Corporate Crisis Management Blog

 So now you have an updated and strengthened Crisis Plan.

You went through a rigorous exercise of building crisis responses to all the new and emerging risks – from Presidential tweets through to highly politicized issues around gender, sexual orientation, race and workplace culture.

You are satisfied that your processes and systems are capable of matching the speed by which digital and social media drives a crisis.

In every industry, at businesses of all sizes, crisis communication is a common topic of discussion. With every passing year, a growing number of companies are investing more time and resources into emergency communication methods and planning. 

Manufacturers are vital to the continual growth of the U.S. economy, contributing more than $2 trillion to our gross domestic product each year and accounting for nine percent of the total American workforce, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. When a disaster strikes the manufacturing industry or its supply chain, it has the potential to send significant ripples through the entire country, while also putting individual companies at risk of going under. That’s why, in manufacturing, business continuity and disaster recovery planning is especially important.

(A version of this blog was published originally on June 21, 2016)

• Do you have a plan for what to do in a crisis?     YES/NO
• Was the plan updated in the past year?     YES/NO
• Could you quickly access the plan from anywhere?     YES/NO   

 Cyber breaches are on the rise, and companies like yours are experiencing more significant losses due to cyber threats than ever before. Symantec reports that 2015 set a record with nine “mega-breaches,” with 429 million users’ identities compromised. Faced with the growing threat of cyber attack, is your organization investing time in cyber security training as part of its business continuity planning?

 You just got that call.

There has been a huge data leak discovered within your company. Or somebody stole all your emails and is ready to share the contents with the world. Or you just got named in a presidential tweet. Or your product is being accused of starting fires in airplanes. Or a blog was published by an ex-employee about your sexist and discriminatory culture.

Emergency preparedness is a tricky concept. Even for those organizations that put significant time and effort into preparing for crises, true preparedness is a moving target, requiring continual attention to ensure that the business is ready for anything. 

Unfortunately, many organizations are not prepared for potential emergencies. In fact, according to the Business Continuity Institute’s Emergency Communications Report 2016, 62 percent of respondents are not confident about their preparedness for a location-specific security incident, such as workplace violence or an act of terrorism. 

Is your disaster recovery plan actionable? Most organizations would say that they take disaster recovery seriously, with plans and protocols in place for every possible situation. After all, no one wants their business to be vulnerable to a crisis. However, having a disaster recovery program in place isn’t the same as being truly prepared for a potential disaster. Truly successful preparation involves regular audits and reviews of your plans to ensure that each element is up to date and working as intended.  

 Nothing illustrates the new kind of threat that technology brings to corporate America than the prospect of being the subject of a Presidential tweet.

As one internet observer noted, “Donald Trump has the most powerful thumbs in the world”.

In this blog, we at RockDove have offered our view that to prepare you must have the right technology at your own fingertips.