Engaging and Informing Employees During a Crisis

Most crisis communication plans depend at least somewhat on the ability and willingness of employees to come to work – but that assumption may not be valid.

According to a Deloitte study, including employees in pre-crisis planning and keeping them updated during an organizational emergency are critical to ensuring their participation and maintaining consistent communications with customers and other key stakeholders.

Financial Executives International Daily spoke with Kathie Schwerdtfeger, crisis recovery leader for Deloitte Advisory Strategic Risk Services, about the important role employees can play in helping an organization’s crisis response and communications efforts.

FEI Daily: What kind of role should employee communications play in crisis planning?

Kathie Schwerdtfeger: In the early days when we talked about business continuity planning, we talked about events when data centers went down or organizations couldn’t get payroll out. But in today’s environment, crises are often more complex than just a portion of the business not being able to handle their day-to-day activities. They fundamentally undermine the essence of some of those organizations actually operating, and any time you have a crisis that strikes, with any sort of complexity, it often takes people away from their day jobs — but they’re in the best position to actually manage through the process, and they may not have the right knowledge skills or abilities to understand how to react in times of crisis.

Organizations often don’t think about the impact to their employees and their leadership team when crisis strikes, so we do believe, looking at it holistically, companies need to focus on the people aspect and what you can expect for them, and from them.

There may be a type of crisis whereby their own safety has been challenged, maybe they have impacts in own family or their own close network, and that’s definitely an aspect that needs to be considered holistically when putting together a well-orchestrated plan for crisis.

For the rest of this interview from Financial Executives International, please click here.