Crisis Management 

is an organization’s process- and strategy-based approach

for identifying and responding to a threat, an unanticipated event, or any
negative disruption with the potential to harm people, property, or business
processes. Being prepared for any event to become a crisis requires a crisis
management plan.

Crises can occur at any moment with or without warning, and can take many
forms: natural disasters, active shooter scenarios, terrorist events, mass
violence occurrences, and even global pandemics. Beyond any immediate
threat to people, property, and processes, crises and critical emergency events
often yield unpredictable and cascading effects on employee morale, brand
reputation, customer satisfaction, and even the supply chain.

Proper planning for critical events includes establishing a crisis management

team and developing a crisis management (CM) plan to keep people from harm,
maintain business continuity, enable recovery from disaster, and protect assets
before, during, and after a critical event occurs. Further, it is imperative that
every organization validates and tests its CM plan and deploys the right
emergency communications technology to support crisis response across the
organization.

WATCH CRISIS MANAGEMENT DEMO

How to Assemble a Crisis Management Team
It’s critical for all CM stakeholders to have a holistic, common operating
picture and reliable emergency communications to ensure the crisis response
plan is executed as designed. CM teams often comprise operations, finance,
and human resources personnel, as well as legal representatives. A crisis
manager is a pivotal member of the crisis team. The crisis manager directs the
organization’s execution of the CM plan and the organization’s public response
to the event.

Organizations should recruit CM team members who specialize in a

component of the CM plan. An IT team member is well suited to manage any
technology components, and a human resources representative is appropriate
for handling any employee support following the event. A legal representative
and senior leadership member can advise on big-picture perspectives to ensure
decisions are not jeopardizing the organization.
How to Build, Evaluate and Test a Crisis Management Plan
A crisis management plan prepares an organization for the unpredictable,
defines roles and responses, and minimizes the damage to the organization, its
employees, and its customers.

Distributed enterprises and teams can complicate how a crisis team builds,
evaluates, and tests a CM plan. The dispersed nature sets up challenges and
introduces many distractions to a team responding to an incident or business
disruption.

Building a Crisis Management Plan

A timely and precise response to each critical event is essential to minimize the
impact of the crisis. A CM plan must prevent delays, missed tasks and
assignments, or laggy crisis response times. Even if crises aren’t all digital,
“digital-first” is the best way to approach developing a crisis management plan.
For example, if the organization has only one physical campus, an on-premises
solution could prove a pitfall if the operations center were to become
inaccessible.

When building a CM plan, an organization must facilitate communications and

coordination that are clear and quick, relying on CM technology that ensures
the safety of people, the protection of assets, and the effective recovery of
business as usual.

Successful CM plans address five essential topics: people, facilities/critical

infrastructure, technology, business, and brand reputation.

People: People are every organization’s most important asset, and enterprises

have a duty of care to their employees. Ensure that in every critical event, the
crisis team can answer whether lives are in danger, if there is a physical safety
issue, and whether there will be an impact on employees, customers, visitors,
and vendors. How will they be notified with emergency notifications?

Facilities/Critical Infrastructure: Facilities and critical infrastructure must be

checked to ascertain whether they have been impacted by the event or are at
risk of harm in the event of a crisis that plays out over time.