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In the first case, the HR person readily caught her error and took swift action to recall the erroneous email. Only a few people saw and opened the email, and the offense could have merited termination, though it was unintentional. The employee, in fact, expected to be fired. In this instance, however, the employee was not terminated. Still, the few people who opened the email, despite promising to delete it, could have exacerbated the situation simply by sharing it. Which brings us to the organizational crisis and damage of the emotion-charged email string involving senior leaders.
Not only did it cause reverberations throughout the company, but it did damage externally as well. How many other employees also forwarded that email? And how many of those emails went only to their personal email inboxes? But the target recipients certainly do. No organization can hope to plug every potential leak operationally.
They know that setting policies and ground rules for social media usage, for example, is far more effective and cost-effective than desperately trying to shield them from social tools or micro-monitoring them. The second one is easier said than done, of course. But in the examples above, the first organization dealt with an errant communication swiftly and with a level head. The program can be completed in just 10 courses 20 months and covers numerous topics critical for advancement in the communication industry, including crisis communication, social media engagement, focus group planning and implementation, survey design and survey analysis, public relations theory, professional writing, and communication ethics.
With a mass notification system, contact information phones numbers, e-mail, etc. Contacts can be any group that can be affected by the crisis including employees, customers, and community members living near a facility. Crisis managers can enter short messages into the system then tell the mass notification system who should receive which messages and which channel or channels to use for the delivery.
The mass notification system provides a mechanism for people to respond to messages as well.
The response feature is critical when crisis managers want to verify that the target has received the message. The crisis response is what management does and says after the crisis hits. Public relations plays a critical role in the crisis response by helping to develop the messages that are sent to various publics. A great deal of research has examined the crisis response. That research has been divided into two sections: Practitioner experience and academic research have combined to create a clear set of guidelines for how to respond once a crisis hits.
The initial crisis response guidelines focus on three points: Be quick seems rather simple, provide a response in the first hour after the crisis occurs. That puts a great deal of pressure on crisis managers to have a message ready in a short period of time. Again, we can appreciate the value of preparation and templates. The rationale behind being quick is the need for the organization to tell its side of the story. When a crisis occurs, people want to know what happened.
Crisis experts often talk of an information vacuum being created by a crisis. The news media will lead the charge to fill the information vacuum and be a key source of initial crisis information. We will consider shortly the use of the Internet as well. If the organization having the crisis does not speak to the news media, other people will be happy to talk to the media. These people may have inaccurate information or may try to use the crisis as an opportunity to attack the organization.
As a result, crisis managers must have a quick response. Carney and Jorden note a quick response is active and shows an organization is in control. It lets others control the story and suggests the organization has yet to gain control of the situation. Arpan and Rosko-Ewoldsen conducted a study that documented how a quick, early response allows an organization to generate greater credibility than a slow response. Crisis preparation will make it easier for crisis managers to respond quickly. Obviously accuracy is important anytime an organization communicates with publics.
People want accurate information about what happened and how that event might affect them. Because of the time pressure in a crisis, there is a risk of inaccurate information. If mistakes are made, they must be corrected. However, inaccuracies make an organization look inconsistent. Incorrect statements must be corrected making an organization appear to be incompetent. The philosophy of speaking with one voice in a crisis is a way to maintain accuracy. Speaking with one voice does not mean only one person speaks for the organization for the duration of the crisis.
As Barton notes, it is physically impossible to expect one person to speak for an organization if a crisis lasts for over a day. Watch news coverage of a crisis and you most likely will see multiple people speak. The news media want to ask questions of experts so they may need to talk to a person in operations or one from security. The crisis team needs to share information so that different people can still convey a consistent message. The spokespersons should be briefed on the same information and the key points the organization is trying to convey in the messages.
The public relations department should be instrumental in preparing the spokespersons. Ideally, potential spokespersons are trained and practice media relations skills prior to any crisis. The focus during a crisis then should be on the key information to be delivered rather than how to handle the media.
Once more preparation helps by making sure the various spokespersons have the proper media relations training and skills. Quickness and accuracy play an important role in public safety. When public safety is a concern, people need to know what they must do to protect themselves. Sturges refer to this information as instructing information. Instructing information must be quick and accurate to be useful.
For instance, people must know as soon as possible not to eat contaminated foods or to shelter-in-place during a chemical release. A slow or inaccurate response can increase the risk of injuries and possibly deaths. Quick actions can also save money by preventing further damage and protecting reputations by showing that the organization is in control. However, speed is meaningless if the information is wrong. Inaccurate information can increase rather than decrease the threat to public safety.
