The ability of an organization to sustain its resilience effort requires the organization to understand and develop essential crisis management frameworks and processes.
Typically, frameworks will encompass the phases of preparedness, response and recovery.
At the preparedness phase, the identification and prioritization of risks that threaten the existence and continuity of an organization’s delivery of critical business functions is essential for the follow up design of incident response and contingency plans.
As a common approach, organizations may develop plans intended to respond to various identified risk scenarios (i.e.: human-caused, natural or environmental threats).
Once these plans have been developed, they need to be communicated for validation.
This activity can often be a laborious and repetitive process as it will depend on the complexity of the plan(s), size of the organization, business footprint coverage (state, regional or global), and also the need to comply with relevant regulatory measures that may influence the depth or scope of communications required.
Hence, the preparedness phase must be well thought through, even before an organization can be assessed for its readiness to respond to identified organizational threats.
While crisis management planning can help to mitigate an organization’s risk exposure during a potentially disruptive event, the events leading up to the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic as well as recent developments and measures recommended by global health authorities and various governments, have posed a considerable challenge to sustaining an organization’s resilience.
Welcoming Your Employees Back Safely
Your communication strategy and processes will play a critical role in keeping your employees safe while diminishing the impact of additional disruption. The Return to Work Resource Kit, which includes the Transition to Normality brochure, provides your organization with a set of tools and best practices in crisis management and communication planning to support your journey back to the office as part of this next stage in the crisis.
Also available is the Best Practices in Crisis Management: Communications Planning white paper which outlines crisis management plan development and considerations for enhancing overall crisis communications, and the Returning to Work: Critical Communications Strategies to Consider white paper with guidance on coordinating an effective response when it’s needed.
Download these and other valuable resources to help your organization respond to the changing dynamics of any situation and avoid further business disruption and risk to people, assets, facilities and your supply chain.
