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Hi friends. Welcome back to Less Chatter more matter, the podcast where we leave out the faffing around and deliver practical communication tips in an [00:01:00] engaging way that actually help. It's great to have you back for another episode, and thank you for continuing to tune in. Of course, if you are just here for the first time, a big welcome to you. For today's episode I thought I'd take a slightly different approach and rather than me just delivering a list of tips, although I do hope that is helpful, let me know if it's not, I wanted to share a case study with you from my own experience to show how some of these concepts we've started discussing come to life in a real life situation.

And what better way to demonstrate strategic communication inaction than a crisis? So in this episode, I'm going to talk you to you about an approach I've taken now a few times for crisis communication in the context of natural disasters. Now, if you are from somewhere like Queensland, where I'm from, then you are probably well versed in natural disasters unfortunately, uh, everything from floods to fires to cyclones, to [00:02:00] droughts, you name it, we've had it. And with climate change, natural disasters are only becoming more frequent and impacting more people as our population also grows. So chances are that whether you are in comms or not, at some point the business you work for or the sector or industry you work in is going to be impacted by a natural disaster in some way.

And like all crises, it pays to be prepared. If you remember back in episode nine, I talked through the three key principles of crisis communication, and I mentioned then that having a crisis communication plan in place is really crucial to the success of your communication when, not if, when a crisis occurs.

So even though sometimes we have very little warning of a natural disaster happening, you can still whip out that plan and be well prepared, but even if you don't have [00:03:00] a plan in place already, those three principles I spoke about back in that episode remain the same. Those principles are timely, transparent, and thoughtful, and today I'm going to show you how those principles come to life through this real-life case study. So let's get into it.

I want you to cast your minds back to March 2017 and here in Queensland, Australia, a tropical low formed over the northeast of the coast, and it's soon progressed to become Severe Cyclone Debbie. Now, for those of you who are based in Asia, a cyclone is the same as a typhoon and it's the same as a hurricane in the US.

So Cyclone Debbie formed at the northeast of Australia at the top of the state, and cyclones in this part of the country are not unusual in the summer months. It's really just the intensity that varies. And Debbie was a big one. She was category four strength, which is right at the top [00:04:00] end of the scale.

It hit towns in far north Queensland and along the Whitsunday coast. And for those of you who don't know the area that's very tropical, lots of tourists there. Um, beautiful part of the world when there's not a cyclone involved. And it caused significant damage to those towns there. It also traveled a bit further south, caused more damage further down the coast.

And as it traveled down the coast, the intensity did lessen, but then it caused, uh, widespread flooding in Southeast Queensland and Northern New South Wales. And unfortunately, that flooding resulted in the loss of lives. Schools were shut in Brisbane for a couple of days, and for those of you who don't know Brisbane, it's the capital city,

so quite a big city. So to have all the schools shut in the area was fairly significant. So all of this happened over the course of about two or three days, and as I said earlier, in this part of the world, we're kind of used to cyclones happening. But [00:05:00] this one I think took people by surprise because of the devastation it caused over such a huge area, so not just the parts where the cyclone itself hit, but also the flooding it caused throughout the state.

Now, at the time I was working in comms for a very big company that had a huge insurance business, and you can imagine when a natural disaster occurs insurance is right on the frontline. So in this instance, my team and I were supporting the CEO of the business and his comms, as well as leading the internal comms response to the crisis.

Now from an external comms perspective, other people in our corporate affairs team were responding to media inquiries, uh, and ensuring proactive messaging got out through the website and social media channels, et cetera. There are also teams like contact centre staff and assessors who communicate directly with impacted customers.

Now my team and I had the job of preparing all the CEO's communications and [00:06:00] driving that internal comms process. Uh, just to give you a bit of background here, this organisation was very well prepared for crises. So there was a crisis management plan and a crisis management team that got stood up when a crisis was escalated to a certain point. The subset of that team is the crisis communications team, and there's a crisis communication plan, which is updated every year. So all of these things were already in place. The internal comms component should not be missed in that planning. It's really, really crucial part of responding to a crisis.

Number one, many of our own staff, uh, were impacted in some way. So either the branches that they worked at were impacted or their own homes and belongings were impacted. So our staff had to know whether or not they could even go to work, what they had, what they could do if their access was cut, um, what options they had if they had to take leave [00:07:00] because their homes were damaged. We needed to keep our staff safe, and if it wasn't safe for them to go to work, then we had to let them know somehow. So this is where that first crisis comms principle comes into play. Timeliness. We worked with the business continuity people in the business and regional managers to get an accurate list early every morning of the stores that were open, closed, or open, but not necessarily accessible.

