Few people like to be in the situations where crisis communication is needed. A few, I say, because some people thrive in knifesharp-situations, when you have to put everything else aside, make fast decisions, and act fast. A few. Not most.
Most people recognize that if you are in a situation that requires crisis communication, something has gone severely wrong. Be it a force majeure event or be it the human factor that has failed. Of course, it depends on the nature of the crisis. As many of you, I was working during the outburst of the pandemic Covid 19. An unprecedented situation to all of us – worldwide. There was no map to follow, no answer-sheet to look to. We all had to act on the basis of what we knew, from day-to-day. I was lucky enough to work, at the time, for a company with decisive management. We were early out to shut down operations at the office premises, and move the entire staff to work from home. This was done over a weekend.
To make this possible, the internal communication had to correlate with the external messages. It was key that our customers and investors appreciated the situation and the decisions in the same way as our coworkers. The CEO played the lead part in this. But also, a lot of key coworkers that strived to secure accurate and timely information to customers and investors. We worked hard, and long days in front of those temporary ( as we believed, in the beginning) home-offices. And it wasn’t easy. We had to find new ways of coworking effectively with each other at a distance. But it worked. And our customers never had to experience any shut-down of our services, since we secured operations by fast and informed decisions by the management team. One of the keys here was to trust the organization to make this revolutionary change of ways of working. There is a lot to be said about Covid19, and in this case, I will put a pause in that – for now.
Because a worldwide pandemic is not the only crisis that can, or will, occur in your line of work. I have also been working through actual storms and fires. Through media turmoil against certain operations or person-related issues with upper management members. Through production faults and lethal accidents.
And what unites all of them, is that people in the eye of the storm are affected negatively. Sometimes deeply so. In some cases, it has been human life at stake. In others, a lifetime of value in family efforts at risk of burning away. And when people are deeply emotionally affected, they act and speak differently than they would in an ordinary situation. This goes for you as well. Do not believe that you can act unaffected in a crisis. Take this into account, when you plan your crisis communication.
And plan it, you must. You can not plan what will happen. Nor when, or how. But you can have a plan that works for most situations, and that will serve you well when the crisis hits.
For the actual crisis, you have to gather as much relevant intelligence as possible. If you have intelligence gathering programs, and structures for business intelligence already in place, you will be well prepared. Devine and Mattingly write about this in “The Public Relations Handbook”, and they make good points about proactively gathering critical information and intelligence to nurture PR-campaigns and efforts.
But all companies don’t work like this. Due to a number of reasons; some can’t afford the investments it means to rigg the organization this way. Some don’t know how. And some can’t see why.
Even so, most companies have some sort of environmental monitoring. And most companies have well informed coworkers and management. Even if your company doesn’t have the structures in place, or the seamless flow of intelligence in place to connect relevant departments, you could start growing that seed. If you feel that you are not as prepared as you should be, come a crisis, your first task is to locate where in your organization this intelligence is gathered and analyzed. Who is in charge, and to what end is the intelligence used? You need to be clear on what kind of intelligence you need, in what situations, and when. You have to give the person in charge the reason to why you should be privileged to a certain kind of information, and when.
And a little heads-up; don’t fall in the honey-trap of being the Person That Knows It All. It will not serve you to get all information about every minor miscarriage or incident that takes place in your business, even if you are in charge of risk and crisis communication. Ensure instead that you get the right amount of information of the relevant cases, the cases that will need communication expertise. Define the levels of incidents and the internal order of command, so that you and your business use the resources in an effective way. Take it from someone who’s done that mistake once or twice…
More about risk communication in coming posts. See you!
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