10/20/2003

Lights, Camera, Crisis

The media wants to know what happened and why. This is no time to be tongue-tied. A good plan will guide your company’s responses if tragedy strikes.

As a culture, America is well-acquainted with seeing what terrors a sudden and jolting crisis can inflict in a swift blink of an eye. The key weapon of a crisis is its element of surprise, its ability to catch people off guard and blind them with confusion and pandemonium. And the key defense for rental companies of all sizes against a battered image during a crisis is to have given careful forethought to the tragic unforeseen.

A crisis communication (CC) plan, developed in a logical manner when heads are clear and undistracted, can help a company navigate through devastating circumstances and potentially damaging media attention.

“A communication plan is not intended to change the way you’d react in a crisis; your company will still go through the process of handling the emergency,” says Mary Estes, a Tampa, Fla., public relations consultant who develops and implements crisis communication plans for businesses. “The plan addresses how you communicate to the public what has happened. It gives a company processes for rapid identification of potentially harmful situations and methods for responding to them quickly and effectively. A good crisis communication plan is designed to be used in conjunction with the normal decision-making processes of your organization; it doesn’t supercede them.”

Mini-crises are all part of a day’s work at a rental operation. The truck delivering chairs for a 2 o’clock wedding breaks down five miles from the church, or a customer is yelling about a stalled backhoe. But prudent companies plan for the big-scale crisis--the one you see on the news and hope never happens to you. It could be a fire or a bomb threat, a natural disaster or a robbery. It could be a fatal shooting on the premises of your company. It could be a protest or a strike against your business, a major layoff of employees, or a financial breach of trust within a publicly held company.

Those events can happen anywhere, to anyone.

The risks inherent to rental are equally disturbing. A rented stage collapsing at a high school concert, a rented excavator tipping and killing a bystander, scaffolding that has collapsed and injured workers and pedestrians on a city jobsite, or an inflatable ride injuring little children. If any of these happen tomorrow, what will the media say about your company? And, more importantly, what will you say about your company and the incident that has occurred?

Undoing mistakes is tough. If you or one of your employees say the wrong thing or refuse to comment at all when a tragedy has occurred, people you do business with and the public at large can draw negative conclusions. You might manage to get your foot out of your mouth, but a muddy footprint on your company’s image can have long-lasting effects.

Whatever the crisis, a communication plan achieves one vital function: It puts the rental company in control of its own image when turmoil is present. Whether simple or elaborate, a plan enables rental executives to get their company’s messages across to the public in moments of shock and peril.

CC planners agree that the size of an organization is irrelevant in the decision of whether to create a plan. Being prepared to speak is critical--and imagining as many ugly scenarios as possible means that your company will be prepared if the worst should ever happen.

“Not having a crisis communication plan in place is a recipe for disaster,” says Karen Friedman, whose Philadelphia-based firm, Karen Friedman Enterprises Inc., trains and consults businesses for contact with the media. “What happens if there is an incident at your company that receives media attention before you’ve had a chance to prepare? What happens if your employees say the wrong thing or if management refuses comment or reacts without giving thought to key messages they want delivered to the public? The rumor mill will go out of control, and your reputation is at stake. Not having a crisis plan means you have no control and will let outside sources define the story for you.

“Crisis planning means that in the event of a crisis, those affected will be your top priority and you can lead, manage and take charge instead of reacting,” Friedman continues. “Don’t think it can’t happen to you. Nothing is more important than being prepared.”

Standard elements of a CC plan are fairly universal. The variable is how elaborate a company chooses to make its plan, Estes says. Because every rental company is slightly different, an assessment of a rental store’s products and services and an evaluation of the company’s sphere of community influence can help determine the plan’s detail.

However simple or complex, the plan, according to Estes, should lay out the steps for factually assessing a crisis situation and determining if implementation of the plan is warranted. The plan should establish the crisis communication team that will be responsible for making the assessment and then taking appropriate actions, all centered around the objectives of communicating facts of the crisis, minimizing rumors and restoring confidence in your company.

“The size of the company doesn’t matter,” Estes says. “What matters is having a plan to communicate to your constituencies, and that your employees are familiar with how it works. The plan should say ‘Here is what we do, here is who we call, here are the messages we want to say, and this is the person who says them.’

“And remember, if something happens that can adversely affect your company in some way, you want to be sure that you show that you genuinely care,” Estes cautions. “There’s an old saying in public relations that goes, ‘No one cares what you have to say unless they know you care.’”

Estes outlines a dozen components that are common to more comprehensive, sophisticated CC plans that large companies might establish; smaller companies can modify the list and still develop a plan that will guide the owner and his or her employees through a catastrophe.

