Transcript
[00:00:05.330] - Imogen
Hello and welcome back to Dear Comms, the coffee break podcast tackling your biggest corporate comms challenges. I'm Imogen.
[00:00:13.030] - Amanda
And I'm Amanda. We're here to give you practical, no-nonsense advice so you can focus on the things that really drive influence, engagement, and impact. Today we're in our fourth episode of our crisis season. And we're looking at what happens after the storm, or the initial storm has passed, because what you do after a crisis can matter as much as how you responded in the moment.
[00:00:39.800] - Imogen
It's easy to think, you know, once the headlines have died down, once the journalists are not knocking at your door, that it's all over and you can move on. But the fact is that people don't forget so quickly, and silence after the fact doesn't just leave questions, but it also leaves almost a vacuum in which doubt can start to build.
[00:01:05.890] - Amanda
Yeah, 100%. You know, your employees, investors, regulators, suppliers, communities, they don't forget, and they are still interested in what's happening and what the future holds. You and I have seen this up pretty close when we've worked with clients that handled the immediate crisis pretty well and then said nothing for weeks. And I think that's probably due to sheer relief that the phone isn't ringing off the hooks anymore. But that silence, it creates more uncertainty than the incident itself. You know, employees feel forgotten, and trust takes months to rebuild, years even.
[00:01:46.600] - Imogen
I would go with years more than months. When we are dealing with crises for our clients, Amanda and I talk a lot about the 3 Rs when it comes to that kind of post-crisis strategy. So review, rebuild, and reassure. So I think if we go through those one at a time, we'll start with review. And that is your opportunity to take a hard and brutally honest look what happened and how you responded. Because there is a real need to take what happened and learn from it. You need to invest time here. This is where your crisis log is going to come in super handy. So, invest time here and resist that temptation to kind of skip it and say, "I don't want to think about it ever again," and jump straight to the rebuilding.
[00:02:41.160] - Amanda
Yeah, exactly. This is where I think real change begins, actually. You want to go beyond what went wrong. You need to ask yourself, how were the decisions made? What data or instincts drove them? Who had a voice, who didn't? It's a real opportunity, an important opportunity to really dive into what went wrong.
[00:03:06.090] - Imogen
Have a look at your stakeholder map. That you've obviously done as part of your ongoing preparation for crisis. Have a look at that stakeholder map. So, who did you actually talk to and who did you miss out? And what was the reason for that? You know, recovery isn't just internally with your immediate employees. Who outside in the wider world needs reassurance? Who do you need to start engaging with a bit more?
[00:03:35.460] - Amanda
Yeah, and absolutely, maybe reprioritize them and re-tier them. I think the other thing to forget is global nuance. Nothing is ever really local these days. What feels transparent in one country might come off quite differently somewhere else. So we've seen Teams rollout templated, one-size-fits-all, messaging, and, you know, we're a fan of being ready and having some templates ready, but it's not— it's in a global context, you have to adapt and build in flexibility so that it's kind of culturally appropriate.
[00:04:18.460] - Imogen
Yeah, and I mean, that nuance is not just about different languages. Even countries that speak the same language, you know, they might have very different cultures or very different approaches to the way in which they expect companies to respond to crises. So, it's really about working with local teams as well and making sure that what you're saying is coming across in the right way.
[00:04:41.160] - Amanda
[Speaker:LOUISE] Yeah.
[00:04:41.390] - Imogen
[Speaker:KATIE] Think about what you can learn from the experience you've had. So, follow up on your stakeholders, do pulse surveys, have a look at that decision log that your legal team is sitting on, revisit all your frameworks, revisit all of your procedures, and use those to get better.
[00:05:03.850] - Amanda
Yeah, don't sit on those learnings. You will have playbooks and manuals, I'm sure. Update your what-if scenarios, rewrite your frequently asked questions, 'cause I think if nothing changes after a crisis, then you probably haven't learned enough.
[00:05:20.240] - Imogen
And when that crisis happens, you'll go into the whole spiral all over again, and you won't, it won't get any better. The second R we were talking about is rebuild. It's tempting to think about rebuild as getting the spin wagon out and trying to make it all seem better. But actually, it isn't so much about what you're saying, but it's about how you behave.
[00:05:42.140] - Amanda
100%. You can't rebuild trust by just by saying we care. You've got to prove it. And that means showing change and not just talking about it, quite frankly.
[00:05:54.260] - Imogen
Yeah, and we've said the same in the past about things like values and having your leadership live your values. It's the same here with this rebuild section. We need our leadership to live the rebuild. They need to be visible. They need to be walking the floor. They need to be doing town halls. They need to be talking to people. Your employees need to know that leadership has not gone into the bunker, that they're still engaged, that they do actually care beyond the fact that the headlines are no longer there.
[00:06:28.660] - Amanda
Yeah, and a plea for middle managers at this point, they are your frontline. They are the ones that employees turn to when they want to know, are we okay and what's happening now? So, give them a What Now pack, talking points, guidance on tone, not just the facts, something a little bit more nuanced and a bit more authentic.
