Why Every Company Needs a Crisis Communications Plan

You’ve probably heard the old adage, “plan for the worst, hope for the best.” There are no truer words when it comes to crisis communications.

Having a clear plan in place spells out – step-by-step – how your organization will respond to a crisis. It’s vital to the continuity and recovery of your business. 

Planning for, and responding to, a crisis should involve key stakeholders across departments, include a list of potential audiences with whom you’ll need to communicate with and through which channels, who will be doing the communicating, potential key messages, and internal procedures and expectations. 

Not having a plan in place could spell disaster for a company – regardless of size. Consider the following: 

Employee retention and recruitment: Your team members want to know their lives, their safety matters to you. Should something happen and employees’ concerns not be addressed, you could face a drop in morale, employee desertion, and difficulty in filling those positions. This could lead to a disruption in operations, filling orders on time, and ultimately impact how your customers see your company.        

Financial loss: The crisis event itself could have an adverse effect on your financials, but the fallout from disrupted operations could also have a huge impact on your bottom line that could take a long time to overcome. However, handling the crisis well, mitigating issues, and being transparent as you communicate, could make a huge difference in recovering.  

Reputation loss: Lawsuits, loss of market share, even layoffs could impact your reputation – whether with customers, suppliers, other key stakeholders, or a combination. The perception of how you handled the crisis – regardless whether its accurate – makes a huge impact. Following your plan can help you make it through the fray. You won’t be at a loss for what to do. You’ll know what steps to take, how to communicate to your audiences, and be better able to recover. 

No company is immune to a crisis. Anticipating potential issues, creating a plan, responding quickly and honestly to a crisis, addressing the issues head on, and learning from what happened to try to prevent it from repeating itself can build trust and respect with your stakeholders.