In the event of a crisis, it’s important to be well-prepared. To make the preparations, you need a place in which a crisis team can form or an existing crisis team can discuss what’s currently happening. And that’s not all: You need a place where the next steps are set down and the upcoming communication activities are planned and prepared. One factor is especially important here: Time! It’s a case of interacting quickly and effectively in order to be able to make statements to employees or external bodies (e.g., press representatives).
For those thinking about a group chat, it must be said: The most structured and best-suited option for interaction on this scale is a Community. Two scenarios are conceivable, which each follow the same structure:
- A crisis breaks out and you create a Community on the basis of your crisis team, or
- you have already set up and prepared a Community for any crises. In the event of a crisis, you can easily and, above all, quickly use this to directly discuss the first measures, coordinate language rules, and plan activities.
True to the motto "Having is better than needing", we recommend preparing a Community and then activating it when the situation requires.
The basic setting for the Community is "private" visibility. This means it’s only visible to a certain group of people: the members of the crisis team. You can change the configuration in the Community settings.
Next, consider which apps you need in your Community. The following apps & widgets are used in our example, and we will explain the details to you below:
An overview of current events
A central element of any Community is the timeline – this also applies here. There you can find the latest developments, the newest posts and comments. This offers you an initial overview. You can also quickly collect important to-dos and the next steps with a post. If a consensus is found, you can mark the topic as completed, for instance with the hashtag #closed.
Schedule
With the help of the link button widget, you can provide a precise schedule. Behind the schedule lies a document or content in Haiilo with prepared procedures and necessary steps in the event of a crisis: of course, you decide what this contains. In many cases, there will be a "crisis handbook" in the company, to which you thus have quick access.
Meeting minutes
In the emergency, discussions will take place at much shorter notice, in which many further steps will be discussed. It is all the more important that you also keep a record of these. The blog app helps you here, as you can use it as storage for your minutes and so access old minutes at any time.
Communication preparation
There need to be preparations to make sure that your employees are optimally informed. The blog app gives you a place in which you can coordinate your communication in the crisis team. This allows everyone to edit the post and, via comments, you can all give your "ok" for the publication. You also get an overview of your planned communication activities and above all: everything is bundled together in one place.
Overview of the crisis team
In order to be prepared for a crisis, an overview of the members of the crisis team is helpful. This can be presented best with the list app. All of the members are listed here with their contact details. You can customize the list according to your needs and add further fields. A numerical order can also be helpful for showing the chain of information.
In our example, we’ve created an overview of the crisis team including contact details. Do you need further information about a contact? Simply click on the name of the corresponding person to reach the contact person’s profile.
Our example contains these fields:
The content app can also be an alternative to the list app. It’s the somewhat creative option. For a simple overview, we’ve chosen the list app in this example.
Tip:
You can find out how to optimally inform your employees in the event of a crisis and make the communication activities prepared with this Community available to them in this post.