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July 28, 2009

Planning for Crisis Communications

By Kennedy Maize

Involve Employees in Crisis Management for Best Results

One of the most useful chapters of the book focuses on how to motivate employees during a crisis and how management must respond to its workforce. This is particularly important at a time when companies are laying off workers during the economic recession and facing increasing threats from whistleblowers and outside challengers. A crisis in these circumstances will be an even greater management challenge.

Billie Blair, CEO of Change Strategists Inc., in her chapter, “Why Motivating Employees to Take Action Is Critical,” says that during a crisis “management will close ranks in an attempt to shield employees from unpleasantness and prevent panic from spreading. Employees, on the other hand, readily sense anything unusual going on in the organization and can quickly determine chaos in the air. Because there are numerous markers for a company’s crisis management mode, employees can readily identify these markers.” In more direct words, employees can smell the rotten management fish.

The best way to deal with employees in a crisis, says Blair, is to let it all hang out. She writes, “The unfortunate circumstance of modern-day management is that employees are rarely informed and consulted on ways to extricate the company out of crisis. Therefore, management most often tries to dig out of the crisis on their own, giving subtle hints along the way of what it is that is needed from the company’s employees. However, subtlety does not work in a crisis. It takes head-on engagement of management, the board of directors, and employees, to successfully counter crisis.”

The business communications bottom line is that companies should have crisis plans in hand. They should think ahead about what awful things could go wrong, and how they would plan to respond, including how to involve their employees. Even if nothing goes wrong, crisis planning is probably a useful exercise and worth the expense, because PR shucking and jiving in a bad event (TMI-2, for example) costs a lot more in the end than a positive planning exercise.

The Crisis Management Guidebook (Access Intelligence, Rockville, Md., 2009, $399) is a required resource for business communications and human resources professionals in power generation businesses. A disclaimer is needed here. Both PRNews and MANAGING POWER are owned by Access Intelligence of Rockville, Md., although neither has any publishing, editorial, or business connections with the other.

—Kennedy Maize is executive editor of MANAGING POWER.

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