[00:06:53.580] - Imogen
Yeah, your unofficial leaders can be really good here as well, you know, those people that you turn to, to really know what's going on in the business.
[00:07:02.790] - Amanda
They know everything, right?
[00:07:04.710] - Imogen
Yes, they do. Victoria was my go-to person. She knew absolutely everything. But, you know, getting those unofficial leaders on side and making sure that they know what's going on and how they can help other people when inevitably they're approached, that's also a really good way of kind of building that trust up again. Volkswagen is a really good example, actually. So, way back in—
[00:07:33.090] - Amanda
On both sides, actually.
[00:07:34.920] - Imogen
Yeah. Way back in the annals of time, 10 years ago now, so 2015. 10 years? It is. We're all getting very old. They had a huge emissions crisis. I don't know if you remember.
[00:07:47.320] - Amanda
Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:48.480] - Imogen
And it was a massive corporate scandal. Massive. Their market value dropped, I think it was by like 40-odd billion in 2 months. And they got a huge amount wrong in the way in which they handled the crisis. But eventually, they kind of got it together a little bit. They did a multi-year transformation program. They completely restructured internally. They changed their leadership. They shifted their strategy towards electric vehicles. And it has been, as we say, it's been 10 years, and it's been a very, very slow recovery, but it is starting to make a difference. And they have been very transparent and very visible about the changes that they've made.
[00:08:37.140] - Amanda
You make a really important point here, and that is recovery can be an inflection point, a chance to become better, stronger, more trusted than before. I'd be interested to know how many people are still buying Volkswagens, actually. Point to remember. Look it up. Look it up, yeah. And in fact, really, this ought to be part of your crisis strategy from the very start. You know, what are the actions we're gonna take that means stakeholders trust us in the future?
[00:09:06.330] - Imogen
How can we become better as a result of this? You know, it's like your mother always used to say, you know, a mistake is just a chance to do things better the next time. It's a learning opportunity. I don't think my mother ever said anything like that.
[00:09:19.050] - Amanda
Anything like that to me.
[00:09:21.870] - Imogen
Well, mine did, and she was right. So, going on to the final R, the reassure. It took Volkswagen 10+ years, and they're still not there yet. And trust cannot be repaired in a week by putting out a nice new press release and a video. It has to be shown, and your progress as an organization and as a leadership team has to be shown over time. So you can think about how you're going to reassure in the long term. So doing kind of milestone messaging, sort of your 100 days on update, that can work really well. It's about reinforcing that, you know, we're still here, we're still working on it, we haven't forgotten, we know we got it wrong without obviously admitting liability, etc., etc., etc. Um, But we are committed in the long term to doing better the next time.
[00:10:22.070] - Amanda
Yeah, and just because the organization and you are ready to move on doesn't mean the outside world is at all. They're not in the same place. And I think you've also gotta be consistent in the don't go quiet. Even if there's not that much new news to say, I think transparency is about frequency as much about the content that you're saying.
[00:10:47.340] - Imogen
And we can't forget, you know, much like messages and transparency might come across differently in different countries, in different cultures, that reassurance that you do also needs to be very localized as well.
[00:11:01.290] - Amanda
Yeah.
[00:11:01.910] - Imogen
Because what our French customers might take as something reassuring might not be the same for our Malaysian customers. You need to set guardrails, I guess, global guardrails, but give your individual markets or regions the room to breathe and to adjust them depending on the context in which they're operating.
[00:11:27.920] - Amanda
The other thing that's really important when it comes to recovery is data. Gotta track how things are going. So run employee pulse checks, you know, monitor media sentiment, checking with key partners and regulators. There's one thing that we've on several occasions have recommended to clients is to build a trust index. So a tracker tracking reputational health over time. And there's loads of little data points that you can put into that, whether that is pulse checks, whether that's media monitoring, whether that is some, you know, you observing of particular stakeholder groups. Build a bigger picture and keep everybody updated.
[00:12:13.680] - Imogen
Yeah, and try not to have amnesia. It is so tempting. Once you are past the heat of a crisis, you just want to curl up into a ball and forget that it ever happened and get on with the next thing. But those learnings, that evaluation, those pulse checks, the understanding around your reputation, You need to make that part of your culture. That's not just something that sits within comms. That is something that comms leads and brings to the leadership team, and they embrace and bring it into the wider organizational culture.
[00:12:49.420] - Amanda
Yeah, institutionalize it. Yeah. So, if I was to sum up and recap, review what's happened, rebuild through visible change, and reassure through consistent and localized updates. That's how you're going to start turning that reputational hit into something that's more like a longer-term opportunity.
[00:13:09.370] - Imogen
Next time, we are going to close out our crisis series, and we're going to give you our 10 golden rules for crisis management. So, I know you've all marked it in your diaries, tune in for that one. Don't forget to send us questions or thoughts. You know, we like a good knotty problem to unpick, so send them our way. But until next time, bye!
)
