‘Stupid questions’ should help inform your crisis strategy

When a crisis strikes, communicators need the infrastructure to not only help put out the fire, but to address the knock-on effects on employees and how they view the company and their jobs.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference, Megan Person, director of communications and legislative affairs at the Armstrong Flight Research Center at NASA, Elizabeth Kosar, communications director at the Colorado Department of Revenue, and Samantha Grandinetti, internal communications manager at Staffbase, discussed how communicators can tackle crises in a way that calms down employees.

Kosar said that her organization uses a measurement called the “SPF check” that determines urgency.

“We want to know how quickly we’re burning,” she said. “Are we burning right away? Do we have an hour? Do we have two hours? Are we going to burn in a day? And then that informs how we strategize.”

Person said that even though communicators can’t control how employees discuss a given crisis, they can try to guide the conversation.

“Now is the time to build relationships with the people who are in the know so that you can influence how fast that unofficial communication starts to roll,” she said.