The unpredictability of future events pushes modern businesses to identify likely crises that can occur and negatively impact their operations. Companies should be ready to make drastic changes to survive when a situation happens.
Unforeseeable consequences of some events or unpredictable events businesses consider potential risks can cause a crisis that affects employees. When an emergency occurs, companies should make decisions quickly to minimize potential damages that can harm their operations. Managing a crisis is a strategy businesses implement to deal with any significant and sudden adverse event.
So What’s Crisis Management?
Management of a crisis is the act of planning, implementing, and monitoring a particular strategy put in place to ensure a business is ready and able to handle effectively any significant adverse events that occur and affect it.
A crisis may happen at any period and can originate from multiple sources. Whether a situation is due to workplace violence, natural disaster, or employee misconduct, mishandling it can have disastrous consequences on your business. It is vital to prepare your employees for an anticipated crisis by developing a strategy to effectively and appropriately deal with unexpected and disruptive events that can threaten your business.
Types of Crises
Crises can either result from external forces or are self-inflicted. Some of the external forces that can cause such a situation in your organization include security breaches, false rumors, or employees’ misconduct. These factors and others can cause a crisis that hurts an organization’s reputation.
A self-inflicted crisis occurs due to situations arising within the business. Such factors that can cause self-inflicted problems are providing poor customer support that trends online or working in an environment with hazardous chemicals.
How an Effective Crisis Management Strategy Works
The process of managing a crisis works in three fundamental stages:
Pre-Crisis Stage
This stage involves putting measures to prevent anything likely to cause a crisis. Some of the factors involved in a pre-crisis step include creating a plan to manage any potential situation, hiring a team responsible for crisis management, and performing several drills to determine how your organization will react in the event of a crisis.
Management and Response
This stage involves training your team to deal with and respond to all stages of a crisis. Your team responsible for crisis management releases alerts and messages to inform stakeholders and employees of any situation happening within the business environment. In this stage, safety gets priority before everything else.
Post-Crisis
This stage is when a crisis has already subsided or passed. Business owners must maintain close contact with their respective employees after the problem. They should work with both their crisis management team and employees to review how their plan to tackle a crisis performed during the situation.
How to Create a Plan to Use in case of a Disaster
Creating a crisis plan should cover three phases, i.e., preparation, crisis process development, training, and testing. The preparation involves identifying ways to respond to an event and providing employees with several emergency contacts to use in a crisis.
The crisis process development assesses the event, how it might affect your business, and its potential severity.
The training and testing phase is to organize a drill to test how your employees will react if a crisis occurs. The drill results help the crisis management team know how to train employees on the best way to respond to any emergency.
NetQuid’s Crisis Solutions
NetQuid offers businesses top-notch crisis recovery solutions to help them effectively navigate the lifecycle of a disaster. Their strategies cover several topics, including crisis stimulation, real-time response, 24/7 monitoring, crisis communication, and more. Contact NetQuid to find out how they can help your organization respond quickly to an event and recover in no time.
