Flanangan Consultants, LLC

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Crisis Preparedness Communication & Training


Our Perspective

Crises produce unanticipated demands on your people and your organization. Traditional table top and simulation exercises are a critical part of preparedness. These exercises are effective ways of practicing and evaluating the planned response.

One of the most important components of preparedness training is the opportunity to develop the mental and emotional behaviors that will allow your people to respond effectively to any crisis. This opportunity is not fully created by traditional preparation exercises.

In evaluating the need to develop mental and emotional behaviors keep the following four points in mind:

  1. For a period of a few weeks to six months most of the people in your organization effected by a crisis will exhibit a decline in their performance as they manage their own stress reactions. This performance decline will be present at the very time when you need maximum performance to return your organization to full operations.
  2. Depending on the nature of the crisis, studies show that from 10 – 40% of those impacted will meet the criteria for the diagnoses of Acute Stress Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
    • It appears that the percentage of those meeting these diagnostic criteria is highest when the crisis is of a violent or terrorist nature.
    • While some people who have been through a previous crisis may perform better, others will find themselves more severely impacted.
  3. During and after a crisis the many leaders and employees will not seek help in managing the impact of the crisis on their emotions, relationships and performance.
  4. The skills and knowledge to respond effectively and minimize the emotional and mental impact of a crisis while maintaining near normal levels of performance can be taught to people in advance of a crisis.
    • These skills and knowledge will not be held in reserve in case of a crisis – they will in fact enhance the day-to-day decision-making and performance of the employees who build them.

Our Objectives

Our Crisis Preparedness has the following objectives:

  1. Ensure that senior leaders fully understand the potential impact of a significant crisis in terms of:
    • Their own decision-making and leadership behavior;
    • Mental, emotional, behavioral and performance reactions of managers and employees throughout the organization
    • Customer confidence & loyalty
  2. Provide the opportunity to develop and maintain the personal and organizational responses to address each of these three critical areas
  3. Use learning processes that not only build skills and behaviors for responding to crises but also enhance leadership and enterprise effectiveness in the face of day to day challenges and opportunities.
  4. Implement resource efficient processes for preparing managers and employees with the skills and behaviors necessary to respond to crises and minimize their impact on personal and business performance.

Our Approaches To Crisis Preparedness

  1. Preparedness Assessment

    2. We provide our clients with an assessment of the organization’s ability to respond to a crisis by evaluating and making recommendations regarding 9 key areas:

    • Employee Trust & Confidence In Leadership
    • Communication Capabilities & Effectiveness
    • Leadership Preparedness
    • Crisis Business Policies

             —Operations related
             —Customer related
             —Vendor related

    • Crisis Decision-making Protocols
    • Awareness Education for Managers and Employees
    • Availability of a CISD/CISM Qualified EAP Network
    • Human Resource Crisis Response Protocols
    • First Responder Preparedness
  2. Executive Briefings

    3. Given time pressures and demands, we prefer to integrate our executive briefings into existing leadership meetings. We generally require 45 – 90 minutes per briefing. Based on the needs of executives and organizations, briefing topics are typically drawn from among the following:

    • Business Implications Of Different Categories Of Crisis & Threat
    • Employee Reactions: What Leaders Need To Know About Acute Stress and Post Traumatic Stress
    • Accelerating Business Recovery
    • Crisis Management Teams: New Skills For A New World
    • Prevention: Leadership, Communication, Training
    • Professional Resources
    • Response Planning: Realistic Responses To The Unimaginable
    • Building Executive Resilience
  3. Preparedness Scenarios

    4. To develop behavioral skills for crisis response, we recommend the use of online scenarios. There are four reasons for this recommendation:

    • Story telling is a very powerful and engaging means of driving learning. People enjoy using scenarios that depict people like them in their own organization. They are motivated to learn.
    • Scenarios provide large numbers of employees with the opportunity to develop behavioral skills without requiring that they take large blocks of time out of their production time to attend classroom sessions.
    • Scenarios are one of the most flexible, effective and cost-efficient means of learning.
    • Scenarios provide the ability to learn privately. This affords people the opportunity to assess their personal coping and response behaviors without fear of embarrassment.

    We provide crisis preparedness online scenarios in the following areas;

    • First Responder Preparedness
    • Manager Preparedness
    • Employee Preparedness

    Our preparedness scenarios can be developed and deployed across your workforce in 6 – 7 weeks.

 

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