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Ways to Improve Your Business’s Crisis Communication Skills


No business owner wants to experience a major crisis in the workplace, but every business owner hopes to be appropriately prepared for a crisis if it does happen. As the owner, you must consider the worst-case scenarios of your business’s location, business risks, and national emergencies. Stay prepared for a problem around any corner with the various ways to improve your business’s crisis communication skills, and you’ll get through the disaster smoothly. Accurate communication is the hardest part of crisis control, but you will need to master it to be an inspiring leader among your employees.

Establish a Communication Web

During a crisis, you can’t be expected to handle every single phone call or request by yourself. Have a crisis committee prepared that involves your managers and strong leaders. Each person should be in charge of handling one branch of a crisis. Allow your HR manager to handle calling employees or families, a shipping or receiving manager to handle product delivery issues, and so on. Ensure that your crisis team knows and will remember their jobs. If anything happens to a member of your crisis team, whether they are a part of the emergency or stop working for you for any reason, have a back-up in mind.

It is also important that your crisis team knows exactly what they can and cannot talk about to customers or news outlets. You may benefit from having a designated spokesperson for talking to the news during a crisis.

Maintain Your Communication Equipment

Your communication devices are essential for a crisis being resolved smoothly. Without the ability to talk through problems with each other, pandemonium would erupt in the workplace; this, in turn, worsens the emergency. It’d be a disaster if your communication tools broke down during an emergency. Make sure to do regular maintenance on communication devices like computers, phones, and two-way radios. Regular maintenance is especially important when the devices are aging. Computers will begin to slow down and phones may cut out or break down, but the way it breaks depends on whether each employee is equipped with a wired line or a cellphone. For the more industrial side of things, two-way radios have their own tells for when they require repair.

Be Empathetic

The situation during and after a crisis isn’t only stressful for you—it’s also stressful for everyone involved. Especially when there is a loss of life during an emergency, you must handle the situation with respect and understanding. Staying empathetic isn’t only one of the ways to improve your business’s crisis communication skills; it’s also an important part of handling any emergency outside of the workplace. Remain kind and offer assistance or condolences when you can.



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