Every minute can work in your organisation’s favour or against it.
Accidents, incidents, and made-up scandals, all can affect your personal or organization’s reputation, especially when you are a public or visible entity. The crisis may vary from natural causes to organisational, financial or human resources management.
A bribery or money laundry accusation, an offensive statement, either misogynistic or even misandrist, or labour accidents with injured or dead people, all are subjects of crisis management. Large organisations acting in sensitive domains, such as oil and gas, construction, defence etc, have specialised departments that perform risk analysis and prepare scenarios to tackle the crises when they occur.
In crisis management, time matters the most, but it is equally important HOW your brand reacts to the crisis, so here are a few crisis management approaches:
- Silence
- Defend yourself
- Acknowledge and take the guilt
- Condemn
Crisis management is a counterclockwise mission.
Regardless of the crisis scenario, the manner of communication is extremely important, the channel, as well as the moment you are conveying your message, the verbal, nonverbal, paraverbal aspects that can improve the situation or degenerate.
Silence
Some organisations choose to remain silent when a crisis occurs. Most of the time this scenario helps, because some people may not have even heard of the crisis. But in the 4.0 era, social media can amplify the crisis, forcing the organisation to take a position.
Defend yourself
The first instinct during a crisis is to defend yourself, to neglect and dismiss the evidence, but this might make the situation even worse, especially if it is obvious that you have made a mistake that offended or affected many people.
Acknowledge and take the guilt
Probably the most difficult is to take the guilt for the crisis situation your organization is facing. It is not easy to acknowledge that you were wrong, miss intended, fooled, greedy, neglectful and so on, but that might be the only reasonable solution.
Condemn
It might happen that a company’s employee provokes a crisis, in this case, the organisation can take distance from the person who generated the crisis and still defend the organisation’s reputation, otherwise, the whole organisation can suffer.
Rules in crisis management
React fast
the sooner, the better!
Stay firm
humble or strong
Be empathetic
show people you are a human
Rules in crisis management
Express support
for the victims, if any
Prove you learned
something from it
End in a positive manner
it won't happen again
Crisis Management Services
SUSTENOBIL PR/ODUCTION is a full-service communication agency focused on sustainability and technology, that provides Public Relations and crisis management services in 9 countries from Central and Northern Europe.
Central Europe
Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia.
Northern Europe
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland.