Fact – every business, indeed every type of human interaction, can fall victim to a crisis and requires a good plan to get out of it again.
This goes for everything from child and pet care to interpersonal relations to industries as diverse as traditional B2B and B2C, commercial archaeology, AI innovation specialists and literally everyone else. That this influence is so diverse should not surprise you – if anything, now is the perfect time to realise just how much a crisis (such as a global pandemic) can influence not only how we do business but how we interact, both of which are important parts of how well we manage all that… and while crises can vary in immensity, they do not necessarily vary in intensity.
In other words – your business doesn’t need a global pandemic to reach a crisis. And since what starts a crisis varies greatly from situation to situation, it should be a valid concern for all of us – are our ideas of how to manage a crisis when and if it happens up to date, realistic and above all applicable to the changes in our social and actual environment?
Crisis management is something that should be a part of every workplace, no matter what your area of expertise. And veritably, it should not just be the management tier – who usually gets to deal with it – that has a strategy to deal with a crisis, should this crisis arise. Think of it this way – we all know how to behave when in a car crash, or when encountering a health and safety emergency at home (such as a bad injury, or an allergy, of our own or a loved one, or a child or pet in our care). But in reality, we also know that we may not, in case something does happen, react as well as we imagine we might, or we are taught we should. When we face any kind of stress or adversity, we may go through many psychological and behavioural reactions, including the “not dealing” reactions – most commonly flight or freeze -, and even if that lasts a relatively short time, we are still losing valuable seconds that may make a big difference to the outcome of the situation. Even people used to stress may experience these stress responses – now imagine having to undergo sudden stress out of the blue when you are not used to it at all and the worst you ever deal with is spilling a bit of coffee down your shirt before going to work.
As Sam Tsima points out in his Forbes article, not having a good plan – which is the start of thinking about how one might deal with a crisis – means that businesses are led as if a crisis may never occur.
He also points out, briefly, that planning for a disaster doesn’t mean you are inviting it to happen. And yet, for all that it’s but a brief mention, this is a sentence I want you to reflect on. Socially – and often to the point of beliefs, so religiously or superstitiously – we treat planning as either jinxing/foretelling or, alternatively, as being a downer (which, incidentally, is, I suggest, a response derived directly off the previous two, which have featured hugely in our history in many forms). These days, at least in the West, we mostly do not actually believe someone may bring disaster on our heads through pessimistic thinking or witchcraft… but we do behave as if the thinking could indeed cause a bad change to happen, or treat the person who is thinking hypothetically (and perhaps ahead, which are two different things, even though they may become connected through events that follow) as someone who is going against the collective – in this case company – narrative of things going right. We behave as if focusing on that narrative is enough to balance the world out, and as if the person who is considering countermeasures in case disaster does strike to be the one who is unbalancing things.
That is why people who think ahead often get something of a bad rep, including at the office… and why so many businesses end up without a good strategy for disasters that may come.
This is why it is so important to stretch crisis management to all tiers. If something bad does indeed come to pass, then it makes most sense to :
- have a good idea of how you are going to solve the problem, and how this problem will influence each tier and employee, and what they can do to cohesively, as a part of the group, solve this problem
- have a number of trusted experts/consultants standing by that you know you can reach quickly if you need an expert opinion on a topic
- know that crises do happen, and that they can range from social (such as rumours that threaten your reputation) to natural (such as extreme weather), medical (such as an epidemic or pandemic), human caused (eg violence at workplace, an active shooter or a terrorist attack that includes your area) and behavioural (such as failing to deal with a new situation, eg new working conditions such as we have been facing during Covid-19), before you even hit the usual ones that each business has in consideration (and there are many).
- how people respond in crisis (whether it is ongoing or sudden) and what behavioural changes and challenges one might expect; from the anthropological perspective, one’s background can be included as well (because our different psychological, social, religious and cultural backgrounds do, in fact, somewhat influence how we respond, because different societies deal with emotions and their expressions differently, and because our unique experience may influence how we personally may deal with crises).
Crisis management at work is something that we are aware of, and that has a place in business fact and theory, and it is often theories that have been made many years ago that dictate to us, if we do in fact even have a crisis management policy, what is a crisis and how it should be addressed. This unfortunately means that these ideas may be outdated, socially as well as otherwise. Theoretically, you could argue that it is a) better to have no crisis management policy than a bad, outdated one that will serve you little, or b) that any policy is better than nothing.
However – two things need to be considered when thinking about the way we behave about crisis management.
First is the “ignore and it will go away” – the extension of thinking that positive outlook is all you need, and ultimately often the idea that it is better not to have a policy and wing it than have a bad or outdated one. For many businesses, even natural disasters, but also human ones (such as sexual assault or harassment at work, racism, religious intolerance or intolerance due to religion, violent employees/management tier…) are mere “ifs”, even if they have a good reason to consider them seriously. We still build in tornado paths; we still make half-hearted attempts at creating policies to deal with interpersonal issues that are either sorely lacking substance or are poorly executed when needed.
The second is the fact that we live in a constantly changing world.
A few decades back, social media did not feature. Therefore, the possibility of a smear campaign, conspiracy theory or a disgruntled employee using it as a platform to spread the rumours as wide as possible did not feature either. Half a century back, cyber attack wasn’t more than merely science fiction.
These have since become facts, and they aren’t alone – a pandemic the size of Covid-19, for instance, can theoretically occur at any point, and no matter how prepared we may be, we are likely never prepared enough, because the circumstances may vary greatly from one to the other.
As you can see from these examples, neither of these perspectives is valid or helpful. Having no policy is no better than having any policy; and either is highly unlikely to lead to successful crisis management (and that of consequences of it) should it occur. Neither is having no policy better than any policy as far as behaviour of people under stress is concerned, as the first means every-person-for-themselves thinking, which in turn means more panic, more confusion and more people working cross-purpose, and the other one means bickering over applicability of a strategy or following it even if it should be perfectly clear that it cannot possibly apply in the present situation.
It is therefore my firm belief that crisis management protocols are not only a must, but a must that should be updated regularly.
Where I have seen businesses lacking in this, the consequences were generally not good; the social change, for instance, has left many hastily redefining their perceptions and policies, often with little real understanding of what this means in broader sense, not to mention in their own little world. This not only leaves the companies in question (and anyone else who blunders this way) unfortunately open to criticism (leading to more crises to manage), but also leaves the employees and the management high and dry where understanding where they stand, where they should stand and how this changes everyone’s behaviour towards each other on daily basis or if a crisis pops up, comes in. Tokenism, for instance, can be one of the consequences of such miscomprehension of crisis management protocols updating; another, visible wherever the pandemic has created havoc within businesses (especially those operating regularly on international level and moving physical goods), is general irritability and confusion, together with maladaptive changes (i.e. doing things that don’t work over and over again, regardless of the obvious lack of efficacy). Both can ultimately lead to losses – both financially and in terms of how the company is perceived by others, be it by society in general or their clients specifically.
A lack of policy creates an environment where crises, when they come (and they will!), create a bad disruption. All of this, however, can be avoided simply by considering crises to be a real threat that can affect anyone, at any point; an unpredictable threat with unpredictable consequences, and one that changes considerably as time passes. What was true in the late 80s may no longer apply; and that is why I warmly recommend that businesses take an updating policy seriously, and that they consider social science their best friend when trying to understand not only the scenarios that can occur but also how our human behaviour affects us all and to what extent it can influence any given scenario.