What happens if you’re not prepared when a crisis strikes? What will happen if you simply haven’t got around to crafting a crisis communication strategy, plan or process? What could go wrong? First of all, remember that 99% of the time, no preparation is enough preparation. This is not an excuse to defer the important work you have to do. It is, however, the main reason you never get around to it. There is no daily fee charged for delaying.
But don’t forget the other 1% of the time: When you need to communicate RIGHT NOW, but you can’t because you haven’t prepared. Here’s a list of what will go wrong should you be caught unprepared when you really, really should have been prepared.
No communication strategy
Most likely, your organization’s leadership daily chooses to delegate the responsibility for stakeholder communication to others. This includes marketing, public relations, government relations and employee communications. These tasks are daily delegated to ‘experts’ to carry out. There may be corporate-level emphasis on some specific functions, likely marketing more than others. CEO’s seldom reach their rank because they are good at public relations; they get there because they are good at management, growth strategies, finance or investor relations. Or they had the idea that got the company started. Or they inherited their position.
One thing for certain, it is the rare and special CEO who lies awake at night thinking about crisis communication. They delegate it and they expect it to be done. Then they ignore it. When was the last time you were called into a meeting to help your executive leadership understand the public impact of a possible decision, and to ask your advice on how to deal with it? If you’ve had this happen to you at all, you and your organization are fortunate.
Now imagine that something very bad has happened. Operators are under stress, costs are suddenly going through the roof, regulators are concerned, customers are cancelling orders, shareholders are asking questions, and reporters are calling…. It is suddenly not a good day. Everyone asks; ‘Where’s our public affairs person?’ Someone remembers your name. You are called in and told; “Make it better!”
Congratulations, your newly coined strategy is ‘make it better’. But you don’t have direction, buy-in, support or attention. As quickly as it turned to you, leadership’s focus has now switched away from you as they focus their efforts on operational areas that have always held their attention, not stakeholder communication.
Your responsibilities? Great. Your authority and resources? Small. You’re in the worst possible place to be. You’ve been given responsibility to immediately provide immensely important stakeholder communication. The leadership of your organization has charged you to save their proverbial bacon and your career is on the line. A crisis communication strategy not only identifies risks and actions, it also identifies authority, resources and recourse. Without this you will be spinning your wheels alone.
You might attempt to outline a basic plan: Listing of risks/events, affected stakeholders, likely concerns, key actions and messages, dissemination plan and resource list. You might even get it done. But you’ll likely not get it approved, let alone implemented. It won’t be approved because everyone is too busy and distracted. You won’t get it implemented because nobody will be willing to make such a decision under stress/threat/risk.
Your only recourse will be to implement it anyway, and risk the wrath of reluctant responders for what you did. But even if you manage to implement a last-minute strategy, you’ll likely find that you can’t get staff dedicated to support you and you can’t get people to respond to any of your requests. Everyone in your organization has gone into crisis mode. Email in-baskets are instantly overflowing. Everybody now has two jobs to do: their normal one and their crisis one. Without an accepted, approved and implemented crisis communication strategy and plan, you are not on their list.
The cost of this failure? Your organization is being labeled more non-responsive with every moment that goes by without information. Affected stakeholders are deciding whom they will trust to give them information, and your organization isn’t on their list. They’re starting to listen to people telling them what to do, and your voice isn’t being heard. They’re starting to worry about their safety, jobs, homes and future, and you’re not helping them. Good will is going away, and it is going away for good. Minutes wasted in failing to communicate early in a response become hours expended later to regain a voice and stakeholders’ trust.
No priority for response communications
In addition to failure to plan and subsequent performance issues, you will likely face a persistent and pernicious problem: perpetual lockout from important deliberations, decisions and actions.
Remember that other people your organization are not communicators, so they are not considering communication risks or issues when they make decisions. Most people regularly feel that their specific function in an organization is one of the most important functions. A crisis response often breaks this, but it does so by edict: everyone is told what is the most important objective, and everyone focuses on the elements and tangents of that named objective.
Without development, review, acceptance and implementation of crisis communication strategy, stakeholder communications default to lower and lower priority, attention and resourcing. Not only will you will not be at the table, over time you will be moved further and further away from the table. You will struggle for attention and resources from people who spend less and less time considering your needs.
Then, when stakeholder communication isn’t on the thought horizon, someone under stress will make a bad decision about a public-facing action. Response needs will suddenly be apparent and response plans will be activated. But without a priority on crisis communication, response efforts will turn inward. Decisions will be made in a vacuum, and not communicated with a worried public. Reporters will be shunned, TV crews will be turned away for ‘security reasons’. Community meetings will be cancelled due to ‘schedule conflicts’. Media will be told there’s no time for questions. Activists will be arrested, badly. People will be told that solutions are too technical to explain, and to ‘just trust us’.
Credibility and trust fly away, at the hands of people who should care the most; they just don’t know they should. It isn’t a priority.
Communicators not mobilized in time
Since response communications aren’t seen as a priority, response communicators often aren’t on the callout lists. Instead of being notified immediately when an incident occurs, you may be notified late, or not at all. It may take someone at a higher level of the organization who has worked with communicators before to realize you need to be brought into the response.
Unless you’ve been able to enforce a strong communication process into your organization’s response plans, producing accurate and timely communication products is going to be challenging enough without any additional delays in notification.
If you haven’t been able to enforce a strong communication process and priority into your organization’s response plans, you will always be in this position, having less time to produce stakeholder communication product. The delay will only exacerbate what will already be a very difficult process. Consider delayed notifications as an additional cost for ineffective planning and implementation.
