Category: Crisis Communications

 

What are crisis communications and why do you need it?

Crisis communications is a facet of the overarching business continuity management strategy. It is the establishment and application of guidelines that guide an organisation on how to communicate effectively in the event of a crisis. The strategy involves anticipating potential risks, preparing responses in advance, establishing communication channels, and executing a quick and effective response when a crisis occurs.

Crisis communications isn’t merely about managing the flow of information in the throes of a precarious situation. It also encompasses post-crisis communication to ensure that stakeholders’ trust remains intact, and the organisation’s reputation is rehabilitated efficaciously.

The importance of robust crisis communications cannot be overstated. Given the volatile business environment we operate in, punctuated with unforeseen occurrences such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, pandemic disruptions, and more, the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ a crisis will strike.

Having a proficient crisis communications strategy ensures your company can manage any critical incident in the following ways:

 

1. Information Control: It allows you to control the narrative around your brand, presenting accurate information in a timely manner and preventing the spread of rumours or misinformation.

 

2. Stakeholder Confidence: Transparent communication during a crisis can maintain or rebuild stakeholder confidence and trust. Stakeholders include not just your clients, but staff, shareholders, suppliers, and the wider community.

 

3. Operational Continuity: Prompt and effective communication can facilitate business operations to resume quickly or continue with minimal disruptions during a crisis.

 

4. Reputation Protection: Crucially, it aids in protecting your organisation’s reputation, an invaluable asset in today’s hyper-visible, interconnected world.

 

In essence, crisis communications are a fundamental aspect of any organisation’s risk management strategy in today’s vastly unpredictable business environment. Establishing proficient crisis communication protocols can control the information, ensure stakeholder confidence, enable operational continuity, and most importantly, protect your organisation’s reputation.

Done right, it’s more than merely staying afloat during testing times; it’s about rising with resilience, ready for future challenges.

 

The four steps of effective crisis communication

 

Navigating the turbulent waters of a crisis requires more than just a hastily constructed response; it necessitates a carefully devised strategic plan that encompasses the following four steps:

 

1. Preparation: One of the most crucial steps in effective crisis communication is adequate preparation. Develop a crisis communication plan that identifies potential risk scenarios, key stakeholders, necessary communication channels and roles, and responsibilities of the team members. Incorporating regular drills or simulations into your preparation routine aids in better understanding of the plan and helps identify any potential loopholes.

 

2. Response: The response phase is when the rubber meets the road; it’s the immediate actions and communications following the onset of a crisis. Rapid, transparent, and consistent communication is crucial here. Not only must your organisation provide timely updates to stakeholders, but also empathetically acknowledge the impact of the crisis and outline steps being taken to mitigate it.

 

3. Management: This phase involves continual engagement with stakeholders, managing media interactions, and updating crisis communication based on the evolving situation. Actively listen to stakeholders’ concerns and be responsive in addressing them. There could be unexpected developments; hence, the ability to adapt and modify your communication in line with changing circumstances is vital.

 

4. Recovery: Once the immediate crisis is under control, the recovery phase commences. This phase focuses on repairing any potential damage to your organisation’s reputation, restoring trust among stakeholders, and conducting a post-crisis evaluation. This evaluation facilitates learning from the crisis, refining your processes, and better preparing for future incidents.

 

While these steps provide a roadmap to navigate the crisis communication terrain, being mindful of the nuances of your specific crisis, audiences, and communication channels will make this roadmap purposeful and pertinent to protecting your company’s interest. With these foundational steps, your organisation is set to tackle any crisis with resilience and poise.

 

 

How to create a crisis communication plan

 

• Understand your Audience: The first step is to know who you are communicating with. Recognising your stakeholders or audience, including clients, employees, or shareholders, will enable you to tailor-compelling messages that address their concerns appropriately.

 

• Specify your Communication Team: Identify a team that will be responsible for communicating during a crisis. This team should involve skilled personnel or leaders who preferably possess strong communication skills and understand your business operations well. Their role involves managing all forms of communication throughout the crisis to ensure consistency and clarity.

 

• Conduct a Risk Assessment: Evaluate potential crises that your company might face and focus on the ones most likely to happen based on your industry’s vulnerabilities and historical trends. Whether it’s an operational failure, a cyber-attack, or a natural disaster, understanding these risks helps in effective preparation.

 

• Create Your Key Messages: One thing a crisis doesn’t afford is time. Therefore, having preset messages for different risk scenarios can be a lifesaver. Tailoring your communication and resonating with your stakeholders’ sentiment is the key to ensuring their unwavering support during challenging times.

 

• Choose your Communication Channels: Depending upon your stakeholders, your choice of communication channels may vary. It could range from press releases, social media, newsletters, emails, or an internal communication system. A variety of channels ensures your message reaches a broader audience promptly.

