Crisis Management

Crisis Management

A crisis can be defined as any situation that is threatening or could threaten to harm people or property, seriously interrupt business, significantly damage reputation and/ or negatively impact the bottom line (Bernstein, 2016).

If an organization does not prepare for a crisis, more damage will be created in the process. Experience demonstrates that organizational leadership often does not understand that in the absence of adequate internal and external communications:

Ø  Operational response will break down.

Ø  Stakeholders will not know what is happening and quickly become confused, angry, and negatively reactive.

Ø  The organization will be perceived as incompetent, at best, and criminally negligent, at worst.

Ø  The length of time required to bring full resolution to the issue will be extended, often dramatically.

1.       The impact to the financial and reputational bottom line will be more severe.

The SAPS needs to anticipate the crisis before it evolves in order for the issue to be resolved quickly and effectively.

1.      Anticipate the crisis

The SAPS need to identify possible crisis that may happen in order to solve the problem quickly and effectively. There are two benefits through doing this. some of the situations are preventable by simply modifying existing methods of operation and it will be better to think of possibilities now rather than when being put under pressure

2.      Identify your crisis communication team

The SAPS should create a specific team that is in charge of handling a crisis so if it had to happen, the team is informed as to what could happen and know the best way to solve this problem.

3.      Identify and train spokespersons

Knowing who the spokespersons are is a vital part in a crisis as the spokesperson must have the right skills, the right position so people respect them when they speak as well as the right training to make sure that the crisis is handled effectively.

4.      Spokesperson Training

Spokesperson training will teach the SAPS to be prepared and ready to respond in a way that optimizes the response of all stakeholders.

5.      Establish notification and monitoring systems

The SAPS should create a communication platform to reach someone quickly such as through phone or fax or email. Social media is also a really big platform to use and is extremely effective. Intellegence gathering is an essential component of both crisis prevention and crisis response.

6.      Identify and know your stakeholders

Knowing who the internal and external stakeholders play an important role in a crisis. The SAPS employees should be the most important audience as they are the main PR representatives. all stakeholders will be talking about the crisis to others not on the SAPS contact list, so it’s up to them to ensure that they receive the messages you would like to repeat elsewhere.

7.      Develop holding statements

While full message development must await the outbreak of an actual crisis, “holding statements,” messages designed for use immediately after a crisis breaks, can be developed in advance to be used for a wide variety of scenarios to which the organization is perceived to be vulnerable, based on the assessment you conducted in Step 1 of this process

8.      Assess the crisis situation (Post Crisis)

Reacting without adequate information is a classic “shoot first and ask questions afterwards” situation in which you could be the primary victim. Although, if the SAPS have done all of the above first, it’s a “simple” matter of having the Crisis Communications Team on the receiving end of information coming in from your team members, ensuring the right type of information is being provided so you can proceed with determining the appropriate response.

9.      Finalize and adapt key messages

With holding statements being used as a starting point, the Crisis Communications Team must continue developing the crisis-specific messages required for any given situation. The SAPS team should already know, categorically, what type of information its stakeholders are looking for. What should those stakeholders know about this crisis?

Have no more than three main messages that go to all stakeholders and, as necessary, some audience-specific messages for individual groups of stakeholders. The SAPS will also need to adapt their messaging to different forms of media as well. 

10.  Post crisis analysis

Once the crisis has happened, the SAPS need to analyse the crisis that occurred and understand what they had learned from it in order o move forward and make sure that it does not occur again.