1. Identify suitable skilled staff to form your crisis
response team. Take into account minimum numbers
of staff. In a long-running crisis, people will burn out if
there aren’t enough backups.
2. Take into consideration recent personnel circumstances.
Young families and elderly dependents can all affect the availability
and willingness of your crisis team.
3. Be aware that in a crisis, your crisis team’s
core personality traits will be accentuated. I have
seen internal politics, competitiveness, jealousy, insecurities
and a whole host of other issues bubble to the surface within
crisis management teams.
4. Ensure strong leadership during a crisis.
This will be crucial if you are to have any chance of weathering
the storm.
5. Develop a workable plan. I like lots of
checklists. Your crisis team will not have time to read a
thick manual in a crisis.
6. Clearly define the organisation's expectations
of the crisis teams and in turn what they can expect. Issues
such as overtime payments and relocation/hardship coverage
need to be considered.
7. Train the team around your crisis response, and
exercise the plans on a regular basis. Human performance
improves with training and practise. This was something crucial
I learned from my medical training!
8. Provide specialists to educate
your crisis team on how people react in a crisis
and how people cope with grief.
9. Develop relationships with the professional counselors
that you may need to call upon, especially if dealing with
loss of life. What you will certainly need in the immediate
aftermath are people skilled in providing psychological first
aid.
10. Do not shirk your responsibilities as an employer
when dealing with tough stuff. Whatever the cause
of the crisis, if it involves human suffering, your staff
will want to know that they are working for a caring and compassionate
organisation.
11. Consider the best way to communicate with all
your staff on a frequent basis—even those not
involved in the crisis response. In our experience, personal,
face-to-face team briefings are best.
12. Test your notification system outside of office
hours. Dedicated systems exist to simplify this task.
13. Ensure that all employee records are current and
include home and mobile numbers. You should also
have emergency contact numbers and the relationships with
the emergency contact listed for all staff. Update this information
quarterly.
14. Make sure HR can be contacted after hours.
You will need their input if your staff are impacted in any
way.
15. Make it easy for staff to communicate with your
organisation during a crisis. Set up a free phone
number that gives a pre-recorded message of the latest factual
information.
16. People will be desperate for information,
and in a crisis, your phones could get jammed very quickly.
Consider outsourcing this area to a specialist supplier.
17. Use your web site for disseminating information
to your staff and customers.
18. If using a remote site, consider all the practical
and logistical issues in advance: transportation,
accommodation, catering, childcare, shift patterns, etc.
19. If you have a crisis overseas, a whole host of
other issues will come into play. Time differences,
language barriers, variable medical standards, cultural differences
in dealing with death and bereavement, poor or non-existent
local support, involvement of the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, etc., will all come into play.
20. Be aware of the protocols of death notification
for the country where you live.
21. Provide ongoing support to those who have been
personally affected by the crisis. This could include
regular hospital visits, frequent communication and possibly
attending funerals.
Dealing with people is perhaps one of the most challenging
and rewarding areas of crisis management. Hopefully your crisis
will never involve injury or death, as nothing can fully prepare
you and your crisis team for dealing with these issues. However,
with good planning, training and a first class crisis response,
you and your organisation can deal with the unthinkable. The
reputation of your organisation could even be enhanced as
one that really does care about its people, whether staff
or customers.
The above is just the tip of the iceberg. Even if you feel
you have all the above items covered, it can still pay to
have an external specialist company audit your plans. Even
better would be to have specialists conduct your annual simulation
exercise (you should test annually as a minimum). They will
offer an objective and non-judgmental view of your crisis-response
capabilities and give invaluable feedback on issues that perhaps
have not been considered.
David Perl is chief executive of Docleaf, a crisis communication
company. Contact David at info@docleaf.com
Article copyright Docleaf.
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