How good it is when everything works fine, right? But, BEWARE! As a business professional, you should be prevented and define a crisis plan for what may happen, since you never know when you can face an emergency situation for your company reputation.
Having a business crisis plan is the key to anticipate to possible complicated scenarios and be able to manage them effectively
From Lexington we propose you to follow these steps to elaborate a good business crisis plan. Here we go!
Planning, always planning
Planning is the basis for any business to work properly and without unpleasant and unexpected facts. Having a business crisis plan will help you to speed up the hard process, to act more effectively and to begin to regain the reputation of your brand as soon as possible.
Name a responsible person
Every project, task or work needs a visible head. Choose a responsible person with an entrepreneurial attitude, easy decision-making, proactive and with great communicative skills.
The person in charge is not going to be alone, so you shall select the people who will be part of his / her crisis team and who will support him / her throughout the management process.
In a situation of business crisis, do not look for guilty, but solutions
Analysis and objectives
Before launching the crisis plan in your company, you shall carefully analyse what has happened and the scope it has had among your target audience. You should think that you should not look for guilty, but solutions.
Moreover, you should also establish and sets out the objectives of what you want to achieve with the business crisis plan, the priorities and the principles of action, such as minimizing the potential damages that can be caused to the business.
What is your potential audience?
Define the profile of the audience to whom you try to influence in a crisis situation; this is essential to know the tools, tone and messages that you should use to get a talk with them and thus reach a mutual understanding.
Choose the best strategy
- Reactive strategy: it is about communicating only to a requirement from part of the public.
- Proactive strategy: inform before the demand arises, so that the company manages to control the information flow of the situation.
- Accessible strategy: it is based on implementing an information transparency strategy from the company itself, being open to dialogue.
- Consistency strategy: the company will communicate what happened through official unilateral declarations.
The attitude, first of all!
We already know that having a well-defined strategic plan is necessary, but also it shall be accompanied by a great deal of patience and a lot of honesty, since the way the company acts will also determine the success of the crisis plan.
From your company, you must adopt an attitude of transparency, admitting mistakes and apologizing in an open and sincere way. In addition, it would be advisable to explain what will be done to solve the conflict; that will help to soften the situation.
On balance, in business, anticipating the next steps is crucial: once you are launching the business crisis plan, you should already be thinking on the post-crisis evaluation and on how the reputation recovery plan will be done for your brand.
“Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”
Peter Druker