And also, uh, any reports of any team members who were personally impacted as well. Now, when I say early, I mean early! I was on conference calls at 5:00 AM every day for a couple of weeks. And that was to get the latest information that came, uh, through emergency services and a few other sources as well.

And that way I could get the latest information to pass on to the CEO, write his comms up, uh, update all our other channels, et cetera. So we took that information and we packaged it in different ways for different audiences and different [00:08:00] channels. We'd, uh, create an email update to go out from the CEO to all staff.

We'd provide information to leaders to pass on to their staff, um, and about their responsibilities in communication as well, we would update the staff hotline and we updated the intranet. So I want to pause here for a moment and just talk about this tactic, in using the intranet. We wanted it to be our one source of truth.

So if you have a lot of messages going out from different sources, it gets really confusing. People feel really bombarded. It's very likely that some of that information will become inaccurate. It's not necessarily the latest information. So we wanted to make sure we had this one source of truth that all other comms would point back to.

We set up a live running blog on the internet that was accessible from a big fat button right in the center of the screen on the homepage of the internet. And as information was provided throughout the day, we would upload that to the blog, right? [00:09:00] And all the other channels, as I said, like the CEO email, posts on Yammer, et cetera, we keep pointing them back to this blog as where to find the latest information. Now on the blog, we also included, uh, links to other resources like the Employee Assistance Program because, you know, you've got people who would need some mental health support throughout this, whether or not they were personally impacted or just dealing with a lot of distressed customers, for example.

Um, we also had links to official sources of information like the SES, the Bureau of Meteorology, those sorts of agencies. So not only did this blog mean people could access up-to-date information that was relevant to our organisation throughout the day at their convenience, it also meant we really had a really great record afterwards of how that incident progressed and the types of messages we put out.

And that's really important. Later on when you do a bit of a PIR on these things is to understand what worked, what didn't, uh, how this whole situation progressed. Now I [00:10:00] also mentioned something called the staff hotline. Now, this is a good backup channel, but it wasn't really well utilised at this particular business, but that doesn't mean it's not a good backup channel to have, and you should always have some backup channels when it comes to crisis comms.

Now, backup channels are things that you can activate when you know systems crash, or let's say your whole server gets hacked or something happens to it. How are people going to get information from you? So you need to have some backup channels. In our case, staff may not have access to the internet from wherever they are, so this was the backup channel for them.

The staff hotline was a 1800 number that they could ring and there would be a recorded message. And in that message, we would list all the branches that were currently closed, or access was difficult and we reiterated a lot of those staff safety messages and we could update that message as often as we liked.

But typically it happened about once, maybe twice a [00:11:00] day if things progressed rapidly. Now, this is where we get to the second principle of transparency. Being really open from the start about where the impacts are being felt and how we are responding. There is zero point in trying to hide these impacts because it's unsafe, it's unhelpful, and the media's gonna find out anyway, right?

So being transparent means you can make sure everyone has the information they need to stay safe, and also the information they need to support their customers and their own colleagues. And that means you need to have consistent messaging through every channel from every voice. So whether that's internal or external audiences, from the CEO or an in Yammer message from another leader, the key messages have to be consistent in order to avoid confusion.

Now it's worth pausing here to remind everyone that when a crisis does happen, you need to down tools on everything else. That crisis becomes your number one [00:12:00] priority from a comms perspective. In the case of Cyclone Debbie, that storm was moving very fast and different towns and branches and people were being impacted by the hour in different ways. When the storm was approaching Southeast Queensland, the government began making announcements about schools being closed, for example, and encouraging people to stay home, work from home where possible, don't go out, you know, all those sorts of messages. Now, we had to move quickly on that to, uh, inform our staff about what our policies were, et cetera, how to stay safe.

It's all those sorts of things. So for example, What could our staff do if they had to keep their children at home, which meant they couldn't work? What could they do if access to their office was cut off? All of those sorts of things needed to be considered in the messaging, and they needed to be communicated really quickly, which means our attention had to stay on the crisis response.

So everything else has to wait. Focus on the crisis at hand. [00:13:00] Now this brings me to the third principle of thoughtfulness. Your messaging needs to show empathy. It needs to show understanding and build an emotional connection with your audience. So in this case, it meant making sure the CEO's message acknowledged the huge amount of work going on by teams who were supporting thousands and literally thousands of customers across the country and many of whom were understandably very upset, right? Very distressed. It also meant acknowledging the feelings of those staff whose own homes and belongings have been lost, and not just acknowledging those feelings, but offering other support mechanisms that were meaningful for them.

Remember that your people can either be your biggest advocates or your biggest critics, and a crisis is an opportunity to build that sense of community, a sense of pride in your business, among your teams, and activate them as advocates for your business in the longer term. So your messages have to demonstrate [00:14:00] how you are supporting your people, your customers, and your communities.