No response communication staff structure
If you haven’t thought out what you will need to do during a response, particularly during the first few hours of a response, you won’t know who, or how many, staff resources you need. If you don’t know whom you need, you won’t have their contact info handy to mobilize them. If you could effectively mobilize them, you won’t be able to make clear, concise task assignments based on qualification.
The result? A lack of communication resources; you will be overwhelmed with tasks, time demands and deadlines.
Only careful planning can prevent this dilemma. It’s not enough to know what communication products are going to be needed; you have to know who will produce them; those individuals will need pre-approved templates to use and they will need to know any necessary approval flow and distribution plans. They need to be available, up-to-speed and capable of actually helping you.
If you haven’t identified needs and staff resources, quantified staff member capabilities and assigned specific roles, you won’t have any staff to help you. If you do mange to mobilize staff, they’ll likely spend their time waiting for you to tell them what to do, or you will have staff taking the wrong actions and doubling your workload.
No statement template preparation
It is very difficult to be creative under stress, a constant in response communication. You may think you are good at ‘winging it’ under pressure, but you won’t be.
In the early response, when the greatest demand for information is matched with the least amount available, we all need prepared statements that will frame the few facts we can confirm with statements of commitment and caring. If you’re having to write as you go, two things will happen: You’ll be too late because you’re waiting for ‘a bit more’ information, or you will forget to frame the facts in a context that will give you an opportunity to continue the conversation later.
Templates aren’t generated to shield your organization from scrutiny; they’re designed to welcome it by focusing on your strengths. They aren’t written to hide bad news in a bunch of ‘feel good’ commentary; they’re written to frame truth in context with the response efforts. Well-written templates allow you to maximize use of verified facts while welcoming stakeholders wanting more. Finally, prepared templates ensure that you are able to actually communicate at all, since they are already approved for your use. Which leads us to…
No approvals
Remember that stress reigns throughout a response. Placid coworkers become panicked, mellow supervisors become manic. Communicators become tongue-tied and attorneys become obdurate. The challenge of gaining content approval during normal times is multiplied in a crisis.
And that is if you can even find someone to approve content. Often, all key decision makers are in transit – either to the office or to a plane, on a plane or in a vehicle. Cell phones don’t work in congested command spaces, laptops are left at home, and IT is scrambling to match bandwidth to appliances while leadership waits to receive anything from anyone. Email inboxes explode, text messages multiply all by themselves, phones aren’t heard, or aren’t answered. And your approvers disappear into the ‘fog of war’.
Your approval trail leads nowhere. About the time you do find someone, the burgeoning command structure moves them up or down the command chain. So you wait, already late and watching seconds, minutes, or hours go by. The phones ring with media questions. Your organization’s social media accounts fill up with comments and a pervasive theme emerges: Your organization is choosing not to communicate. Every minute without released information is verification of this; suspicion becomes conviction, and conviction leads to condemnation. Without recourse and without a voice, you watch your task shift from communicating facts to defending inaction. And there is nothing harder to defend.
Unauthorized messaging
At this point it is almost inevitable that someone will say something to break the cycle. A responder may tell a friend, who tells a friend, who calls the media. A spouse may write a post on Facebook. Or an instant expert, retired fireman, or ex-employee will become available for interviews. And the information available veers away from accurate facts, to suspicions, impressions, suppositions, recollections – anything but truth.
This dynamic is inevitable in the best of responses, but it can be moderated by quick and continuous release of factual information and context from response officials who have been authorized to speak for the response. If you fail to provide information when your stakeholders need it, others fill the vacuum. They often have neither the capability nor the concern for accuracy Wrong information is presented in a sensationalist, biased manner. Opinions and agendas parade as facts. Graphic, sensationalist imagery is used without regard to privacy or propriety. The end result at best is a public lumbering off after misinformation. At worst, desperately needed trust is squandered, accurate information is overridden by false information, and false information leads to public harm, reputation damage and loss of trust in response efforts.
No distribution capability
Assume that you managed to scribble up a brief update statement, by some miracle an approver dropped by on their way to the restroom, and your statement was actually approved for distribution!
Now what? You may not have access to your organization’s distribution tools, so you only have your personal or work email accounts. You can’t send the release to your list serve or a commercial distribution vendor; that’s another level of review, approval and action by people other than yourself. They likely aren’t available, either because they’re on their way to the response or off-shift; crises never happen during regular work hours. And you don’t have a contact list of key stakeholders ready to use anyway.
Your best option may be to go outside to the gathered media to share the information you have, or to post it on your Twitter account. In either case you’ve generated an ‘exclusive’, not on the basis of relative value of each outlet, but on their availability. And you’ve missed the most important people to share the information with. Without preparation, your critical audiences will likely be neglected, and they may become… critical.
The solution?
There’s only one: Prepare now. Count this blessed 99% time as an opportunity to get ready for the brutal 1%.
Responders easily look in the wrong direction for planning. They tend to focus on past responses and ask past-tense questions: What happened last time? What could we have done better? As a result, Command strategy is built on best practices, policy and process – but all from past experiences. Truly effective response strategy includes both looking backward, to be sure we’re incorporated lessons from the past, and looking forward to be sure we’re ready for future events.
No management degree should be offered without requiring a stint of managing a fast-food restaurant. These workplaces present unique management challenges as they combine low wages, high turnover, part time loyalty and portability. Fast food employees are starting their work career, hoping to move on and up to better work at any moment. They are learning employment skills on the job. Minimum wage is a great leveler, providing equal opportunity at a multitude of venues. With employee turnover rates commonly
The world is changing ever faster. I’m old enough to remember waiting for checks to come in the mail. I remember faxing. I remember my first email, and wondering if I’d need a desktop computer for my first job. Yet more change has occurred in the past 5 years than what I experienced in the previous five decades. This change is occurring technologically, operationally and in the culture of communications.