Cynosura

Late stages of a crisis & recovery

Having gone through the early stages of a crisis there is then the possibility of a prolonged period where the crisis continues.  This can last for days, weeks or for a major crisis even months or years afterwards.

There are plenty of cases of companies that, having survived the early stages of a crisis then failed to follow through and suffered some reputational damage as a result.  This paper aims to lay out a programme for the later stages of a crisis and recovery.

Evaluation

Throughout the crisis it is important that you evaluate what is happening:

• The effect of your statements on audiences
• The effect of the crisis on your stakeholders
• The way in which the media is reporting your statements
• The effect on your business
• The state of the crisis, amount of information flowing into the crisis management team and the progress in recovering from the crisis – crucially, is there more to come?⁽¹⁾

Most important is to evaluate the reaction to your holding statement and first major statement.  Once a press conference is over, analyse very closely the questions being asked.  These will help you to decide what angle the media are intending to play and may also show up some shortcomings in your own statement.

If you don’t have the capacity to do so yourself, make sure you bring in an agency to monitor media reaction closely.  Also monitor what is happening on the web.  If this is a major crisis then the use of sentiment analysis may well prove important.

If you have an intranet then make sure that you are watching the reaction of your employees to the crisis.  If there is the possibility of reputational damage then you need to know how they are reacting.  If there has been loss of life then you may need to consider bringing in counsellors.  If it is a labour dispute then will any of them speak to the media independently of you and if so what might they be saying. 

Monitor all telephone calls coming in to the company and keep a detailed record of all comments about the crisis.  If the crisis is a major event, then you should have a special helpline in place where people can call and ask for information as well as leave comments.  This should also be reflected on your website or ‘dark site’.

Keep information flowing

Once you have made your first statement, don’t assume that is it; the media will want further regular updates and you should be prepared to hold more media interviews or press conferences as further information is revealed.  Don’t forget to inform other stakeholders at the same time, especially employees and investors.

Be consistent with your messages.  Do not be tempted to give a different message to investors; the media have access to all communications sources and will pick up discrepancies or hypocrisy very quickly.

As the crisis starts to abate you should issue statements about what remedial action you intend to put in place.  Will you be making reparations or honouring injury claims?  Very often it is better to be generous at this point and gain credit than to argue over damages and suffer subsequent reputational loss and depressed sales for months, even years, afterwards.

If you haven’t already done so, then think about getting a presence on You Tube.  This might be a statement from the CEO or Chairman; it might be an explanation of what happened and what you are doing about it; or it could be new safeguards you are putting in place.

It might be at this point that you start to think about doing some advertising.  This might be to explain what happened and what you are doing to correct the problem.  It might be to reassure or where the fault was not yours, to advertise that business is now back to normal.

Assessment

During the course of the crisis all the actions of the crisis management team should have been very carefully monitored.

• How did individual members of the team react?  Did they panic or were they calm?  Was their reasoning good or did they become emotional?  How well did your spokesperson do?  Although this may seem harsh, you could face another crisis at any moment and you need to be sure that you have the best people doing the required work
• Capture all of your activity during the course of the crisis.  From the very first piece of information until your team decides that the crisis is over a careful log of all activities should be recorded with timings.  Make sure that detailed notes are kept of your crisis management team meetings and the reasoning behind the decisions taken
• Ideally you will have recorded all media interviews, these should be reviewed against the subsequent media coverage
• Also keep a record of all media coverage so that you can analyse how the crisis management went as it proceeded through the various stages
• Carry out an assessment on the consequence the crisis has had upon your business.  Has there been any impact on sales, have any investors pulled out, what was the effect on your shares, is it starting to recover ?

Create a detailed report of the crisis and all of your findings

Learning

What lessons have you learnt from the crisis and what do you need to do to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

• What did you do well?
• What could you have done better?
• Did all of your systems work as expected?
• How can you prevent it from happening again?

Once the crisis is deemed to be over, make sure that you hold a detailed debriefing to discuss all of these lessons and to take decisions about what changes you need to put in place.

Hold a crisis scenario training weekend and put your people through their paces soon after the crisis to see how well they perform with the recent knowledge of the crisis.

After the event

An often forgotten phase of crisis management relates to events that might take place after the crisis.  Here are a few to consider:

• One month, six months and one year after the crisis – will people attend memorials, might the media do a ‘one year after’ story etc
• Inquests might bring the whole crisis back into the public attention
• Legal battles, especially if the company has decided to fight damages claims can lead to a long drawn out coverage of the crisis
• Reports of an official nature will, at some point, be published and can lead to the whole crisis being replayed in the public domain.

The four examples identified here are likely to be for major crises, but it is possible that even small crises might be covered at a local level.  It is worth discussing if such ‘events’ are likely to take place and if so then you should plan to be part of them and make sure that your company reputation is protected.

There is a big difference between knowing the theory and making it happen. For help in implementing your communications practices email us now.

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⁽¹⁾ The nature of the crisis may help you to determine the line you take with the media Very often a crisis can lead to more crises i.e. the media having been alerted to some shortcoming in your company will then dig into other areas and may find perceived evidence of further problems; you should be prepared to address these quickly and vigorously