That thoughtful message will go a really long way immediately, and in the longer term when the dust settles. Okay, so the storm has progressed along the eastern seaboard of the country and eventually came to its natural end. However, the work isn't done, obviously, there's still a tremendous amount of work to do in the wake of a crisis like Cyclone Debbie, and a lot of questions, particularly in the insurance world, questions like, How long will it take to process all the insurance claims?

What can we do about insurance affordability in disaster prone areas? What kind of support can we continue to offer to our people who are impacted or have worked ridiculously hard and long hours to continue to support customers and process massive number of claims? It's at these times, I think once the initial disaster has settled, that the risk of morale dropping is actually at [00:15:00] its highest, not during the crisis itself.

And at that point people are running off adrenaline, right? And they're really focused on just helping people, but now they're exhausted. So at this point, our messaging in our comms turns to more recognising and celebrating our people who were doing amazing things to help each other and the customers.

We had little interviews with assessors who were on the ground, um, who had set up stalls in assessment centers with other insurers to get their voice and their, um, I guess view and experiences of what was happening and the stories they were hearing from customers. They shared photos and videos with us that we included in that blog that I talked about earlier.

Um, and we included their stories as well, and it was a really great way to demonstrate just how amazing our people were in that moment. We also shared positive feedback from customers who were delighted by the support they'd been offered. The CEO visited a few of the impacted areas, [00:16:00] visited assessment centers.

We reported on those visits, his reflections, you know, on the devastation he'd seen, but also his reflections on the amazing work that our people were undertaking in supporting communities and customers and each other. So these types of stories still address the hard work of your people, but they also recognise and celebrate it and show that it hasn't gone unnoticed, shows that we value those people. It can bring your team members back to your organisation's purpose, why you exist as an organisation in the first place. So if done right and thoughtfully, you can really use your crisis comms as an opportunity to reengage people behind your vision, your goals, and your purpose as an organisation.

So to quickly reiterate, the three principles of crisis comms are timeliness, thoughtfulness, and transparency. And all of these three come together to help you build and maintain trust in your [00:17:00] organisation and its leadership during a crisis. Trust is the big goal of crisis communication. It's really hard to earn, so easily lost, and a crisis can either be that opportunity to maintain and build trust or lose it in a heartbeat.

When you lose trust in an organisation and or its leadership, you have disengaged staff who will no longer be your advocates. You'll have an increase in staff turnover. You'll have a decrease in trust among your customers, shareholders, other stakeholders. And all of this ultimately negatively impacts the bottom line, right?

And risks the viability of your business. But with really well planned crisis management and crisis communication, you can help to mitigate some of those risks. That's why it's so critical to have a crisis communication plan in place, and not only have a plan, but know how to use it. So in this case, we had the plan, everybody already knew their roles and responsibilities because we, not only did [00:18:00] we update it once a year, but we kept updating it as people changed. We had a lot of systems and tools in the backend that could just be activated like that, as soon as a crisis hit, like that staff hotline, like that running blog on the intranet, those sorts of things could just be activated.

So again, having the plan in place really, really critical helped us hit the ground running. There was no confusion about who was doing what. Everybody just picked up, got on with it, got the job done. So speaking of being prepared, my Crisis Comms Bootcamp beta test is kicking off next week. There's just a couple of spots remaining, and this bootcamp, it's a one hour webinar once a day from Monday to Friday, along with Q&A sessions from me and all the tools and templates you'll need to get your crisis comms plan underway and position yourself as the go-to person for crisis comms in your business.

Whether you work in comms or not, whether you work for a big or organisation or a small business, the Crisis [00:19:00] Comms Bootcamp will be for you, I promise. As I said at the start of the episode, it is not a matter of if, but when a crisis will occur and it will impact your business in some way. It's much better to be prepared than to be chasing your tail when things kick off.

Now if you're interested in the bootcamp, I am offering it at half price because I'm trialing this format for the first time. Usually I run crisis comms training as either a half day, full day or even two day format, cos there is a lot to unpack if you really want to go down that rabbit hole. But I'm hoping this format will make it easier and more accessible for people to learn, while still being really engaging, and that's what I need you to tell me if this format works or not. So I'll throw a link in the show notes or head to, heymelcomms.training/training to get to the info. In the meantime, I'd love your feedback on this podcast right now. So let me know what's working, what you think I could improve, or what else you'd love to hear [00:20:00] about.

I love feedback, so please get in touch with your thoughts. As always, it's been a pleasure delivering this learning to you and I will see you next. Keep doing amazing things.