It’s go time. A crisis has emerged, and you’ve got to communicate with countless individuals, assign responsibilities, and follow-up on tasks to ensure the situation is handled rapidly. Failure to do so may result in your organization being at risk.
So, how do you handle it?
In most scenarios, you likely send emails, get on conference calls, or establish meetings—but with all the back and forth, it’s easy to lose track of what is happening or allow some issues to slide through the cracks. One of the areas that sometimes receives low prioritization is documentation.
Why Documentation is Critical to Crisis Communication
Documenting can be broken up into three phases – before, during and after a crisis. Before an incident arises – identifying steps necessary to handle a crisis is critical as it allows you to approach a situation with a proactive plan of action. During an incident – recording actions and conversations ensures tasks are completed and it provides transparency across your organization. After an incident – reviewing a report of everything that was documented provides teams with detailed reports on how the situation was handled in order to make changes, if needed.
Bottom line – you need to document everything and here are three key categories to get you started:
- Who is on the response team – Clearly define your team’s structure, roles and responsibilities. Make sure to include every employee that could potentially be involved in the situation, including those from Security, IT, legal, C-level executives, etc.
- Your plan of action – Think of this as your check-list. You must identify the list of tasks or actions that each person or department is responsible for and the timeframe they have to complete it. It’s a good idea to have a plan of action for every scenario you can think of within your crisis communication management plans.
- Who needs to be informed – People will want information on what is happening. Typically – the bigger the crisis, the more hands that need to be involved or aware of the situation. You need to not only plan a process for how personnel will be informed and what communication channel will be used, but also how often updates will be provided.
EventStream Gets Everyone on the Same Page
OnSolve launched a new innovative product called EventStream that allows organizations to create an event page within OnSolve Send Word Now Mobile. EventStream offers a central location where a user can create an event or incident, assign tasks to recipients and groups, and monitor progress continuously.
Key capabilities:
- Creation and monitoring of an event or incident
- Assigning tasks to recipients and groups
- An intuitive mobile interface
- A centralized location for event details
- Secure Lockbox files to provide critical information in a secure way
- Two-way communication through an integrated chat solution to promote collaboration
Have a Recall? It’s Time To Mobilize Your Business Continuity Plans
Ask yourself this – how would your organization handle internal communication during a recall today? If your answer involves email chains, conference calls, ad hoc meetings or any combination of those, odds are mistakes are being made that could jeopardize business continuity.
Download The Article
