Crisis management is one of those dynamic fields in which there is always a lesson to be learned.
Take, for example, the recent, and massive, Hurricane Harvey, which hit the Gulf Coast with a force that hadn’t been seen in that area in more than a decade. Soon after the storm made landfall in Houston, massive flooding occurred, prompting many to question why local officials hadn’t called for an evacuation.
Indeed, Houston’s mayor asked people to stay in place. Meanwhile, Texas’ governor urged residents to evacuate. These mixed messages left many of Greater Houston’s 6.5 million residents confused, while observers from around the country were left to wonder why crisis communication before and during the storm wasn’t handled better.
Under Intense Scrutiny
As the mayor of Houston has no doubt experienced, these days, there is an unprecedented level of scrutiny placed on any organization that finds itself in the midst of a crisis. It’s true for city and state governments, multinational corporations, and even smaller enterprises. In our age of digital technology and social media, news and speculation travel extremely quickly, so it’s vital to handle crisis management in a strategic, thoughtful way.
Today, a single tweet or viral video can be shared millions of times in a single day. That’s why organizations have to be prepared—well ahead of time—for their next crisis. It’s not enough to begin formulating a response or a strategy the moment a crisis strikes; you’ll waste too much time trying to catch up to the incident while news about it spreads online. In the meantime, your customers, investors, and the general public will have made up their own minds about it.
Modernizing Crisis Management Training
For organizations of any size, crisis management training is an important part of this preparation. However, it simply isn’t effective to train your crisis response team to use lengthy, wordy crisis management plans, whether in hard-copy or PDF form. Not only is the information difficult to retain because it is so long-winded, but during a crisis, it would be difficult to find the right information quickly.
A more effective approach to crisis management involves using mobile technology to improve access to draft statements, scenario planning, contact details, and other important documents. With a mobile crisis management app, your team members can instantly reference the information they need, right at their fingertips.
A mobile app also improves crisis management training in several important ways:
Simplified training
Traditionally, crisis management training might have meant printing out thick workbooks for each team member and then gathering everyone together for a long training session. With a crisis management app, all trainees have access to the information they need, right on their mobile device. This simplifies training for new employees while also streamlining retraining for everyone else. In the age of smartphones, the mobile interface feels user-friendly and familiar, which allows them to focus on the content of the training rather than on the medium itself.
Convenient testing of mock crisis scenarios
As part of your training efforts, you should regularly guide employees through mock crises. Staging a practice scenario using a mobile app is simple and straightforward. Employees simply use the app to access the information they need, communicate with each other, and play their part in the crisis response. This process not only helps familiarize your people with the various components of the app, but it also can reveal gaps in information that could affect future crisis management efforts.
Access the most up-to-date versions of your plans
Another challenge of hard-copy or PDF-based plans surfaces when it’s time for updates. Let’s say you train your crisis team on one version of your plan this month, but then you roll out updates to the plan later this year. Familiarizing everyone with the newly updated plan can be burdensome, but you need to ensure that they are all referencing the right information when a crisis hits. A mobile app does away with this problem, because all plan updates are instantly pushed out to every user’s device. This guarantees that when a crisis strikes, every user has immediate access to the correct planning information and can begin initiating the response right away.
Streamlined preparation for future incidents
When each member of your crisis team has anywhere/anytime access to your most up-to-date plans, you significantly improve your preparedness for the next business-impacting crisis. You and your team don’t have to worry about whether the right people will know what to do in the moment of crisis; they will have everything they need to help ensure a timely, confident response.
Bringing Mobile Technology into Crisis Management
As you consider ways to improve your organization’s approach to crisis management, be sure to examine how well you are leveraging digital technology. In nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives, we benefit from mobile technology in particular. The advent of crisis management apps means that you and your team don’t have to slog through lengthy hard-copy or PDF crisis plans every time a crisis hits or training is needed. Instead, you can incorporate mobile technology into your crisis planning efforts and enjoy simplified, streamlined crisis management training—and a higher degree of preparedness.
