Workforce reduction. Epidemic. System shut down. Is your organization prepared to deal with a crisis? It’s important that you evaluate your preparedness in order to respond effectively in crisis situations.
At some point and time your organization will face a crisis, how you manage the crisis, and weather the course, can ultimately determine your success or failure. Being prepared to respond to it depends on the elements of your crisis response plans and the tool you use for evaluating the adequacy of your organization’s response.
An effective crisis response plan must consist of:
- Identifying Key Personnel and Assigned Roles During a Crisis
- Establishing Crisis Communication Protocols
- Guidelines for Crisis Scenarios and Appropriate Responses
- Post Evaluation Execution of the Crisis Plan
Identifying Key Personnel
A crisis demands rapid responses with a clear chain of command and the ability to transition as soon as a crisis is expected. Your organization should establish a designated leader who also has a second in command and a core crisis response team of people who also function as designated leaders charged with managing the various departments of your organization. This includes having established mechanisms for identifying essential personnel, rapidly locating the core crisis response team and a designated meet location.
Establish Crisis Communication Protocols
Identify clear external and internal communication channels. You want to ensure you have access to manage and have input about the narrative.
Determine a location that will serve as your base, one that has the necessary bandwidth for receiving information and communication output. This may look like having access to external media coverage, the ability to rapidly connect to various lines of communication (social media, direct media, internet, internal communication systems, etc.), communicating with personnel and the public. Even though crisis communication can be reactive, general emergency response messages should be composed in advance.
Guidelines for Crisis Scenarios and Appropriate Responses
It’s important to remember the 5 P’s (Proper Prevention Prevents Poor Performance.) During a crisis information is shared whether you manage it or not, so it’s important to anticipate certain events, actions, and responses. By being proactive, it can make managing the process somewhat easier and help you to effectively manage a crisis and reduce its effects before it occurs. By creating a set of crisis scenarios that serve to guide planning can be highly effective. The scenarios should represent a broad range of potential emergency situations that an organization could face. The crisis response team and communications team should be able to assess a combination of pre-set responses, that may include facility lockdown, police or fire response, evacuation, etc.
Post Evaluation of the Crisis Plan
Gathering feedback and evaluating the response post-crisis provides insight and an opportunity for organizational learning to occur and identify where the crisis plans strategies need to be revised.
Another important element to post-evaluation is having the systems in place to accurately assess your organization. A post-crisis review should be conducted by key personnel, the communication team, and the crisis response team after each significant event. The guiding questions should be: What went well and where is there a need for improvement? What are the key lessons learned? What changes do we need to make to our organization, procedures, strategy, and resources?
For some businesses and organizations, writing a crisis communication plan can be difficult, so contact Outreach Strategists to help you get started. We will train you and your staff on how to navigate through a crisis with effective strategies and a crisis plan tailored for your industry.