The Drill™

News

Crisis Management In The Media

CRiSIS Planning And Media COMMUNICATION EXPERTS

The Drill’s crisis management consultants make news headlines: Part of our crisis planning ethos is to try to help businesses shape the developing narrative via judicious media and stakeholder engagement, to take crisis-hit companies from unsafe ground to safer terrain.

Also, when crises break, media journalists/producers often ask Drill experts - all crisis management specialists - to offer insights and observations to boost understanding of the crisis communication issues at play. Our experts have vital international and hands-on crisis management consultancy expertise, which is transferred into our crisis management planning tools and crisis software.

Drawing on years of frontline crisis management consultancy, Drill staff enact crisis fixes and crisis solutions to help businesses overcome their PR and operational problems. Your crisis response plans can be improved just by reading some of the articles below, featuring our proprietary approaches and methodologies for crisis management puzzles. The articles do not constitute specific advice or counsel, but we believe their principles to be, without guarantee, thought-provoking! So when you’re ready for better crisis management planning or preparation, call us.

We hope you enjoy the read.

Challenging Times For Crisis Management Planning

As crisis consultants, our company recently ran a snapshot survey of peak body PR practitioners probing the extent of crisis communications planning within their businesses.

While we were keen to find out how crisis consideration and capability has developed - certainly over recent ‘Covid’ years - we wanted insights on how employees were being briefed, coached and developed in terms of their crisis awareness and crisis management responsibilities.

Our survey revealed some interesting findings. In particular:

Revelations around the funding of crisis management

The deployment of digital tools in crisis management simulations

The frequency of crisis simulations offered to internal staff

This survey - completed mainly by senior Comms/Public Relations practitioners from Australia - was run subsequent to an online crisis simulation masterclass for around 30 cross-industry, mixed-competency delegates. 

Here are some of the key findings we uncovered:

40% couldn't remember their last crisis management simulation

While over 90% of those surveyed confirmed that crisis management is 'owned' either by the disciplines of Communications and/or the 'C-suite' (executive-level managers within an organisation), 40% of respondents couldn't remember their last/most recent crisis planning exercise! A minority 25% declared that their most recent crisis simulation took place within the prior six months, with a comparable quartile having crisis-trained sometime during 2020.

This finding puzzled us; it seems strange that despite Communications and the C-Suites ‘owning’ crisis planning, 40% couldn’t recall when they last did any crisis rehearsal or simulation exercises.

If 40% of those who are responsible for this area of critical business practice can’t remember their last crisis management training event, what do we suppose the percentage is for normal staff members who are one or more steps removed from crisis management? How ill-prepared might other staff members be in the event of a crisis situation impacting their business?

Money and resources are not a major problem

Only 7% of those surveyed suggested that money/resources was holding their organisations back from being best prepared to manage crises. This dispelled notions that organisations were holding back from running staff crisis planning sessions due to unavailable budget; not so, it seemed.

However, 45% wanted more practice and crisis training sessions, while over 20% were keen for better plans and processes to be instituted at their place of work (note; the remainder wanted a mix of improvements on money, plans and crisis simulation fronts, equally).

Again, this finding stimulates some interesting questions: If funding for crisis planning is not the problem and almost half of the respondents wanted more planning or training on the crisis topic, where is the disconnect? What are the barriers preventing available resources from being invested in crisis-focussed events and skills updates for the key crisis management teams, and for the wider workforce?

Some digital doubts persist

A 60% majority thought the increased digitisation of plans, processes and preparations would likely help them handle crises - including crisis media management - more effectively, yet a resolute 40% remained unconvinced that digital has a big role to play in educating and preparing staff about drills, roles and responsibilities required for the onset of any crisis.

The subject of digitally enabling or supporting any company’s crisis management capability should be being discussed in every organisation: the advantages are too numerous to be resisted: From using real time crisis recording tools to disseminating messages to multiple outlets and recipients from a single source platform and, of course, using interactive learning modalities and tools - such as The Drill crisis simulator - digital apps, tools and techniques enhance those two key elements that determine crisis response success; namely, time and speed.

While we - as crisis trainers and crisis software developers - must allow for misinterpretation of the question we posed about digital tools, it’s concerning that 40% of PR practitioner respondents could neither see nor endorse the role of digital tools in improving their organisation’s ability to respond to any crisis event or crisis scenarios!

Some conclusions and questions

As the founder and principal consultant at The Drill with direct experience of crisis management front-lining, I drew some interesting conclusions as a result of seeing the survey feedback:

"This survey from the practitioner frontline shows that only 25% had recently undertaken any crisis rehearsals, despite the fact they had experienced a fresh global crisis. That’s a very small minority of professionals who are well-aware of the huge damage that crises can do to brands.

This 25% figure is, also, despite the revelation that almost 70% of respondents wanted better plans and more regular crisis training. We also discovered that digitising crisis preparations is still in its infancy, as only 20% have digitised the way they run crisis simulations. Again, this contradicts that experiential and interactive exercises offer the highest rates of learning and knowledge retention compared to other teaching modalities. 33-50% of those surveyed, still rehearse for crisis events with old methods and modalities such as pens, paper and peer-to-peer chats."

While the current survey was limited to delegates who responded to our post-simulation event questionnaire, The Drill is keen to hear from other practitioners and organisations keen to share their experience of current crisis management and crisis communication practice standards. 

Feel free to contact gerry@thedrill.com.au, if you’d like to explore or share your challenges and journey of skilling and preparing your staff for issues or crisis management incidents.

Gerard McCusker