Daily news headlines are full of brands dealing with crises. So, is your company prepared? Good crisis management, especially in manufacturing, can make the difference between costly disruption and prompt resumption of operations.
Crises can come in a number of forms, including cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and criminal acts. Although no one wants to imagine that their plants can suffer from disaster, the best way to minimize the negative impacts is having a good plan of action.
What is Crisis Management?
Crisis management is the process of anticipating, preparing, and managing unexpected situations or crises that impact your enterprise, employees, and stakeholders. Notably, crisis management is different from risk management, which requires the assessment of potential threats and getting the best method of avoiding them. In crisis management, you deal with a threat that has already taken place.
It is true that crises have devastating impacts, but on the flip side, they have the advantage of motivating businesses to be better in the future. For example, many companies have adopted web-based apps to promote team collaboration and improve data security.
The Three Stages of Crises Management
When dealing with a crisis, it is prudent to understand the situation facing your company in order to take the right action. Crisis management can be broken down into the following three stages.
Stage One: Pre-Crisis
The first step in crisis management, as repeated by this entrepreneur, happens way before the crisis strikes your business. In reality, this step involves preparing to prevent crises from happening. The process involves planning, recruiting, and training your crisis management team. You might need to run different simulations to prepare your team for handling a potential crisis.
Step Two: Response to the Crises
The second step takes place when the crisis has already happened and involves responding to it using the plan that you have already created. Note that the actions you take at this point should be efficient and professionally implemented.
Take the case of the Coronavirus crisis that has struck most companies in the last coup-le of months. The response might involve activating a work from home policy because you can never know how long the problem will last.
Step Three: Post-Crisis
This is the last phase and happens when the crisis has happened. At this point, you need to evaluate the strategies that the company took and determine how effective they were. Then, you can work on replicating or improving your crisis response and management in the future.
No matter the size and nature of your industrial facility, one of the must-have things is a good crisis management system. Remember to also keep updating the crisis plan to ensure it will be more effective in addressing threats that might strike your organization later.
