In today’s business world, the ability to anticipate and respond to disruptive challenges – both internal and external – is essential. A comprehensive business continuity and resiliency plan can help you anticipate and manage these challenges, ensuring that your business can weather any storm. And when disruptions do occur, a robust public relations program can help you protect and defend your company’s reputation.
I have covered a number of topics that relate to business resilience planning in a communication context in this podcast, such as understanding who your competitors are, how to anticipate and manage disruption challenges, and how to communicate your plan and engage stakeholders along the way. Today I’m bringing this together into an episode that gives this all a badge and added some free downloads and resources for you at the end, so look out for those.
You’ll learn what business resilience is and how to take some small steps to communication planning, whatever the size of your business.
Let’s dive in!
Additional links and downloads:
If you’re a creative business or Agency check out Wadds Inc’s free Strategic Planning and Crisis Preparedness report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6316046fe5302f1a8f8f41c2/t/6340194579013c1db5cdf27a/1665145160000/Wadds-strategic-planning-and-crisis-preparedness-report-2022.pdf
Amanda Coleman has some great advice in this reasonably priced book; Everyday Communication Strategies: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Everyday-Communication-Strategies-Prevent-Protect/dp/1398606979
Check out my reputation management resource page on my website: https://henbe.co.uk/projects/protect-your-brand/
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Full transcript (unedited)
In today’s business world, the ability to anticipate and respond to disruptive challenges – both internal and external – is essential. A comprehensive business continuity and resiliency plan can help you anticipate and manage these challenges, ensuring that your business can weather any storm. And when disruptions do occur, a robust public relations program can help you protect and defend your company’s reputation.
I have covered a number of topics that relate to business resilience planning in a communication context in this podcast, such as understanding who your competitors are, how to anticipate and manage disruption challenges, and how to communicate your plan and engage stakeholders along the way. Today I’m bringing this together into an episode that gives this all a badge and added some free downloads and resources for you at the end, so look out for those.
You’ll learn what business resilience is and how to take some small steps to communication planning, whatever the size of your business.
Let’s dive in!
So starting at the beginning here, what are we talking about exactly –you may be listening and completely new to his topic, and, as I said in the intro, I have broken this down and talked about the components a lot on this podcast.
A comprehensive business continuity and resiliency plan helps you anticipate and manage disruptive challenges – both internal and external – so your business can weather any storm. You can get started by understanding your business’s risks and vulnerabilities and developing strategies to mitigate those risks.
I think it breaks down into three big components (or buckets);
- Understanding the external and internal risks;
- Working out the impact of those risks in different scenarios on various parts of the business and;
- Creating a plan of actions you need to take to mitigate and deal with the potential impact should it play out.
Now, these are potentially huge buckets, depending on the size of your business, and something other than something you may link to the communication function. But actually, they are about the potential reputation impact on your business. So they’re very much related to how you communicate in a crisis and how you prepare people for communicating about risk and impact, as well as educating people in your business about how business impact relates to reputation impact – which is very much the role of PR and comms in the business.
There are some simple things you can do;
A good place to start is by conducting a business impact analysis. This will help you identify which business functions are most critical to your operations and the financial and reputational risks if those functions are disrupted.
Once you have a handle on your risks, you can develop a communications plan to protect and defend your company’s reputation in a crisis.
Often, a business may already have a risk management plan which looks at standard things like organisation continuity and financial risk. However, it’s important to look at all external factors for reputation management, so plotting and analysing societal issues related to the business for reputation impact as well. Organising these into a grid and scoring them on the likelihood versus the impact helps identify those that need prioritisation and your immediate attention.
Other business tools, such as the probability vs. impact matrix grid and the PESTLE management tool, look at all the external factors (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental) that influence an business. It’s also good to look at internal and external factors when considering a wholesale review. For example, subjects such as internal diversity and inclusion can trigger reputational issues.
The good thing about this process is that you can also use it to draft a crisis management plan.
Moving on to your plan of action.
Once you have listed, analysed and prioritised your potential business continuity issues and their potential reputational impact, it’s a good idea to draft these into a plan for your business that can be monitored, reviewed and updated.
The plan could summarise the issue and the mitigation steps needed, including draft responses. It needs to be an implementable plan and not just a strategic document. This could include any scenarios you may want to consider and any impact you may want to mitigate and manage. Include sign-off procedures, communication steps or sequencing needed, and the team you will need to assemble should you need to.
This not only means you are super-prepared, but the impact won’t feel as great if the issues play out, as you will have done 60% of the thinking already.
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