster's impact. The agency was used to secure new housing for many employees. "We did not want to harm the real estate economy," reports the team. "We did not advertise Shell's seeking real estate for employees, so we took a local real estate agent in-house as our (unseen/transparent) local residential broker."

Meantime, on 20 February, Shell began reoccupancy of One Shell Square, changing its post-Katrina local motto from "Shell is Coming Home" to "Shell is Home."

What did the group - aside from its newfound respect and influence from and over the internal chain of command - learn from its $33-million initial two-week spend on local real estate resources resulting from Katrina?

Some simple lessons now include a much stronger set of knowledge surrounding continuity plans and implementation of them. Family-oriented solutions also moved to the forefront of the company's thinking and actions. And fundamental but crucial tips were reinforced or made even more salient: the simple idea of everyone sharing each others' Blackberry PINs was one. Another is the establishment of a fixed list of conference call numbers.

The team illustrated its work with a graphic analogy to the five overlapping rings symbolizing the Olympic logo. For Shell, those intersecting rings became motivation, governance, planning, competencies and relationships.

"It all came down to the real estate team," Napier concludes. "We did it all. Necessity is the mother of invention, there's no better example."

Real estate now "has a seat at the table . . . everywhere."