 

• Implement Regular Training and Exercises: Having a crisis communication plan on paper is not enough. Regular training and exercising of the plan are crucial in preparing your teams to respond swiftly and skilfully when a crisis hits.

 

• Review and Improvement: A crisis communication plan is not a static document. It evolves as businesses grow, environments change, or new threats emerge. Regular reviewing and improving of your plan ensures your organisation remains at the forefront of crisis readiness.

 

 

Tips for managing a crisis

 

• Maintain Open Communication: Transparency is vital in a crisis. Ensure you maintain open lines of communication with all stakeholders. Whether it’s employees, customers, or investors, providing factual information about the crisis and how it’s being managed helps build trust and reduces misinformation.

 

• Mobilise Your Crisis Management Team: As soon as a crisis hits, mobilise your crisis management team. This team should initiate the implementation of the crisis response plan, manage internal and external communications, and oversee the procedure until the situation is resolved.

 

• Prioritise Issues: Understand that not all problems can be addressed immediately. Prioritise the issues at hand based on their urgency and impact on operations. This facilitates a systematic approach towards problem-solving and helps mitigate risks effectively.

 

• Show Compassion: During a crisis, don’t forget the human element. Whether it’s an internal issue affecting staff or an external concern impacting customers, being compassionate helps your organisation maintain relationships and convey empathy.

 

• Monitor the Situation: Stay updated on the progression of the crisis. This could involve tracking media coverage, engaging with stakeholders, or assessing the impact of the crisis on various aspects of the business.

 

• Debrief and Learn: Once the immediate threat has passed, take time to debrief. Identify what worked well, where the gaps were, and how you can improve the process for the future. Incorporating these learnings into your crisis management plan will bolster your readiness for future crises.

I hope you all had a well-deserved break over the Christmas period. It’s important to switch off and recharge the batteries as they say.

For Risklogic, the end of 2017 was our busiest on record, so for me and my colleagues across the ditch, it was very important to take some time. However, when you choose resilience, Emergency or Crisis Management for a career, you have always got one eye on what’s going on around the world, not just on the contracts we work on.

One of the more well-publicised events were the huge wildfires of California. These have no doubt been catching your attention in some form. Whether it be the celebrity retweets, the images of wild animals fleeing down busy high streets, or the images caught by the International Space Station, you can tell it’s a big one.

 

The stats so far on the fire

The covered story and event in America is actually three separate fires, Thomas Fire, Rye Fire and Creek Fire.

Each of these fires cover hundreds of thousands of acres with Thomas Fire being the largest and most reported.

The Thomas Fire has destroyed at least 1,063 structures while damaging 280 others; becoming the 7th most destructive wildfire in California history.

During the three major fires, a dozen other fires roared through the state of California stretching the emergency services to their absolute limit. Fire services from around the country were flown in leaving their own state under-resourced during Americas dry months.

Over 122,000 acres have been burned, much of it the lush, picturesque landscape of the state’s beloved wine country. The area burnt so far in Napa and Sonoma is three times larger than Washington D.C.

The fires torched 20,000 acres in about 12 hours on the Monday alone. This means the fires advanced at a rate of more than a football field every three seconds.

The smoke from the fires led to the worst air pollution on record for Northern California. Air quality is considered “very unhealthy” when the index reaches 201. At one point on Tuesday, the air score in parts of Napa hit 486.

This large fire has ensured the insurance total had risen to $9.4 billion in less than a month.

Source: edition.cnn.com

Getting away from it all

For me, my downtime and re-charge involved a trip back to my favourite township in New Zealand,

Wanaka. Located in Otago, near the Southern Alps of NZ. This place is the place to be, so much so Shania Twain has a house there and the character Ethan Hunt of Mission Impossible spent his honeymoon there!

I wasn’t there to buy a house (unfortunately) or try to escape work from the CIA, it was about mounting biking, trail running and kayaking, maybe the odd beer or two as well. However, on the second day during a trip on our kayaks to a small island, my wife and I noticed a couple of helicopters flying overhead.

 

Not unusual for this part of the world, the difference this time being each one carried monsoon buckets. ‘Probably just a training exercise’ I thought, as I couldn’t see any fires.

That soon changed on our way back to our campsite, suddenly it became very clear that this was not a training exercise when Mount Roy came into view covered in smoke and flames. The hillside overlooks Wanaka and obviously attracted a lot of attention from the thousands of tourists that descend on this part of the world.

Temperatures of 32+ degrees and strong winds were not making things easy for the fire crews and pilots who were flying non-stop all day and for the next couple of days to contain the blaze.

