Blogs

Workflows are more than just complicated flowcharts, and we think they’re vital to responding effectively in case of a crisis or incident and will give you more accountability and allow you to follow-up after the event.

Workflows improve your incident response

Hopefully, incidents don’t happen very often in your organisation which means that it is easy for the team members who make up your crisis management team will spend the majority of their time in the day-to-day running or your business, whether that’s in sales or marketing, and it is probably unreasonable to expect them to refresh themselves on the intricate details of your crisis management plan so that they know it by heart just in case.

You can, therefore, think of your workflow as a sort of aide-memoir or checklist so that if the worst did happen, it can be acted upon quickly and almost unconsciously to ensure your team responds quickly and effectively. Although the individual members of your crisis management team may be senior managers within the company, they may not be experts in incident management, so a workflow provides them with some support too.

Include relevant details in your workflow

Having a workflow is great, but if it is too vague your crisis management team could spend more time trying to find the relevant information to communicate to your team. Ensuring that all the relevant information is included within your workflow can save a lot of time and effort on the part of your team ensuring the response to an incident is as straightforward and efficient as possible. This will also allow you to capture and retain corporate knowledge, and helps you to plan for the fact that if people leave the business then their knowledge leaves with them ensuring the response provided by your team is always consistent and effective. There is however a fine balance to be struck here between giving enough information and too much, which could just as easily hinder your response as help it.

Make workflows accessible

Making sure your workflows are easily accessible is another key consideration. If your workflow is only available on paper, how does your team access it when they are away from the office? Arguably having a cloud-based solution makes sense to ensure that it is available at all times to those who need it, but could you take it a step further and have templates available to your crisis management team to help them get messages out faster and more efficiently?

Practise!

Having a workflow is one thing when it comes to crisis management, but if you haven’t tested it how will you know it works? Testing your workflow is a guaranteed way to make sure that your plan works as you’d expect, and allows your crisis management team and employees become familiar with the response to an incident or emergency.

Do you have a crisis management workflow? Let us know in the comments and to find out how Klaxon can help you create a workflow for your business why not <<schedule a demo>>?