Teams and businesses have to work together and quickly to navigate times of change and crisis.
Without defined roles, it is much harder to ensure that your organisational communication aligns, and most importantly, that it aligns with your business priorities. For some businesses, although still in crisis mode, there’s business as usual work to do too. Even though your team may be small, getting everyone on the same page is key to being able to plan beyond damage control.
There are 3 ways businesses can start to get ahead in their communications:
1. Assign roles
Work out what communication roles you need and assign a person to each role. Consider a primary and secondary contact where possible. We don’t know how long this uncertainty will linger, and your business will have to manage crisis communications as well as ongoing business communications. People may also burn out or potentially get sick.
2. Clearly define roles
Working in a crisis is very different to business-as-usual. Roles may be different as will priorities. People are working from home and have less face-to-face contact during the day and processes change. Clearly mapping out and documenting who is responsible for what, will make your and their difficult job much easier.
3. Communicate roles
Communicate the clearly defined roles, responsibilities, process and contact details across the business so that everyone knows who to contact and how to communicate consistently.
Here’s a short template that may help.