5 Steps to Manage Communications in a Crisis for Any Business
My lessons from leading a healthcare communications team through COVID
I’d been promoted to my management position only three months ago when March 2020 struck.
I was the head of a six-member communications and training team responsible for outreach to doctors, urgent cares, and hospitals across 28 states. For this reason, when COVID fell like a bomb, my team became responsible for communicating urgent information to these panicked providers. Additionally, we had to do it after an overnight transition to full-time remote work while handling our own fears and stressors.
I’m proud to say, we pulled it off within a week or two. Below, I’ll outline the key lessons I learned during this trial-by-fire storm on how to manage a business’ external communications during a crisis.
1) Take care of your team FIRST
If you’re dealing with a crisis, most likely, your team will be stressed. If they can’t function, your company will fail. Therefore, always take care of your team first. Allow them space to be human. Let them make mistakes, vent, cry, and even ask for a day off to recuperate. Stop being a manager, and instead be a human being.
2) Create a central communications hub for the public
The best place to do this is on your company website. The central hub should be the place where you constantly update changing information in real-time. At my job, we created a COVID Crisis Information page with the latest updates for our hospitals, doctors, and urgent cares. Anytime something changed, we updated the COVID crisis page.
3) Develop your messaging
Your messaging will change during a crisis, so do your best based on the information you have. The key is: DON’T WAIT. Our company’s initial messaging primarily focused on emergency approval for telemedicine. Of course, at the top of the page, we ensured people knew to check back often, as information changed rapidly.
4) Drive traffic to your central hub using all outreach methods available
Begin linking to your central hub everywhere and use all outreach methods to drive traffic to it: Facebook posts, Twitter posts, emails, talking points, press releases. The key is to make the public aware of your central hub as quickly as possible. Remember to stick to your primary messaging, which will ensure consistency. At my job, because our target audience was specialized, we concentrated on sending emails and fax blasts to our doctors and hospitals. We also created talking points for our customer service phone team, who took phone calls from panicked providers.
5) Monitor and update
Once the initial phase of the crisis has calmed down, you can continue monitoring the situation and providing updates through emails, social media posts, the media, and other means. Remember to continue reminding people to check your central hub.
I want to emphasize these steps are meant for external communications. Communicating internally to your organization’s employees may look different, but you can still employ a similar strategy with evolved messaging.
Managing communications during a crisis is exhausting, so once things slow down, remember to give yourself a chance to rest and recover, too. After all, if you led a team through that, you deserve some R&R.
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