
By Tara Gibson - May 5, 2020
As everybody adjusts to the “new normal” of stay-at-home orders, remote work, and social distancing, businesses and organizations have been running through their business continuity and crisis plans after being hit economically and operationally by the COVID-19 pandemic. Two weeks ago, we hosted an informational webinar with Clint Emerson, a retired Navy SEAL, New York Times Best Selling Author, emergency preparedness professional, and owner of Escaping the Wolf. Emerson covered how to prepare employees for an event and manage the aftereffects, the three simple steps to crisis management, and the five pillars to successful program development.
When creating a crisis management policy or directive, it should be both written and kept simple to ensure everybody who reads it can understand it. The policy then becomes the anchor that is attached to emergency communication plans, training plans, training drills, education, and more. Businesses should always be testing this policy so that it can continually be updated and improved upon.
Having a comprehensive crisis management plan in place is crucial. Emerson explains that if you have no plan in place, you are leading yourself to failure. When creating a crisis management plan, you must allow for flexibility and plan for the events you hope will never impact your business, such as a global pandemic. An organization should also include all important stakeholders and decision makers from each department to provide their individual inputs and work together on creating a plan.
The communication aspect of a crisis management plan is extremely important. Having technology, such as a mass notification platform, on your side to push notifications and messaging out to an entire company, or segmented lists of specific departments, will allow you to communicate effectively to everybody involved.
Being satisfied with a crisis management plan or policy is not good. Over time business leaders may become complacent as they believe their plan needs no changes and are not making efforts to update and adjust the plan. Businesses should always be looking for ways to improve upon their crisis management plan, whether it’s finding better ways to streamline it, adding additional communication features, or practicing the plan repeatedly to find holes that should be addressed.
The big five pillars to any program are the following, explained Emerson:
When you build a crisis management program it’s important to include the below 3 simple steps:
If you missed this webinar and would like to watch it, you can download the recording below!
Tara is a Marketing Coordinator on the Rave Mobile Safety marketing team. She loves writing about all things K-12, State & Local, Higher Ed, Corporate, and Healthcare, and manages the Rave social media channels. When she's not working, she's taking care of her smiley, shoe eating, Instagram-famous fur baby, Enzo!
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