Crisis Management needs very effective crisis communication

Crisis management will safeguard your reputation

A crisis management plan (CMP) describes how your business will react to a crisis, including who will be involved and what they will do. The plan strives to minimise harm and restore operations as soon as possible.

Crises come in many forms, but generally they threaten your organisation’s operations, reputation, finances, or strategic objectives. Some crises jeopardise lives, health, and safety.

Having a crisis management plan is critical because, without one, people under stress may make poor decisions and may unintentionally extend or worsen a crisis. Taking swift, constructive action may be the key to your organisation’s survival.

In the wake of a crisis, a plan keeps employees focused on an organisation’s top priorities and combats fear and uncertainty that can compound the damage. Moreover, the exercise of creating a plan helps you to identify threats, minimise their likelihood, and improve the response.

a dedicated crisis management team

In addition to containing and controlling the narrative and helping clients to manage extreme crises, the Lighthouse Crisis Management team also provides in-depth training, coaching and development based on our own extensive experience and expertise.

For reference, we can reveal that we have managed and helped contain some of the biggest and most worrisome crises in Europe, with our crisis management advice coupled with our extensive crisis communication strategies.

Lighthouse has become the only agency in Romania and the first in South Eastern Europe to become part of the prestigious CCNE, the crisis communications network for Europe.

With this alliance, Lighthouse are able to deliver best-practice crisis management and crisis communication solutions, leveraging the huge experience of the network to benefit all businesses in Romania.

Purpose of a Crisis Management Plan

A crisis management plan prepares an organisation to cope with an unexpected calamity in the following ways: It shortens and lessens the impact of a crisis; it protects employees and anyone else affected; it preserves operations and productivity as much as possible; and it safeguards a company’s reputation.  

Crisis planning seeks to make your company more resilient and more capable of weathering the long-term effects of a crisis.

crisis situations need an urgent response

If your company does not have a crisis management playbook in place, now is the time to sit down and start planning. The very future of your business could depend on it.

But where should you begin? If you’re new to the process, building crisis management plans can seem like a daunting task. Luckily, there are just six key steps required to create a plan—and the process will likely become easier after you’ve gone through it the first time.

crisis management risk Assessment

The first step is a risk assessment, which identifies potential crises that would harm your reputation, disrupt your business function and/or processes.

Work with your leadership team, your crisis response team, if you have one, and other key stakeholders to begin listing all relevant threats and vulnerabilities that could impact the company. These might include public relations blunders, complaints, social media gaffes, product recalls, accidents at work, cyber attacks, data breaches, and many more.

Now that you have determined what risks could impact your business and how, begin identifying which actions will help your company to respond effectively to each crisis scenario. Think about the steps that would be required to resolve a given crisis, what resources would be required, and how employees can help.

crisis management Training

It’s important that all employees understand their roles during a crisis. Remember, stress and panic can make it difficult to remember your role in a crisis response; however, there are two ways to mitigate the effects of stress.

First, ensure that your stakeholders have the information they need. During the tense moments of a crisis, people require very quick access to straightforward information. Consider ways to quickly and effectively distribute a crisis plan, such as through a crisis management app, which includes real-time access to up-to-date documents, incident reporting, contact lists, messaging capabilities, and more.

Second, be sure to frequently train stakeholders on your crisis management plan. Stage regular tests and rehearsals to ensure that every individual is familiar with the plan, can respond confidently, knows where to get additional information, and understands his or her role.

Thirdly, it can be prudent to only target and engage the right people, as some crisis communications have to reach all employees, others don’t. Our capability helps you decipher and engage the right people, sections, and geographies who need the information, without needlessly involving those who don’t.

crisis management and crisis communication plan needs to be continuously updated

Once your plan is written and approved and has been tested, be sure to revisit it frequently. It’s vital to keep the plan up to date, especially as employees join or leave the company, new technologies are implemented, and other changes occur. It can be helpful to review and test the plan at least a few times a year to keep the content fresh.

Also remember, a crisis does not always happen during working hours and you need to be able to react to any given situation 24/7. So if a PR nightmare or a product recall strikes on a Saturday afternoon, your people still have immediate access to the information they need to activate the appropriate plan right away.

The key element of crisis management

It is worth emphasising that we consider crisis communications as the key element of the management plan, because it is vital to align and co-ordinate the release of information.

When there is an emergency or a major impact on the business, there may be limited information about the incident or its potential impacts. The “story” may change many times as new information becomes available.

One of the aims of the crisis communication plan is to ensure consistency of message. If you tell one audience one story and another audience a different story, it will raise questions of competency and credibility. Protocols need to be established to ensure that the core of each message is consistent while addressing the specific questions from each audience.

Management needs to develop the strategy and the crisis communications team needs to implement that strategy by allaying the concerns of each audience and positioning the organisation in the correct way, allowing it to emerge from the incident with its reputation intact.

Here are a few selected bullet points covering some of key actions that need to be given due consideration in every organisation.

• Contact database across all audiences, including the News Media

• Issues management book for call-centre agents

• Identification of all potential crisis situations

• Define crisis scenarios and their action plans

• Crisis cell – who and what

all lighthouse crisis solutions come with service guarantees

From your brief, our experts and management team will custom design what we consider to be the best crisis management solutions for you. We will provide tactical options, budgets and targets that we will achieve.

You may be very surprised with the strength of our recommendations and the anticipated outcomes.

We would certainly advise you to measure our ‘service guaranteed proposals’, against your current performance.