Any organization is vulnerable to a crisis. Such issues have led to the downfall of any organization worldwide. Lack of proper management of any trouble leads to catastrophic damage. You need to prepare early enough and communicate with your stakeholder to anticipate any crisis. You must include your staff in your discussion about handling the matter both before and after the problem.
What is crisis communication?
These are laid protocols that allow your organization to communicate effectively during a crisis. Since emergencies usually strike without warning, having a crisis communication plan will help the company survive any situation.
Your employees should not give up after any crisis. They should be able to handle the situation with courage, determination, and a smile. All you need is to consider all possible solutions to the outcome crisis. For instance, if your marketing campaign is failing the quickest way to improve it is through social media. You can not only save the face but effectively connect with everybody involved as well. For this, you must be signed up on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and have enough followers as well.
Let’s look at them.
· Identify Your Crisis, Communication Team
It would help if you had a team of executives to serve as your organization’s crisis communications team. The manager or other person should lead any legal counselling that requires control of the group. The size of the team you choose should depend on the needs of your organization.
Ensure the team sets a communication process for your business. Ensure all the staff is involved in training sessions to avoid missing introductory sessions that might help them. Make a straightforward process and use the right channel of communication to pass your information to staff.
· Establish Notification and Monitoring Systems
Knowing what is being said by staff, clients, or any other person on social media might negatively impact and turn into a crisis. When you develop a way to follow up with stakeholders’ feedback, you can accurately adapt your strategy and tactics.
Ensure to have means to reach out to internal and external stakeholders as soon as possible. You can as well spread awareness via social media platforms like Instagram. All you need is to have enough Instagram followers, and you get more clients to your account. With many followers, you boost your brand sales and as well receive reviews about your services.
· Assess Your Weaknesses
Before you can draft any plan, it’s essential to determine all your weaknesses. You need to brainstorm with your crisis and list all the possible things that might harm your company. It’s necessary to include all your employees in your organization to avoid missing any critical information.
· The Death of The Super Injunction
Although crisis experts argue that taking the legal path is still a viable option, it can also do more harm than good in terms of credibility. Taking legal action can be necessary at times, but you need to be aware that it will damage your reputation. So, it appears that you have nothing to hide or that you are selfish.
Also, keep in mind that going through the justice system takes time. Remember that time isn’t on your side in any crisis, and you have to move with the business.
· Start Brand Monitoring
When you have a brand monitoring system, it enables you to check on negative feedback before going viral. Here you can employ Google Alerts to assist you in keeping up with all online matters. Don’t limit yourself to any receiving alerts from your CEO or manager.
Sometimes some clients might post negative feedback that Google Alert can’t detect. Most of these social media monitoring tools are free, but you can consider budgeting for white glove services if you can. You can as well establish a social media team to deal with such situations when they happen. It’s good to respond in a professional way to minimize negative cycles.
· Natural Crisis
When anything like earthquakes destroys your office, it can be categorized as a crisis. Such scenarios can be rare to occur but still make a significant impact on your organization. If your office location is exposed to extreme weather conditions, it’s essential to have an emergency response in such an unfortunate event.
You need to be a proactive person for you to handle such a crisis. You can decide to build offices in resilient materials to weather in your area and prepare an evacuation plan in an emergency. It’s also essential to have a plan for business operations in case your offices become unavailable.
· Workplace Violence Crisis
It might occur when a current or former employee commits violence against other employees. It might not be easy to foretell such crises when they happen. Still, it’s essential to involve law enforcement as quickly as possible if anyone is injured and your employees are immediately sent to the nearest hospital to get medical help.
· Finalize and Adapt Key Messages
When you have gathered all the data concerning the crisis, your team needs to develop crisis-specific messages required for any given situation. Your team should be now aware of the information stakeholders are looking for and the possible solution.
Ensure to have not more than three key messages for all stakeholders and some audience-specific messages for specific groups of stakeholders, if applicable. You’ll also have to adjust the message to various media types, for example, using links to other pages to provide the necessary information.
· Be Honest and Follow Through
If you don’t know the truth concerning the crisis or the organization has not responded, don’t talk or post anything on social media. You can tell those inquiring details that the organization is gathering information and preparing a formal response.
The legal counsel’s advice must weigh against the complexities of the crisis by spokespersons. If your representative promises a future announcement, your company must follow through, regardless of what is said. Promises that aren’t kept will add to the crisis.
· Post-crisis Analysis
Following a crisis, conduct a systematic review of what went well, what could be improved for the next time, and how to strengthen different aspects of your crisis response strategy. Any crisis communications team should engage in this practice as well. If there are any other critical plans the organization needs to plan for should be highlighted.
Conclusion
As we have seen from the above information, it’s essential to start putting a proactive crisis management strategy. Your crisis team needs to be well informed on handling such situations when they happen within the organization. We hope the information provided will help you make some changes to your firm to avoid losses and damages.