The news media are drawn to crises and are a useful way to reach a wide array of publics quickly. So it is logical that crisis response research has devoted considerable attention to media relations. Media relations allows crisis managers to reach a wide range of stakeholders fast. Fast and wide ranging is perfect for public safety—get the message out quickly and to as many people as possible. Clearly there is waste as non-targets receive the message but speed and reach are more important at the initial stage of the crisis.
However, the news media is not the only channel crisis managers can and should use to reach stakeholders. Web sites, Intranet sites, and mass notification systems add to the news media coverage and help to provide a quick response. Crisis managers can supply greater amounts of their own information on a web site.
Not all targets will use the web site but enough do to justify the inclusion of web-base communication in a crisis response. Mass notification systems deliver short messages to specific individuals through a mix of phone, text messaging, voice messages, and e-mail. The systems also allow people to send responses. In organizations with effective Intranet systems, the Intranet is a useful vehicle for reaching employees as well. If an organization integrates its Intranet with suppliers and customers, these stakeholders can be reached as well.
As the crisis management effort progresses, the channels can be more selective. Victims are the people that are hurt or inconvenienced in some way by the crisis. Victims might have lost money, become ill, had to evacuate, or suffered property damage. Kellerman details when it is appropriate to express regret.
The Role of Crisis. This article emphasizes how communication needs shift during a crisis. This is a short article that discusses the need for spokesperson training prior to a crisis. Prevention involves seeking to reduce known risks that could lead to a crisis. Structuring crisis discourse knowledge:
Expressions of concern help to lessen reputational damage and to reduce financial losses. Experimental studies by Coombs and Holladay and by Dean found that organizations did experience less reputational damage when an expression of concern is offered verses a response lacking an expression of concern. Cohen examined legal cases and found early expressions of concern help to reduce the number and amount of claims made against an organization for the crisis.
However, Tyler reminds us that there are limits to expressions of concern. Lawyers may try to use expressions of concern as admissions of guilt. A number of states have laws that protect expressions of concern from being used against an organization. Another concern is that as more crisis managers express concern, the expressions of concern may lose their effect of people. Hearit cautions that expressions of concern will seem too routine. Still, a failure to provide a routine response could hurt an organization.
Hence, expressions of concern may be expected and provide little benefit when used but can inflict damage when not used. His strongest lesson was that crisis managers should never forget employees are important publics during a crisis. The Business Roundtable and Corporate Leadership Council remind us that employees need to know what happened, what they should do, and how the crisis will affect them.
The earlier discussions of mass notification systems and the Intranet are examples of how to reach employees with information. West Pharmaceuticals had a production facility in Kinston, North Carolina leveled by an explosion in January Coombs b examined how West Pharmaceuticals used a mix of channels to keep employees apprised of how the plant explosion would affect them in terms of when they would work, where they would work, and their benefits.
Moreover, Coombs a identifies research that suggest well informed employees provide an additional channel of communication for reaching other stakeholders. When the crisis results in serious injuries or deaths, crisis management must include stress and trauma counseling for employees and other victims. One illustration is the trauma teams dispatched by airlines following a plane crash. Both the Business Roundtable and Coombs a note that crisis managers must consider how the crisis stress might affect the employees, victims, and their families.
Organizations must provide the necessary resources to help these groups cope. We can take a specific set of both form and content lessons from the writing on the initial crisis response. Form refers to the basic structure of the response. The initial crisis response should be delivered in the first hour after a crisis and be vetted for accuracy. Content refers to what is covered in the initial crisis response. The initial message must provide any information needed to aid public safety, provide basic information about what has happened, and offer concern if there are victims.
In addition, crisis managers must work to have a consistent message between spokespersons.
A number of researchers in public relations, communication, and marketing have shed light on how to repair the reputational damage a crisis inflicts on an organization. At the center of this research is a list of reputation repair strategies. Bill Benoit ; has done the most to identify the reputation repair strategies.
He analyzed and synthesized strategies from many different research traditions that shared a concern for reputation repair. Coombs a integrated the work of Benoit with others to create a master list that integrated various writings into one list. The reputation repair strategies vary in terms of how much they accommodate victims of this crisis those at risk or harmed by the crisis.
