Unfortunately, the COVID-19 virus affects every business. Hoarding was a big thing in supermarkets whilst the hotel business was seeing a dramatic decrease in bookings. Stock levels decrease and the need for flexible staff is growing. In short; COVID-19 messes with your normal day-to-day business.
Corona changes your company’s future plans. Actually, that is an understatement. We see an increase in questions such as: ‘How do I keep my staff up to date?’,‘How can I make sure there’s no panic amongst my teams?’, ‘Which procedures should they follow and how do we communicate this clearly?’
A clear communication plan provides stability for your organization. Your company is depending on it. Answer questions and take away uncertainty amongst your employees. Make use of our 6 tips for crisis communication!
Tip 1: Create an FAQ list – answer the most important questions of your employees
Your employees might have many questions about topics like hygiene, new guidelines, being sick, working more hours, the company during the crisis, and about customer service.
List down those questions and make sure you answer them. Employees are used to going to you as a manager with their questions all the time. If this is the case, you must have a platform on which you answer the most important questions.
If you have an FAQ overview, your employees can look up the most important information whenever they want. In case they have specific questions, they can always approach you personally. Top tip: If you have an employee experience platform, your employees can easily approach you via chat.
Top tip: If you have an employee experience platform, your employees can approach you easily via chat.
Tip 2: Use one single source of truth to keep your employees up-to-date
It is essential that your crisis communication reaches all your employees at the same time.
Your employees are non-desk workers and therefore you need to think about a platform that makes it possible to reach all employees. Ideally, you want a tool that meets the following requirements:
- The tool is available on your employee’s smartphone
- Your employees have a personal login
- You can send quick updates with this tool
- The tool is GDPR-compliant
- You can send different messages per group, location and team.
Conclusion: an employee app works perfectly for crisis communication:
- You can reach all your employees with one click of a button.
- You don’t need to switch between different platforms.
- You can communicate between different groups and send different measures per team or location.
- You can monitor the performance of your messages by using metrics.
Tip 3: Make use of video messaging to make your message more personal and clear
Did you know that your employees take top-down messaging more seriously in crisis situations? According to Interact , employees need to hear from managers in times of crisis. Tribe, an internal communication strategy expert, recommends that a short video with a message from the CEO works best in those situations.
Short videos, no longer than 60 seconds, in which the CEO explains the meaning of a certain procedure work best. Make sure that the CEO mentions the key takeaways.
Tip 4: Make sure all employees read your messages
In crisis communication, it is really important that everyone reads it!
An example: suppose you introduce a new hygiene measure. Nine out of ten employees read this and adhere strictly to it. The tenth employee has overlooked the information and does not follow the rule. Then, of course, the procedure does not work.
What exactly can you do?
- Make sure you can check how many people are reading your posts in the first place. With the internal communication module of Oneteam, this is possible, for example. You can also see who read the message and who didn’t.
- Set a daily reminder to reach an even larger audience. A push reminder works well.
Tip 5: Create short microlearnings
Create short microlearnings. Quickly delivering the message is key for crisis communication.
For example, supermarkets can only allow limited numbers of customers to enter. Your non-desk workers must strictly follow this rule, so it is crucial for them to know what to do in this situation.
This measure is too complex to answer quickly. In this case, creating a short interactive m-learnings would be a better solution. This gives you the opportunity to show step by step how you require your employees to handle the situation. If they have specific questions after the m-learning course, they can always approach you later.
Top tip: set deadlines for the m-learning courses. You want your employees to be fully informed, as soon as possible. Create an m-learning course and you can easily monitor who finished the course and who did not.
Tip 6: Learn and reflect
Learn from this crisis situation. For a future similar crisis, you will then at least know how to handle it best. Here some insider tips:
- List down hurdles you experienced during the process.
- Ask your employees for feedback about crisis communication. Create a poll and let them vote. This is an easy way of quickly gaining answers.
- List down what went well. You can apply this in the same way next time.
Conclusion: crisis communication is key!
Corona has become a serious problem. Get rid of the problem as much as possible by making a plan for this crisis. And then communicate it as clearly as possible. In any case, it is a question of being able to answer questions from employees as quickly and clearly as possible. Guiding in times of crisis is: make sure you have a single source of truth. Oneteam is such a single source of truth, a platform that all your employees can use. In this way, internal crisis communication is much smoother.
