Making good decisions in hard times matters to organisations more than ever, from establishing their resilience to shaping their brand and strategic future. Building effective protocols, encouraging broad input, and planning in advance to head off – or at least to better deal with – potential crises are essential for effective crisis-handling.
A sincere, speedy and genuine reply could regain sales that have been lost, corporate reputation and customer confidence.
Develop a Crisis Management
Team Highly trained skilled people serve as crisis management teams which are the key to surviving the unexpected in business. They must know what is required of them and have to get trained on a regular basis so that they can perform their responsibilities quickly and successfully when dealing with a crisis. Identification of a team leader is important as the first step towards rewarding results as the team needs to have a devoted person who knows a lot about your operations, and is willing to take some action to support it. And to some extent, he/she can prioritise problems to solve safety concerns of the employees. And there ought to be someone from legal to cover such matters as liability and communication. For very large, wide-ranging businesses, other teams might be drawn in, such as marketing executives or HR professionals – in such cases team members might need to work across multiple teams.
Develop a Contingency Plan
The first step to developing one is a risk analysis, where you identify all potential threats to your business and what you can do to stop them – whether that’s flooding, cyberattacks or issues with your supply chain or staffing. Develop specific communication protocols that can be mobilised in crisis situations, including procedures to appoint spokespersons, dissemination channels, and plans to address queries from the media and help channel public concerns. Relay your crisis management strategy to your staff. Whether that means training sessions or drills, or including it as part of your onboarding process for new hires, the more people who are aware of your crisis management plan, the quicker your business can recover when disaster strikes.
Develop a Communication Strategy
A communication strategy enables your business to communicate effectively with both your internal and external audiences during an emergency. It encompasses developing what communication channels and messaging best suit your business, the individuals you need to reach, and the messages your audience wants to receive. A proper communication plan can mitigate the consequences of a crisis, halt the erosion of your company’s reputation, earn the trust of your stakeholders and reduce your risk of legal action. Check in on your comms strategy periodically and tweak what needs to be – review crisis results, host stakeholder engagement sessions, and gather audience feedback.
Develop a Reputation Management Strategy
Developing a basic reputation plan means thinking through what types of problems you might encounter, and preparing systems to handle them as they arise. It involves mapping key stakeholders to figure out who needs what type of information – employees potentially need regular updates about safety procedures and measures; customers might want regular communications about service outages or other disruptions. A plan also includes preparing business continuity protocols with contingency and backup plans in place so that critical operations can continue as normal. A positive reputation can help a business through a crisis, both by bolstering trust among stakeholders and cultivating goodwill, as well as an advantage over its competitor, which can lure the best employees to your organisation and attract new business. As well as helping you to bounce back, conducting post-incident reviews can make it easier to resurrect and improve the effectiveness of your CMP over time by revealing the strengths and weaknesses in response, and changing what’s not working to further prevent incidents.
Develop a Response Plan
When your team has created an actionable plan, train everyone on it and regularly run drills or rehearsals so they see the plan in action and have clarity about their role and responsibilities should a real crisis occur. First, identify and learn about the information needs of your key stakeholder groups during a crisis: your employees may need real-time information about their safety and what to do, local communities can expect a certain level of accuracy and openness from you, and your company’s shareholders may need to know that an incident has been reported by you to regulators, among other needs. Second, every episode can be an opportunity to exercise and refine your crisis-management plan.