The 6 Steps To Crisis Management: How To Handle Your PR When In Crisis
What Is A PR Crisis?
A PR (Public Relations) crisis occurs when an organisation or individual faces a significant threat to its reputation and public image due to negative publicity or adverse events. These crises can arise from various issues, such as product failures, individual or organisational scandals, social media backlash, miscommunication within or with consumers, environmental incidents, or other workplace issues.
When a PR crisis strikes, it's not a time for hesitation. Instead, it's an opportunity to demonstrate your preparedness and strategic acumen. A swift and strategic response is crucial to managing the fallout, maintaining public trust, and protecting the organization's or individual's reputation. Effective crisis management typically involves transparent communication, taking responsibility, rectifying the issue, and implementing measures to prevent future occurrences. That is why every organisation needs a PR team that can effectively manage a crisis.
Types Of Crisis
Types of Crises: Fiscal Crisis
A fiscal or financial crisis is not just a challenge, it's a serious threat that can disrupt a company's operations and stagnate growth and economic stability. It could affect sales, balance sheets, revenue, and cash flow. This crisis could be caused by internal capital management or external factors like economic slowdowns. Understanding the potential impact of such a crisis is not just crucial, it's urgent for effective crisis management.
Types of Crises: Technological Crisis
A technological crisis, often caused by hacks, outages, data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats, poses a significant risk to a company's reputation. In such situations, sensitive information about the company and its customers could be leaked, jeopardising privacy and security. This risk underscores the need for proactive measures in crisis management.
Types of Crises: Natural Crisis
As the name suggests, a natural crisis is caused by natural causes and natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, etc. If a disaster hits near company headquarters, supply stores, or other company facilities, it often endangers employees' lives. As a result of these natural calamities, businesses in affected areas also take a hit.
Types of Crises: Work-Place Related Crisis
Worker strikes, legal liabilities, accusations of an unfair or unsafe work environment, etc, could cause workplace-related crises. These crises could heavily impact the employees' morale, lowering their motivation to work or causing conflicts between employees. Although these conflicts are primarily done in a non-violent manner, there is a threat that they might turn violent on provocation.
Types of Crises: Health Crisis
Natural outbreaks or pandemics could cause a health crisis, an unsanitary work environment, or unhygienic conditions near the supply chain. It could cause several employees or customers to fall ill, causing a backlog in work or outrage among the public.
The 6 Steps Of Crisis Management
Steps for Managing a Crisis: Identify The Extent Of The Crisis
A crisis doesn’t become a crisis if it is resolved at its roots. If not tended to or allowed to grow, this problem can cause severe financial and health issues among employees, consumers, and other stakeholders. So, identifying how big the crisis is, how much area it has affected, and how many individuals it has affected is crucial as it determines whether it is a problem that can be solved easily or a crisis that needs to be managed.
Steps for Managing a Crisis: Communicate With All Stakeholders
After that, it’s essential to communicate with the affected parties or the people affected. This step becomes vital as a positive response from the stakeholders could make resolving the crisis easy and smooth for all involved parties. However, a negative response could further hinder the progress and cause additional problems. Communication is the key. You need to be able to acknowledge the crisis on a public platform, such as social media or through a press release. It is essential that when you address your customers, you also tell them that you are working towards remedying the problem.
Steps for Managing a Crisis: Create A Unified Response
When a crisis hits, it's not a time for individual actions. Everyone in the company must have a unified response. This includes stakeholders like the board members, shareholders, CEO, CFO, etc., right down to the employees, helpers who clean the company's corridors, and other workers. A unified response shows that everyone is aware of the crisis and actively working to resolve it.
Steps for Managing a Crisis: Act Quickly
When a crisis emerges, time is of the essence. Once a problem has come to your attention, swift action is necessary. Delaying a response could cause a snowball effect, turning the problem into a crisis and making it almost impossible to solve. Sometimes, just by not acting quickly, a company loses tens of billions of dollars and cannot recover from such significant financial loss.
Steps for Managing a Crisis: Document The Entire Crisis And The Response
While it may seem weird to spend time documenting instead of working towards solving the crisis, this step is essential to help analyse where the company went wrong and devise a plan to prevent such mistakes from happening again. It also helps identify the affected areas/people and work to solve the crisis from its source. They were nipping the bud from its roots. It also improves the efficiency of the work and proves to be beneficial in the long run.
Steps for Managing a Crisis: Review And Recalibrate
After all of this is done and the company has finally returned to an even footing and has stabilised, it's essential to review the process to understand where the crisis began. This review should cover all aspects of the situation and the response. It's also crucial to recalibrate how not to let a similar thing happen again. This involves identifying the root causes of the crisis and implementing measures to prevent their recurrence. Learning from your competitors and analysing their crises is essential to avoid going through the same.
Why Do You Need A Crisis Management Strategy
Preparation and Prevention: Having a strategy in place allows organisations to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities before they escalate into a full-blown crisis. This proactive approach can help in preventing crises from occurring in the first place.
Rapid Response: In a crisis, time is of the essence. A well-developed crisis management strategy ensures the organisation can respond quickly and effectively, minimising damage and controlling the narrative.
Maintaining Reputation: A crisis can severely damage an organisation's reputation. A strategic response helps to manage public perception, reassure stakeholders, and demonstrate accountability and competence in handling the situation.
Minimizing Financial Impact: Crises can have significant financial implications, including revenue loss, legal costs, and stock market fluctuations. Effective crisis management can mitigate these financial impacts by swiftly addressing the issue and restoring stakeholder confidence.
Compliance and Legal Protection: A crisis management strategy ensures the organisation is prepared to meet legal and regulatory requirements during a crisis, thereby reducing the risk of legal repercussions and fines.
Stakeholder Communication: Clear, consistent, and transparent communication is critical during a crisis. To keep them informed and engaged, a strategy provides guidelines for communicating with stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, and the media.
Continuity of Operations: A crisis can disrupt normal business operations. A strategy helps to ensure business continuity by outlining contingency plans and backup procedures to maintain critical functions during and after a crisis.
Learning and Improvement: A crisis management strategy includes mechanisms for reviewing and analysing the crisis response. This post-crisis evaluation helps organisations learn from the experience and improve their preparedness for future crises.
What Not To Do At The Time Of A Crisis
Ignore, Deny or Delay…
Never, ever, during a crisis, ignore it. Instead, accept whatever has happened publicly and work to resolve it. Ignoring the situation will not make it go away; instead, it may increase the loss that might occur due to the crisis happening in the first place.
The second thing you shouldn’t do during a crisis is deny the crisis. You can make it look like it's an inconvenience and that the team is working on it, but do not deny the problem, as it will grow mistrust amongst your employees and consumers.
Lastly, never delay your response during a crisis. Be as quick as possible and address and update your stakeholders regularly to ensure their trust in your organisation. You can do this through various means, such as social media, press releases, memos, emails, etc.
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