Communicating out of Trouble

All organisations, of all sizes, will at some point find themselves in uncomfortable situations. And very often the trouble is completely unforeseen and caused by external factors. So, how to handle it...

A sea of troubles

Trouble can come from anywhere. Some recent corporate scandals include:

• United Airlines suffered a major reputation scandal and share price drop when a bleeding passenger was dragged off an overbooked flight
• Fox News upset shareholders and advertisers when their primetime anchor, Bill O'Reilly was sued by a former colleague for sexual harassment, a fact of which they were well aware
• Facebook drew international condemnation and the loss of millions of users after revelations that data they had shared with Cambridge Analytica, involving the accounts of 87 million users, was used to target voter in the 2016 US election in favour of the Trump campaign
• Equifax, the US credit reporting agency was hacked through a security vulnerability they were aware of, and the identities of up to 145.5 million US consumers were compromised

Not only were the reputations of these and many other organisations seriously harmed and enormous value lost, but there were also often hefty personal consequences for the directors. This almost always was the result of covering up, not releasing the full details timeously if at all, or deliberately profiting from insider trading knowing the stock price would plummet when the details were released.

Communication strategies

So when faced with a crisis, how should an organisation react? Obviously, the reaction should not be a seat-of-the-pants one. There is never an excuse for an organisation not to have a plan of how to react and respond before the situation gets out of hand. The team to handle such a situation should be put together in advance with the right communication and management skills.

So here are some basic steps to be taken when there is an adverse situation:

1. Quick, but calm action. Find out what has gone wrong and meet the situation head-on with a unified message, and prevent unauthorised employees acting as spokesmen. The message should not be a speculative explanation, but a calming, frank and re-assuring one indicating the precise steps being taken.
2. Depending on the situation, the appropriate stakeholders should be informed as-soon-as-possible. If there is any likelihood of a public interest in the matter, the message must be delivered to them on the platforms most likely to be reached. This allows the organisation to manage the message and not let rumour dictate.
3. Key people from across the organisation with a stake in the situation must be gathered into a war room. This should be lead by a strong and fair person preferably not directly involved in the problem. They must make decisions on how to proceed and what other resources they will need.
4. The urge to act immediately and find the cause or culprit should be avoided at all costs and communication should reflect that investigation or processes are on-going and demonstrate the organisation is acting in good faith.
5. Only once all the facts have been gathered should a plan be built. No matter how bad the facts are, not acknowledging them or covering them up will have far greater consequences than being candid. Once stakeholders and the public lose trust, it is very difficult and expensive to win them back.

So the key here is not panic and communicate, communicate, communicate. Lack of communication or vague communication just to placate the public is usually much worse than direct head-on, frank communication. Lack of communication breaks down trust, invites ridicule, induces fear among stakeholders and breaks down the organisation morale.

Also posted on Weku, @tim-beck, 2018-10-22, for obvious reasons