AUTHENTICVOICE

The purpose of your communication should not be to appease everyone. Of course, you don’t want to offend people. But if you deliver your message in an authentic and empathetic way, hopefully, even those who disagree will respect the thoughtfulness that went into it.

Be prepared to respond

Don’t get caught trying to devise a crisis communications strategy after a crisis occurs. Instead, work with your executive team immediately to answer the following questions if you haven’t already:

What are our brand values, and how do we want them to show up in light of a crisis? How do our values inform our approach to issues that affect our employees and customers?

What is our brand persona? Does our persona differ between our internal messaging and our public image?

If you’ve created a place of trust, safety and respect, your team will discuss issues openly, knowing that differing views are encouraged and welcomed. The outcomes of these discussions will inform your crisis communications strategy, including the response’s tone, voice, and strength.

Crisis communications are a team sport

Now that you have a strategy, you need to build a team to stay on top of current events, coordinate in real-time, and draft culturally sensitive and inclusive communications for company leadership to review and distribute. Engage your communications experts from marketing, your employee experts from HR, and a handful of respected and trusted global “culture-builders” to represent the diverse views across your company.

When a crisis occurs, the team should work asynchronously over several hours to craft a message and send it to their executive contact for

Continued from page 28 review. The review and subsequent revisions must happen within a specified time period. If you wait 48 hours, you may have missed the best window to communicate your authentic message, and to your employees. The silence could be deafening.

At InMoment, our crisis communications are primarily distributed from our CEO, but our regional and HR leaders are secondary messengers depending on the geography and other specifics of the crisis.

External crisis communications

Too often, people view external and internal communications as independent of each other. This is an archaic view. We live in a world where information is immediate and social posts go viral in seconds. You’ll know you’ve delivered a message that resonates with your workforce when your internal communication organically becomes external communication.