1. An introduction states the plan’s goals and objectives.

2. A description of the crisis communication team pinpoints who in the organization is responsible for executing the plan. Responsibilities for each member of the team are detailed, as well as guidelines for assessing a crisis.

3. A positioning statement outlines the organization’s role in the crisis, as well as how the company wants to be perceived among its constituencies, who include employees and their families, customers, suppliers and stockholders for publicly held companies.

4. Designated spokespersons or subject experts within the company are identified to ensure that the right person is able to address the issue knowledgably. In most cases involving a rental company, the president or CEO might be the only spokesman; exceptions might be financial crises in which an investor relations executive or the CFO may be given authority to make statements to the media. The head of human resources may be called upon to make statements involving employees of the company.

5. Media policies and procedures establish guidelines for how the company will deal with getting the messages out, the timing of the messages, as well as the logistics of where press conferences might be held and how communications will be sent. Will press releases be e-mailed, phoned, faxed? A list of media contacts must be included as well--depending on the situation, it’s better to notify the media rather than to wait for them to approach you.

6. Handling media interviews is a section of the plan that helps spokespeople to be prepared for conducting press conferences and media updates.

7. Practicing difficult questions that might arise during various emergency situations will help spokespeople field the real-life scenarios with clarity and credibility.

8. Prepared statements about the company are included in the plan. General truths about how the company views and practices safety are one example.

9. The presentation is a section of the plan in which spokespeople are trained and necessary visuals are considered and assembled, such as a floor plan of the rental store or diagrams of some of the larger rental equipment.

10. News release templates are written and filed, leaving blanks for the details to be added. The key is to include important messages about the company that you want conveyed during a crisis, things that are consistent regardless of the crisis.

11. A fact sheet about the company is compiled for easy access. Collateral material is assembled here, such as the number of employees, the location, the products and services of the business.

12. Identification of key audiences helps the crisis communication team immediately know which group of people need to be reached with information.

13. A contact log comprises a list of phone numbers for quick reference when an emergency has occurred. Estes says that some companies develop this list in a triage fashion, putting names in order of priority and creating a type of communication tree that might begin with the CEO and president, followed by vice presidents or the human resources director, each of whom are responsible for contacting others in the company chain as needed. Internal communications function much faster this way, she says.

Friedman adds that a CC plan should also consist of response checklists itemizing procedures for employees to follow in the event of an emergency. This type of list should be easy to read and posted where employees will see it.

Rehearsing or holding mock drills is essential for getting everyone on board with the CC plan, Estes says. Rental companies that work with regulated industries, such as public utilities, or that have government contracts are probably required to have a plan in place just to do business with these entities. Scheduling an annual drill may also be required; some crisis drills are coordinated with multiple, interconnecting and interdependent companies, such as a rental company and a government agency it serves, as well as large vendors or contractors who may be impacted by a crisis situation.

It’s like anything you don’t do on a regular basis,” Estes says. “When it’s something you don’t have to call upon frequently your skills get rusty. A drill allows you to create a crisis scenario, get everyone engaged in his or her roles and play out the situation. It’s important that employees understand the plan and that they are adept at their roles. It’s also important that they all know who to direct media calls to in the event of a crisis.”

Companies that aren’t required by any regulated stipulations to maintain a CC plan are nevertheless well advised to create one just the same, Estes says. The management team at ARA Insurance Services (AIS) agrees. Having a crisis communication plan in place may not directly impact a company’s liability following a crisis, but development of a plan could expedite the processing of business interruption insurance claims, says Maura Paternoster, AIS claims coordinator.

“Having a preconceived crisis plan may not minimize the actual loss of property and resulting period of restoration, but it may help determine what the business income was prior to the loss, and therefore, the amount the business interruption claim will be. For example, it will be much quicker to review sales transaction data that has been backed up and stored off-site than it will be to request duplicate tax records from the IRS if the originals were burned up in a fire. The quicker we know how much is owed, the quicker we can start paying the claim, and the quicker the rental operator will have the insurance funds to continue paying his employees, business taxes and other routine expenses.”

Paternoster adds that whether or not a rental company communicates well with the media during a crisis probably won’t affect the company’s liability with regards to people who are injured or killed on the business’ premises as a result of natural disaster or a crime. But, as illustrated in her business interruption insurance example, once a company gets rolling with the idea of crisis communication and response planning, an entire package of preparedness can unfold. Fire escape plans, off-site storage of business record back-ups, hurricane, earthquake and tornado procedures, and so on, could not only save lives and restore the company’s operations more quickly, but could also potentially minimize the potency of litigation and other public image carnage in the wake of a crisis.