Crisis Management

All different type of businesses has a business model that is profitable in a specific business environment that is vulnerable to crisis, uncertainty and problems.

Regardless of their sizes (Small, medium and large), Businesses face many challenges and crisis that must be solved. The best companies are the companies that can adapt the most to the crisis. Each company has a specific problem even if they face the same crisis. It depends on the industry of the company, and its Structure.

The following are some of the important steps to solve a crisis that face companies and businesses.

1-Get the right people to analyze the situations, problems, and determine the impact or expected impact of the crisis on the company and stakeholders. In the same meeting (emergency meeting), next steps should be determined to manage the crisis and solve the problems.

2-The right people are usually the senior managers and CEO since they are responsible for the organization’s crisis response. It is better to have representatives from stakeholders, business unit in different geographic areas and the legal advisers are better be in the meeting. This gives us the whole picture to know how to manage the crisis.

3-Response team should be created that are usually headed by the CEO in the first meeting.

Preparation for the future crisis:

1-Developing Internal policy to be used during future crisis. For instance, focusing on the victims or financial damage first and communicate internally before any public announcement are examples of such policies that are better to be developed.

2-Pre-crisis prediction and post-crisis review that help the organization to be prepared and detect the potential problems that may be a crisis in the future. Every crisis should be studied in details, and company should be ready to crisis since crisis inevitable.

3-Usually, the reputation of the company goes down by social media during the crisis so have a stand before the crisis is important in social media to buffer any rumor. And the social media and other channels can be used as a mean of marketing.

Companies follow different ways to survive during the crisis and reduce its impact. There are several ways to apply each method. The small and medium size companies cannot stay as much as the big companies since they have very limited financial resources and human resource too. Companies can reduce the expense, find a new business model and finding new market to their services and goods in order to survive during and after the crisis.

1-Reducing costs usually include variable cost reduction especially reducing employees or their salary. Companies can dismiss those employees that their tasks can be shared with other employee without impacting the performance of the company too much.

Some company reduce the salaries of the employees with a percentage but it is better to reduce more from the seniors and managers. Under this condition all the employees will stay in the company with the hope the condition gets better.

2-Sometime, companies need to change their business model or find a new market for their services or goods to survive.