The Wanaka fire was contained in 5 days. No houses or people were lost, which is a tribute to the hard work and dedication of the emergency services. However, one theme is common in the Wanaka and fires of California: how do we communicate with tourist in this situation?

I was a tourist, so I’m keen to understand! I am of course from NZ, I have been to Wanaka many times and I know the area well. But what about the backpacker from Europe, who has just got off the plane? It could be jetlag, but it could be they just don’t have any situational awareness on their new environment yet?

I was amazed to overhear a young German lady in the campsite office asking the receptionist; “Can I have some information on the walks near Mt Roy please”. The receptionist replied in shock “um…everything is cancelled at the moment due to the fire”. (The smoke, 200 hundred acres of scorched hillside and constant drone of helicopters visible from the office window she was standing only centimetres from). “Oh really, what fire?” the young girl replied. The receptionist and I looked at each other in disbelief. Utter astonishment to how anyone, even with the lowest form of life experience couldn’t see the hillside that closely resembled that of Mount Doom during that final scene in Lord of the Rings.

As of October 2017, New Zealand hosted nearly 3 million tourists. In 2018, we are expecting a 9% increase. Who is responsible for keeping them safe do you think?

It’s fair to say that New Zealand is working on improving its mass communication process, but has anyone thought about our visitors? I’d imagine that it’s on the Governments ‘to-do’ list and I’m sure the emergency services are very aware, however, this young traveller had no idea, how did it miss her?

I have to say, that having lived in New Zealand for the last 14-years and most of that time in the Canterbury area, like many other Kiwi’s, I have seen my fair share of natural disasters.

The “she’ll be alright” statement is still alive and kicking even after these events. Cantabrians have become very accustomed to the shaking, (we still don’t like it though), but it’s probably a new experience for our tourists, will they know what to do? Do we know how to contact them?

If the Wanaka fire had got out of hand and the town had to be evacuated, how would the COMM’s work? I’m not sure to be honest and I was a tourist too! Which is a massive concern.

Wildfires can get out of hand very quickly. During my time living and working in Western Australia, I was a volunteer for the State Emergency Services (SES). During that time, I did some bushfire training and the one thing that struck me is the speed at which a fire can travel.

Similar to the fires of Queensland 2010 which travelled at 110kph at one point, the Thomas fire in California spread an acre a second! You can’t outrun that. You can’t even out drive it. Fast and efficient communication is vital and things can and do get out of hand very quickly.

Don’t just take my word for it

The official Government Technology Publication (www.govtech.com) wrote a long-form piece on the issue with communication during an event of this scale.

Found here, they discuss how “when the warnings came, they were not received by many of those in the most peril”.

“I can use my cellphone to order a pizza and it gets here,” said Rob Lewin, director of the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management. “Why can’t I have that same system to save people’s lives?”

Fortunately for Rob, you can use technology to achieve such mass-communication and collaboration with tools like Activate and CQCommand. But as a trainer and seller of these innovative bits of software, I still struggle to find people who believe and understand why they need it as much as someone like Rob Lewin does. If the tools exist, what have you got to lose to use it?

Technology is still being adopted in the Crisis and Emergency Management space. It’s early days for organisations trusting the power and reliability of an app on their phone. However, the alternative right now simply isn’t working. Trying to communicate over radio, Facebook or even a loud siren 20ks away isn’t going to cut it.

Education

So, who is responsible for the tourist? The tour companies? The airline? Airport Immigration? The Government, or maybe the tourist? My personal view is it’s all of the above:

• Tour company: Provide information of the potential hazards in New Zealand. (I know, not great for selling a product, but they will still come, don’t you worry)
• The Airline: On the final descent would be a perfect time for the aircrew to remind us to sign up for the mass notification system. We all must fill in the arrivals card anyway, make sure there is a section on mass communication.
• NZ Immigration: Confirm that the mass communication section has been filled in on the arrival card, so we can contact you in an emergency.
• The Government: Invest in a national mass communication tool to include visitors.
• The Tourist: Be responsible, sign up for mass communication, listen to locals and stay smart with your actions.

An example of a tourist doing the complete opposite of this was during the Wanaka Fires where a Frenchman decided to fly his drone above the planes, which then grounded all helicopters. The stupidity of some people astonishes me to this day. 

I would be interested to hear your thoughts as I know we’ve all done a lot of travel over the years. Was there an event overseas you were a part of? How was it handled? What did you do and was there anything you would recommend?

Regardless, we’re still deep in the fire season, so stay aware, prepared and be resilient out there!

Until next time, plan, do, check & act…

Contact Us today to learn more

When an event occurs, usually it’s one that effects a larger variety of people and organisations. Seldom are you at the very centre of that event or having to explain why it happened. However, as we know, it can happen – no matter how unlikely you think it is.