Accommodate means that the response focuses more on helping the victims than on addressing organizational concerns. The master list arranges the reputation repair strategies from the least to the most accommodative reputation repair strategies. For more information on reputation repair strategies see also Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger, It should be noted that reputation repair can be used in the crisis response phase, post-crisis phase, or both.
Not all crises need reputation repair efforts. Frequently the instructing information and expressions of concern are enough to protect the reputation. When a strong reputation repair effort is required, that effort will carry over into the post-crisis phase. Or, crisis managers may feel more comfortable waiting until the post-crisis phase to address reputation concerns. A list of reputation repair strategies by itself has little utility. Researchers have begun to explore when a specific reputation repair strategy or combination of strategies should be used.
These researchers frequently have used attribution theory to develop guidelines for the use of reputation repair strategies. A short explanation of attribution theory is provided along with its relationship to crisis management followed by a summary of lessons learned from this research. Attribution theory believes that people try to explain why events happen, especially events that are sudden and negative. Generally, people either attribute responsibility for the event to the situation or the person in the situation.
Attributions generate emotions and affect how people interact with those involved in the event. Crises are negative create damage or threat of damage and are often sudden so they create attributions of responsibility.
People either blame the organization in crisis or the situation. If people blame the organization, anger is created and people react negatively toward the organization. Three negative reactions to attributing crisis responsibility to an organization have been documented: Coombs pioneered the application of attribution theory to crisis management in the public relations literature. His article began to lay out a theory-based approach to matching the reputation repair strategies to the crisis situation.
SCCT argues that crisis managers match their reputation repair strategies to the reputational threat of the crisis situation. Crisis managers follow a two-step process to assess the reputational threat of a crisis. The first step is to determine the basic crisis type. A crisis managers considers how the news media and other stakeholders are defining the crisis. Coombs and Holladay had respondents evaluate crisis types based on attributions of crisis responsibility. They distilled this data to group the basic crises according to the reputational threat each one posed.
Table 6 provides a list the basic crisis types and their reputational threat. The second step is to review the intensifying factors of crisis history and prior reputation. If an organization has a history of similar crises or has a negative prior reputation, the reputational threat is intensified. In general, a reputation is how stakeholder perceive an organization.
A reputation is widely recognized as a valuable, intangible asset for an organization and is worth protecting. But the threat posed by a crisis extends to behavioral intentions as well. Increased attributions of organizational responsibility for a crisis result in a greater likelihood of negative word-of-mouth about the organization and reduced purchase intention from the organization. In the post-crisis phase, the organization is returning to business as usual.
As noted earlier, reputation repair may be continued or initiated during this phase. There is important follow-up communication that is required. First, crisis managers often promise to provide additional information during the crisis phase. The crisis managers must deliver on those informational promises or risk losing the trust of publics wanting the information. The amount of follow-up communication required depends on the amount of information promised during the crisis and the length of time it takes to complete the recovery process.
If you promised a reporter a damage estimate, for example, be sure to deliver that estimate when it is ready. West Pharmaceuticals provided recovery updates for over a year because that is how long it took to build a new facility to replace the one destroyed in an explosion. As Dowling , the Corporate Leadership Counsel , and the Business Roundtable observe, Intranets are an excellent way to keep employees updated, if the employees have ways to access the site.
Coombs a reports how mass notification systems can be used as well to deliver update messages to employees and other publics via phones, text messages, voice messages, and e-mail. Personal e-mails and phone calls can be used too. Crisis managers agree that a crisis should be a learning experience. The crisis management effort needs to be evaluated to see what is working and what needs improvement. The same holds true for exercises.
Coombs recommends every crisis management exercise be carefully dissected as a learning experience. As most books on crisis management note, those lessons are then integrated into the pre-crisis and crisis response phases.
Organizational crisis is presented as a natural stage in organizational evolution, creating Communication is viewed as the pivotal process in the creation and. Communication and Organizational Crisis and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. by Mathew W. Seeger (Author), Timothy L. Sellnow (Author), Robert R. Ulmer (Author) & 0 more. Organizational crisis is presented as a natural stage in organizational evolution.
That is how management learns and improves its crisis management process. It is difficult to distill all that is known about crisis management into one, concise entry. I have tried to identify the best practices and lessons created by crisis management researchers and analysts. However, crises are not the ideal way to improve an organization. But no organization is immune from a crisis so all must do their best to prepare for one. This entry provides a number of ideas that can be incorporated into an effective crisis management program.
At the end of this entry is an annotated bibliography. The annotated bibliography provides short summaries of key writings in crisis management highlighting. Each entry identifies the main topics found in that entry and provides citations to help you locate those sources.
