Crisis management refers to an organisation's approach to preventing, planning for, and responding to events that threaten to harm persons or property, significantly disrupt operations, damage reputation, or impair the bottom line. If you do not prepare, crises cost you money, diminish productivity, and potentially jeopardise your company's long-term existence.
The three primary stages of an excellent crisis management plan are pre-crisis (preparation and prevention), crisis response (handling the crisis), and post-crisis (recovery and analysis, incorporating lessons gained).
Pre-Crisis:
The most effective tactics for minimising the negative consequences that any terrible circumstance can have on your firm are active crisis prevention and being completely prepared to respond. At this point that you will choose your core crisis team, create a formal crisis management strategy, train your personnel, and start adopting crisis-related policies into your daily operations.
Comprehensive crisis management plans should include specific crisis communications instructions and risk assessments, and business continuity and emergency management planning. Training is an important part of this period that gets often disregarded. For various reasons, organisations occasionally establish extensive crisis plans but never provide training on crisis team responsibilities or actual use of the plan.
Unfortunately, this means that in a real-life catastrophe, your plan's implementation will most likely be inadequate, and a lack of training often jeopardise what would otherwise be a good crisis response framework.
Crisis Response:
The ball starts rolling when an occurrence triggers your crisis management plan's reaction strategy. The crisis team is activated, and the training/preparation measures are put to the ultimate test: performance in the real world. The two branches of crisis response are the reputation/communications branch and the operations/business continuity branch.
While you are informing and reassuring the public, squishing rumours, and dealing with the media, crisis communication support experts are figuring out how to keep the business running – steps like finding new supply lines, shifting production to non-affected plants, or configuring systems to allow employees to work remotely.
Post-Crisis:
While it may be tempting to escape to a nearby beach for a week and forget about work, it is vital to keep your head in the game after a crisis. We have never seen a crisis without a few untied threads. Additional crisis communication plans must always be sent out to angry customers, business partners, or local regulators. It assures them that the cause of the crisis has been resolved, valuable lessons have got learned, and specific measures have been put in place to prevent it from happening again. The evaluation of your response and plan is an essential part of post-crisis work.