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Eight Steps for Designing a Coronavirus Crisis Management Plan

James Green spoke with Jaclyn Jaeger at Compliance Week as she wrote about stops to alleviate reputational and financial business disruptions caused by the coronavirus.

With the coronavirus pandemic front and center on everyone’s mind these days, companies are having to walk a fine line between taking care to communicate necessary and important information while also preventing widespread panic. How to go about doing that effectively begins and ends with a robust crisis management plan.

To assemble a crisis management response team:

From a safety and brand standpoint, your crisis management team needs to have the authority to fully respond and to quickly respond, regardless of the incident. Many times, companies make the mistake of having one group of people with day-to-day responsibility and authority while assigning a different group of people as the crisis management team. You want the crisis management team to mirror the power structure and culture of the company.

In terms of internal and external communications plans:

Both internally and externally, communication should be early and often, and people need to know when the next communication is coming. That gives people a sense of calm. That shows that you’re managing an incident and not just responding to it.

Media training?

This is an area that companies trip on. If you’re going to put C-level [executives] in the public eye, they need to have professional training. Doing earnings calls is a different skill set than facing a camera, he says.

Read the full article on Compliance Week; the magazine has removed its paywall during the pandemic.

 


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