A crisis can happen at any time, and when it does you need to be prepared to act quickly to keep your employees informed. There are lots of different ways your company could experience a crisis: it could be involved in a natural or man-made disaster, a law suit, a scandal, or there could be problems with your IT systems or products. Whatever form the crisis takes, having effective and efficient internal crisis communications processes in place can help to keep your employees safe, encourage employees to remain calm, reduce reputational damage and risk, and ensure that your employees hear first-hand about the crisis from the company.
How to communicate internally during a crisis
In a crisis, employee communication is often the thin thread that holds everyone and everything together. It’s therefore critical you make communicating with your employees a top priority when it happens.
Methods for communicating with employees in a crisis commonly include:
Sending emailsPublishing information on your intranetHolding all-staff meetingsHaving one-on-one conversations between management and staff.Informing your staff quickly about what’s happening is critical in a crisis. Not only can it keep them safe, but it can help to stop rumors and ensure that there is a unified, consistent approach to the crisis from the top down in your company. When employees hear about a crisis from rumors or from external sources first, it can make a bad situation worse and deplete morale and lower your levels of employee engagement. It can also lead to more negative outcomes when the crisis has passed. Therefore you need to ensure you focus on management communicating with employees, as well as departments within your organization communicating with one another. Have an internal communications plan prepared in advance
Your draft corporate crisis communication plan should outline key messages, who your spokespeople are, how often you will communicate and the channels you will use to communicate with your employees.Pre-prepare templates and holding statements
These can be updated with information during the crisis, but will save you time, which is critical when communicating with your employees in a crisis situation.Understand your internal audiences
If you have different groups of employees who could be affected in different ways, for example based on their role or geographic location, you should group them so you can communicate with them appropriately.Ensure communication to your employees is fast and regular
Crisis situations are constantly evolving. Don’t send old and outdated news to your employees.Have social media policies for staff
In a crisis you don’t want employees posting misinformation on personal social media accounts that could do more harm than good.Use reliable internal communications channels
Traditional internal communications channels may not reach employees quickly enough and your messages could be missed.
Using DeskAlerts Tools In Internal Crisis Communication
When you need things to run smoothly during a crisis and reduce any negative impacts,
DeskAlerts is corporate crisis communication software that will help you to communicate quickly with your employees across multiple channels.DeskAlerts enables you to have digitized internal crisis communications to ensure your response to the crisis is agile.
***Deskalerts have a picture diagram at this point***