Corporate Crisis Management Blog

While the overall number of work-related health and safety incidents is trending downward, U.S. businesses still spend more than $170 billion a year on costs associated with occupational injuries and illnesses. OSHA estimates that an effective, up-to-date workplace safety plan can reduce an organization’s injury and illness costs by an incredible 20 to 40 percent. However, this goal is only achievable if your business is committed to giving its safety program the resources and attention it needs to be effective.

In this series of a blogs, we are re-examining ‘classic’ crisis case studies that pre-date the digital era to explore what we can learn from them.

The lessons are very different than have traditionally been drawn for students of crisis management.

Nowadays social and digital media has transformed how a crisis unfolds. Many of the strategies and tactics of these golden oldies have been rendered redundant by the digital era.

Social media is the double-edged sword of crisis management. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can be an essential communication tool for effectively managing a crisis—but they can also make a crisis worse than ever if they are not used strategically.

In recent conversations, several people who teach crisis management have bemoaned to me the lack of case studies that really capture how social and digital media drive the modern crisis.

Older case studies don’t help teach techniques that students must understand for today’s threats.

Any crisis plan that is older than two years old is going to be next to useless when the worst does happen.

In the interests of learning and doing better when it happens to us, in this series of blogs we are enjoying being those wise people who always know what a company should have done when it was handling a crisis (after the event, of course!).

We have already examined Google and its immediate handling of the infamous 10-page diversity memo. We also analyzed HBO and the furious social media opposition to a show that did not even have a script.

We are in full ‘armchair crisis manager’ mode, picking apart current high-profile crises in the belief that we can all learn from what happened, good and bad.

This week we are looking at HBO and the social media resistance to a show that did not even have a script.

Accessibility is one of the key components of any workplace safety plan. If your safety documentation and tools are difficult to access or use, your employees are, at best, going to feel inconvenienced and frustrated. At worst, they might forgo referencing the safety plan altogether.

It’s fun to be a smart-ass when it’s someone else who is facing a tricky issue under the microscope of social media and in the full glare of national newspapers, radio and TV news.

But it’s also a learning experience. And a safe one.

Your observations may help you when your organization faces a similar threat to its reputation.