Harvard Business Review, 80 12 , This article provides insights into working with employees during a crisis. An analysis of the effects of proactive disclosure of crisis information. Public Relations Review 31 3 , This article discusses an experiment that studies the idea of stealing thunder. Stealing thunder is when an organization releases information about a crisis before the news media or others release the information.
The results found that stealing thunder results in higher credibility ratings for a company than allowing others to report the crisis information first. Managing the crisis you tried to prevent. Harvard Business Review, 73 6 , This article centers on the six stages of a crisis: The article reinforces the need to have a crisis management plan and to test both the crisis management plan and team through exercises. It also reinforces the need to learn profit from the crisis. Crisis in organizations II 2nd ed. This is a very practice-oriented book that provides a number of useful insights into crisis management.
The book provides excellent information on crisis management plans a template is in Appendix D pp. Accounts, excuses, and apologies: A theory of image restoration.
State University of New York Press. This book has a scholarly focus on image restoration not crisis manage. However, his discussion of image restoration strategies is very thorough pp. These strategies have been used as reputation repair strategies after a crisis. Image repair discourse and crisis communication. Public Relations Review, 23 2 , The article is based on his book Accounts, excuses, and apologies: A theory of image restoration and provides a review of image restoration strategies. The image restoration strategies are reputation repair strategies that can be used after a crisis.
It is a quicker and easiest to use resource than the book. This is a very user-friendly PDF files that takes a person through the crisis management process. There is helpful information on web-based communication pp. There is an explanation of templates, what are called holding statements or fill-in-the-blank media statements including a sample statement pp. It also provides information of the crisis management plan pp. Prepare for business-related crises. Public Relations Journal 49, This article emphasize the need for a message strategy during crisis communication.
Developing and sharing a strategy helps an organization to speak with one voice during the crisis. Advising clients to apologize. This article examines expressions of concern and full apologies from a legal perspective. He notes that California, Massachusetts, and Florida have laws that prevent expressions of concern from being used as evidence against someone in a court case.
The evidence from court cases suggests that expressions of concern are helpful because they help to reduce the amount of damages sought and the number of claims filed. Choosing the right words: Management Communication Quarterly, 8, This article is the foundation for Situational Crisis Communication Theory.
It uses a decision tree to guide the selection of crisis response strategies. The guidelines are based on matching the response to nature of the crisis situation. A number of studies have tested the guidelines in the decision tree and found them to be reliable.
Impact of past crises on current crisis communications: Insights from situational crisis communication theory. Journal of Business Communication, 41, This article documents that past crises intensify the reputational threat to a current crisis. Since the news media reminds people of past crises, it is common for organizations in crisis to face past crises as well. Crisis managers need to adjust their reputation repair strategies if there are past crises-crisis managers will need to use more accommodative strategies than they normally would.
Accidents are a good example. Past accidents indicate a pattern of problems so people will view the organization as much more responsible for the crisis than if the accident were isolated. Greater responsibility means the crisis is more of a threat to the reputation and the organization must focus the response more on addressing victim concerns. Structuring crisis discourse knowledge: The West Pharmaceutics case. Public Relations Review, 30, This article is a case analysis of the West Pharmaceutical explosion at its Kinston, NC facility.
The case documents the extensive use of the Internet to keep employees and other stakeholders informed. It also develops a list of crisis communication standards based on SCCT. The crisis communication standards offer suggestions for how crisis managers can match their crisis response to the nature of the crisis situation.
Code red in the boardroom: Crisis management as organizational DNA. This is a book written for a practitioner audience. The book focuses on how to respond to three common types of crises: There are also detailed discussions of how crisis management plans must be a living document pp. Planning, Managing, and responding 2nd ed. This book is designed to teach students and managers about the crisis management process. There is a detailed discussion of spokesperson training pp. The book emphasizes the value of follow-up information and updates pp.
There is also a discussion of the utility of mass notification systems during a crisis pp. Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: The development and application of situational crisis communication theory. Corporate Reputation Review, 10, The article includes a discussion how the research can go beyond reputation to include behavioral intentions such as purchase intention and negative word-of-mouth.
The information in the article is based on experimental studies rather than case studies. Communication and attributions in a crisis: An experimental study of crisis communication. Journal of Public Relations Research, 8 4 , The research also establishes that the type of reputation repair strategies managers use does make a difference on perceptions of the organization.