Crisis Communication: an Important Part of Emergency Preparation

Featured article by Rear Admiral Bob Day, U.S. Coast Guard, on the Advisory Board at AtHoc, Inc.

“In all matters, before beginning, a diligent preparation should be made.” – Cicero

Businesses today are smart. They consider all kinds of outcomes for every business decision and use complex sets of variables to predict the future. If challenging times are coming for the company, they can often see it in advance and make preparations to lessen the storm. But among all the maybes and possibilities is one situation that many businesses tend to overlook: emergencies within the office itself. It may be a natural disaster, fire or even threat of violence.

Regardless of the nature of the emergency, communication during a crisis is essential to protect personnel and minimize disruption of business operations. But how are companies today doing at creating and using crisis communication plans?

The State of Emergency Readiness Survey recently conducted by AtHoc provides some answers into this question, with three takeaways lessons to help businesses prepare for a crisis that could come at any time.

Lesson 1: Don’t Wait to Develop a Crisis Communication Plan

If you haven’t yet created a plan for communicating with employees in an emergency, consider this. Four in five of the businesses surveyed feel that having such a plan in place is important. But these plans don’t simply come together without any work; there are a lot of variables to consider. There are on average 16 different people needed to take control of a crisis, and an effective plan must include how to contact employees and what steps are necessary to ensure that all the right people receive your communications. In fact, while every business surveyed is working on some sort of plan, only 42 percent of businesses have actually completed their plans. Moreover, it typically takes one or two hours for companies to contact even 80 percent of those individuals with responsibilities surrounding the crisis communication plan.

Despite the challenges, however, there’s a real need for crisis communication plans. On average, businesses reported that over the last three years they had experienced two incident that required the use of such a plan. Without it, companies stand to lose money and potentially even put their employees in danger.

Lesson 2: Be Progressive in Your Approach to Crisis Communications

There are some key differences between companies that are the best at handling their emergency communications and those that aren’t. Divided into two tiers, the top-tier businesses are 56 percent more likely to consider having a plan as extremely important. They are also 60 percent more likely to actually have a formal plan in place than lower-tier companies. Top-tier organizations are also more than 5 times as likely to use the cloud for storing their plan, which means they can access it even when there’s a problem with the local network – a real possibility in a crisis.

A crucial part of crisis communication is being able to reach employees as quickly as possible during the emergency. Top-tier businesses are better at maintaining updated contact information for their employees. Clearly, those that take a more active approach to crisis communications are more likely to be top-tier companies.

So how do you become a top-tier business?

Lesson 3: Take Concrete Steps for Better Outcomes

There are a few simple steps you can take in order to transform your business into a top-tier organization. The first thing you can do is ensure that you have the proper contact information available for all your employees. Every other measure will be rendered ineffective if it’s not based on the correct information.

With that in mind, the communication system you utilize contributes significantly to the overall success of your plan. The system should provide a single point of control through which you can send notifications to employees via multiple channels, including desktop notifications, email, voice and text alerts. The greater your ability to get employees’ attention, the more likely the alert is to be successful. Two-way communication is also important; if your people can respond with real-time information about their status or the emergency situation, you can more quickly account for your employees and react to the situation with more complete awareness.

Emergencies are unpredictable, and while businesses have a tendency to focus on other strategic areas, it’s important that they develop a plan for communicating with their employees in a crisis. By taking an active approach to creating a plan, and combining accurate information with the right technical solution, companies can simplify the process of emergency preparedness.