Secret Sauce in navigating 2020? Effective Crisis Communications
In these uncertain times, we are often faced with a decision on what we need to communicate, when, and how. Prior to the COVID crisis, many of us had little experience with crisis communications.
Then 2020 hit and there was no choice — we had to learn by doing, knowing that a solid communication strategy is critical to maintaining team cohesion and trust.
The guiding philosophy of the companies that have navigated crises well has been proven to be honest and timely communication. Plain and simple. This philosophy has proven to be key in maintaining solidarity and trust with our teams and with out community.
Here are the key points in how to navigate a crisis:
Prepare your Crisis Comms Plan 🚀
Start with an overall assessment of possible scenarios that could happen. From there, build an outline of a communication plan with key pieces of information — like who is on your Crisis Comms Response Team, who owns and approves the response, and what your key messages are for each scenario.
After your “big picture planning,” focus on the most probable scenarios and build out key talking points for each one of them. For example, in tech startups before 2020, the most probable crisis comms scenarios were most likely executive departures. 2020 proved that we need to be ready for much more than that. We now have learned to be ready to communicate about civil unrest, COVID lockdowns, fires, recession uncertainties, and layoffs — just to name a few.
The point is that people will want to know what’s going on, and they will need the leadership team to step up in helping to navigate through the chaos.
Build and train your Crisis Response Team 💪
It’s great to have everything written down, but when a crisis hits, your team will have to act, so the more preparation the better. Just like with anything, practice makes perfect, so it’s important that you do crisis comms “fire drills.” The goal is to ensure that the crisis response team is united, proactive, and empowered to take action in case of a crisis.
It’s best to do a “drill” with a most likely scenario within your crisis inventory, having your team, your executive spokespeople, and your responses ready to go at a moment’s notice.
👉Pro tip: the fire drill exercise can also be the perfect opportunity to build more trust and solidarity within the crisis response team.
Respond Quickly👩🚒
Don’t waste time to perfect the comms for nicer wording. I’m not ecstatic to admit that I made an embarrassing spelling error in an email 😬 — however, the comms went out in time and in the end, timeliness triumphed perfection.
Responding quickly establishes you as the trusted authority and shuts down any rumors or misinformation.
The key takeaway is to prioritize timeliness over perfection. Every. Damn. Time.
Don’t bullshit 🤠
Tell them what you know and what you don’t know. Don’t bullshit, don’t play politics, don’t spin — it never works out. If you don’t have the facts, better to say that you don’t have the facts and you will get it to them as soon as possible.
When the COVID crisis hit, nobody information about what was going to happen next, if we were going to shut down offices, if our jobs were safe. It was the moment of uncertainty, of anxiety, of so many unknowns.
The key here was to engage and communicate with the team right away — even if there weren’t any real answers. The most effective message was simple — “we don’t know what the future will bring, but we’re here, we’re gathering information, and we’ll communicate as much as we can.”
Stewart Butterfield of Slack nailed this principle on the head with this series of tweets. His message was timely, transparent, and honest: “things are moving fast, we don’t have all the answers, but we’re all in this together.”
Follow-through 🏋️♀️
Trust is built by action. If anything that the uncertainty (and insanity)of 2020 taught us, communicating and following through in a timely manner is the only way to build and maintain trust. With so many outside life factors not in our control, the very least we can do is control what we can, to be consistent, to follow through.
If you say you will send out an email end of the day, then send that email end of that day. Communicate the next steps by the end of the week? Be sure you do that. Don’t let your team down. Trust is everything.
Collect Feedback 👩💻
Part of building trust is allowing people the room to give feedback, to voice their concerns. After all, how can I fix something if I don’t know what’s broken? It’s best to have a 2-way comms system set up — say a Slack Channel — where people feel empowered and safe to share and to give feedback on our own blindspots.
If you claim to be an open and transparent company, the worst thing you can do is to continue to communicate top-down, without giving your employees a chance to engage to ask their questions or engage in a 2-way conversation. You need to give your employees a safe outlet to give you feedback, so you can continue to improve.
And remember, you got this 👊
In these turbulent times, we have a chance to build our values and our culture through effective crisis response, allowing us to continue to strengthen our trust-based relationship with our teams and our community.
2020 has been tough on everyone and the only way to get through it is to be inclusive, caring, and transparent, as a leader, as a team member, as a human. We’re all in this together.
