Recognizing that your company faces a crisis is difficult. Seeing a slow-developing crisis requires leaders to overcome the normalcy bias, which can cause to underestimate both the possibility of a crisis and the impact that it could have.
Having a crisis management plan or just do the exercise is therefore critical because, without one, it could be too late or people under stress may make poor decisions and may unintentionally extend or worsen a crisis. Constructive action may be the key to your organization’s survival. Acrisis management plandescribes how your business will react to a crisis, including who will be involved and what they will do.
7 Steps to a Crisis Management Plan
Step 1 - Establish Crisis Management Group
Createa crisis management-related organization chart in your plan, so it’s clear who has final authority and who reports to whom in times of crisis.This decentralized or flat organizations sometimes struggle to achieve in crisis situations. A company-wide crisis may require a headquarters crisis team that has regional teams operating underneath it.
Determine what will serve as the base of operations for the team during a crisis, what supplies and utilities the team will require. Think about everything the crisis management team might need like credit cards and a standby public relations advisor, and line these things up.Information resources will be especially important in a time of crisis.These resources include stakeholder agreements, including union contracts, maps of facilities, timelines, flowcharts of key processes and procedures, supplier contracts, benefits information, and more.
Step 2 - Baseline
Review your organization’s mission and values, and make sure your plan reflects those goals. Keeping your company’s overall mission and values front and center will ensure that your decisions prioritize honesty, transparency, and respect for lives and communities. Next, be sure to identify your organization’s top strategic priorities in a crisis, such as the ability to continue fulfilling orders.
Identify all the potential types of crises, a pandemic, financial crisis, decease of internally VIPs, nature crisis, market, transporte.g.,that your business is likely to face, and then rank them by probability and severity. Your core plan will include responses that apply to the most probable crises.
Determining probability will also require an analysis of your vulnerabilities, because they may play a role in an internally caused or exacerbated crisis. For example, if you have inadequate handling protocols for volatile chemicals, an explosion or fire is much more probable. This process will shine a light on weaknesses and give you an opportunity to address them early on, possibly preventing a crisis from occurring.
Step 3 - Risk Assessment
The nature of your business will determine the specific risks and vulnerabilities that you assess. Still, every organization should start with standard assessment questions about the overall risk culture and the risks to major functions and processes. Once you’ve identified potential risks, use a risk management matrix template to rank them. By evaluating both the potential likelihood of the crisis and the expected severity of the impact, you can prioritize risks for mitigation.
Next, you’ll need to create a plan for how to address the vulnerabilities you’ve identified. Use the templates in the link aboveto keep mitigation work on track by collecting information such as who is responsible, the steps they will take, and the milestones. If you are unsure about whether an incident constitutes a crisis, ask the following questions:
Experience and expertise are vital to recognizing the signs of a crisis and interpreting those signs correctly.
See an example on my risk assessment - click here
Step 4 - Business Impact Analysis
The next step is performing aBusiness Impact Analysis (BIA) in which you refine the predictions of likely impacts on your business from the risk assessment in step 4.
BIA is a systematic process to determine and evaluate the potential effects of an interruption to critical business. One of the basic assumptions behind BIA is that every component of the organization is reliant upon the continued functioning of every other component, but that some are more crucial than others and require a greater allocation of funds in the wake of a disaster. BIA is generally a multi-phase process that includes the following steps:
A BIA is likely to identify costs linked to failures, such as loss of cash flow, replacement of equipment, salaries paid to catch up with a backlog of work, loss of profits, staff and data, and so on.
Here is a link to more deep explanation and template for a BIA – click here
Step 5 - Response and Contingency Planning
This step deals with the practical aspects of an actual crisis. Determine how your company should respond to the crises you’ve identified as both probable and potentially having the greatest negative impact. Rarely does a crisis unfold exactly the way you planned, so your base plan should be adaptable to a wide variety of circ*mstances.
A good way is to think of your response actions as elements that you can add when necessary. These actions could include the following: shutting down, calling emergency services, issuing a holding statement, reviewing relevant or regulatory legal issues, evacuating a facility, getting an emergency line of credit, offering counseling, notifying senior executives, turning off utilities or recalling products.
Assign specific, realistic roles to teams or individuals. Also, create a detailed timeline during which various sequential actions must occur in order to respond properly to a particular disaster.
For each scenario, think about the cause of the crisis and ways to prevent it. You should also consider the tools and resources you would need for the crisis response, as well as how long the crisis would probably last, how the crisis would affect customers, and how you would respond to that impact.
Communication planning is a vital part of the response and contingency step. Identify the best spokesperson for various. If your organization has a dedicated communication representative, they would also make a logical choice. Draft key messaging and talking points for both internal and external stakeholders, and plan how and when you will communicate during the crisis.
A way to write the plan could be - click here
Step 6 - Training and Coordination
Once you have developed your crisis management plan, focus to ensure that team members and other key staff know how to perform their roles. In addition, be sure to alert suppliers and contractors, so they can support your emergency response.
Provide all crisis management team members with the plan. Also, make sure to store the plan electronically, so your employees can access it from their mobile devices.
Immediately after you introduce the plan, train everyone so that they are comfortable with their duties and with working together. Then, perform drills and tests on a regular basis (e.g., once a quarter).
Provide your employees with information that is relevant to their respective positions. For example, disseminate the protocol for working remotely and for resuming in-office work. In addition, communicate to your workforce its responsibilities under the business continuity plans. Make sure that you keep the plan up to date and fresh in the minds of your staff members.
7 - Review and Update
In order to keep your crisis management plan current, schedule a regular review of its contents yearly.And when updating your plan, make sure to incorporate any relevant, recent changes to your business example - changes in processes, suppliers, facilities, and staff.
When you finish your crisis management plan, then, assess your plan based on this checklist of questions:
