Planning for the unknown

Small tourism businesses can be disproportionately affected by crises because of their smaller workforce and resources.  The loss of one staff member or one week’s worth of revenue could be crippling to many businesses and so it is extra important that all small businesses be adequately prepared for the unexpected.

The key to minimising the impact of a crisis lies in proactive planning and training staff for the unknown, well before any crisis arises. For every small business, developing a Crisis Management and Communication Plan is an absolute necessity to ensure preparedness for any potential worst-case scenarios.

This course includes the development of such a plan, as part of the strategy lesson.

Crisis management and communication plan

A crisis management and communication plan (also called a crisis management plan) is a broader strategy that encompasses not only the immediate response actions (the crisis management plan) but also the overall approach to managing and communicating during a crisis. This plan outlines not only how the response team will operate but also how information will be disseminated to both internal team members and external stakeholders. It covers the messaging, channels, and strategies for maintaining transparency, managing public relations, and controlling the narrative during and after the crisis.

A crisis communication and management plan is a foundational component of your business strategy. A good plan makes it easy to detect and prevent a crisis before it happens or before it gets out of hand, impacting both revenue and reputation. Crisis management plans must seamlessly integrate into your overall business strategy, ensuring that they align with your organisation’s goals, values, and operational structure to streamline crisis response efforts.  Having an effective plan sets the stage for cultivating a culture of crisis readiness within your organization.

A comprehensive crisis management and communication plan includes several key elements that help an organisation effectively manage and communicate during a crisis. Here are some of the essential elements to include:

• purpose: defines the purpose of the crisis management and communications plan
• escalation framework: a framework used to determine crisis severity, actions, and teams involved
• the incident response team: lists the team responsible for managing and mitigating the negative effects of a crisis
• roles and responsibilities: details responsibilities of teams and individuals during a crisis
• do’s and don’ts: lists best practices and actions to avoid during crisis management
• activation procedures: details steps for the activation of the crisis management process
• crisis communication guidelines: provides guidelines for effective crisis communication
• maintaining plan: explains how to keep the crisis management and communication plan up to date
• templates and resources: provides response templates and resources for crafting crisis communication
• stakeholder communication: outlines strategies for communicating with stakeholders during a crisis
• media handling: covers protocols for interacting with the media during a crisis

The plan also holds a crisis response section which outlines the specific actions, tasks, and procedures that need to be executed by your response team when a crisis occurs. It focuses on the immediate steps required to mitigate the impact of the crisis, ensure the safety of individuals, and stabilize the situation. This plan includes details about who does what, when, and how during the initial moments of a crisis. It’s about activating the necessary resources and personnel promptly to address the immediate challenges posed by the crisis.

Training your staff in crisis management

When a crisis is unfolding, your staff need to be already familiar with their and their team members’ roles and responsibilities within your plan.  If there is a crisis, every employee has a role to fulfill, whether they want to be there or not. Depending on their skills and what they do, their role may simply to be to find a place to get right back to work and minimise interruption to customers and clients.  However, the key to ensuring everything that you cover all your bases during a crisis is to ensure that your staff knows what is expected of them and especially what to and not to do.  You wouldn’t want to find yourself in a situation where a junior member of your team took it upon themselves to address the media or an integral communication to your customers was missed due to lack of training.

It’s not uncommon for the upper management to undertake training and know who is responsible for what, but front-line or junior management have no idea (perhaps because they were never trained, or perhaps because of staff turnover they have not been trained yet). It is vital that every member of your staff no matter how junior be familiar with your crisis management plan and what is expected of them during a crisis.

Staff need to be trained in 3 key areas:

1. Training in preparation to enact the plan

This can be achieved through the core crisis management team meticulously reviewing each plan step and customising them to suit the organisation, its locality, and the level of threat. This process not only imparts training to the staff but also offers a quality control mechanism to assess the plan’s suitability.

2. Full employee preparation and drill training

Since we know that every employee has a role within the organisation’s crisis plan, it’s essential that they get familiar with their roles and are able to carry them out to the best of their abilities. You cannot assign someone a first aid role and then not provide them with first aid training and experience. Similarly, you cannot provide them with an assignment like setting up an emergency management office without them knowing exactly what that entails.<
There are many different ways you can exchange ideas and bring your team on board to share experiences and contribute to your crisis plan.

For example:

• Policies and procedures that are shared
• Workshops where policies and procedures are explored and learned
• Case studies
• Question and answer sessions
• Webinars
• Drills to provide practice and skill development
• Simulations to provide a realistic way to practice those skills
• Media Training

3. Media training – traditional and social

Some business leaders, including CEOs, do complete some media training. Typically, this training does a decent job of getting them through celebratory announcements and good news press releases or interviews, but not necessarily the crisis situation. This requires more finesse, quick thinking, and the ability to determine who should or should not act as a spokesperson for your company.

Crisis preparedness is all about preparing for the unknown, minimising vulnerabilities in your operations, staff and technology so that when the unexpected strikes, your business is able to weather the storm.

Some key ways to be prepared include:

• writing a comprehensive crisis communication and management plan
• training your staff in crisis management
• mitigating the risks to your operational abilities during a crisis by using safe password management and smart tools

Being aware of the resources that your local council and state governments has available on their websites can help you to speed up the process of mitigating risks and being prepared.  Some great examples are included below:

• the Queensland government site, which includes information and templates for incident response, business continuity and business recovery plans
• the City of Moreton Bay site, which includes great resources regarding flood information for local businesses