What is crisis management?

The word crisis is small, but its effects can be gigantic — especially for organizations that are not prepared to face a more challenging scenario. Therefore, to prevent the consequences of these difficult times from negatively impacting your company, it is necessary to have good crisis management.

But what is crisis management ? It is about the process to make the administration smarter, since it studies the possible impact that a time of uncertainty brings to an institution. Still, it is a plan created by the leadership to evaluate different types of risks that can affect a company.

The pandemic scenario, for example, can affect your brand, financial situation, climate, communication and organizational structure. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze each point in detail.

Therefore, HR in times of crisis needs to have a fully balanced and efficient team. The crisis management process develops manuals in the face of the possibility of a difficult time invading the corporate environment. The issues considered are:

• procedures to be adopted;
• responsible for each emergency measure;
• organizational priorities;
• how the resources will be invested and applied;
• response time for the problem;
• response time for the audience;
• Anticipation of situations that may be compromising;
• image preservation;
• strengthening of organizational culture.

This type of planning makes the company take safe and efficient actions in the face of unpredictable or difficult situations. HR in times of crisis needs to be fully strategist to give greater support to managers and the entire direction.

What is the role of HR in times of crisis?

As already mentioned, in the face of this pandemic scenario, having preventive management is essential. Therefore, it is necessary to think about the internal and external scenarios to ensure less serious impacts and avoid the most common mistakes in times of crisis .

Therefore, HR management needs to think about its internal audience strategically. In addition, adopt control measures and total care, since the employee is sensitive to the unpredictable.

What are the advantages of crisis management?

The high complexity of a corporate environment makes the company need to be prepared. Therefore, having a crisis management means becoming preventive to combat possible situations.

In the current scenario, if an organization does not have good crisis management, it can end up closing its doors. Therefore, it is important to know how to act in tense situations. Here are the advantages of crisis management:

• have greater analytical capacity in the face of a difficult situation;
• new strategies to be adapted to a new scenario;
• reduce negative impacts on the company;
• ability to continue production in times of crisis;
• have solutions for adverse situations;
• identification of possible threats with more assertiveness;
• safer decision making ;
• more controlled and effective administration.

How does HR act in times of crisis?

There are points that must be observed and executed by HR during a crisis. Check out some of them below.

1-Ensuring safety for employees

Any change is a warning sign and leaves a team scared. Therefore, in situations like the one our country is facing, the feeling of insecurity usually takes over the corporate environment.

Therefore, the company needs to transmit this security to its professionals. HR in times of crisis needs to have strategies that reinforce the positioning of the organization, reassuring all employees. Therefore, maintaining a sincere and clear dialogue is the best way to clarify all doubts.

2-Conduct the dismissal analysis for the situation

Crisis times involve layoffs . Unfortunately, this is a fact, as a company’s revenues tend to decline.

In the pandemic of the new Coronavirus, many organizations had to turn off employees, which implies challenges for HRs.

So that your company doesn’t suffer when it’s time to turn off a professional, you need to adopt a more humanized attitude .

Therefore, having a clear conversation and informing the reasons that led the company to make this decision is the best way to face this situation. Still, offer all the support for whatever is needed.

So that the dismissal does not imply a palliative resolution, capable of bringing losses to the post-crisis, the dismissal analysis assumes a fundamental role.

Every crisis has a period of preparation, survival and post-crisis actions. Therefore, deciding the professionals who will be terminated involves a study that is more complete than analyzing the impact of the salary economy.

Dismissing a high-performing and delivering professional at the time of a crisis, for example, can reflect a drop in productivity in the post-crisis recovery.

3-Leave recruitment processes in remote mode

One of the main forms of prevention against Covid-19 is social isolation. Therefore, several companies adopted the criterion of continuing their production from home or removed some professionals to avoid the agglomeration of people.

Thus, if an organization needs to hire a professional, the entire recruitment and selection process must be done remotely. This is something that requires more creativity, to select the right and most efficient person for the moment.

Also, if a professional is hired, the entire process of admission, payroll, vacation control and timekeeping must be done online — until all companies are back up and running normally.

4-Strengthen organizational culture

Today, it is important for management to have strategies to strengthen organizational culture. Therefore, HR in times of crisis must pay attention to this issue.

With employees away or at home office, it becomes more complicated to carry out monitoring and this ends up preventing the exchange of daily experiences. Therefore, in the face of an uncertain and insecure framework, this culture must be strengthened.

Therefore, provide periodic feedback , recognize the team’s effort and show each employee their achievements in order to motivate them. Also, send exclusive congratulations and have other strategies to strengthen the brand.

5-Implement containment actions

One of the security measures adopted by companies in order not to stop production is to work from home. In order for the demands to continue to be of quality, HR must assess whether:

• the employee has a suitable place to carry out their activities;
• equipment at home will be enough for tasks to be completed;
• the chairs and tables are comfortable;
• communication will be by telephone — using an available landline or cell phone;
• the place has internet access;
• computers at home have the capabilities to hold online meetings;
• the company will provide equipment to help professionals develop their tasks with more quality;
• the company will provide financial assistance so that he/she pays the electricity and internet bills;
• the professional needs some special support.

6-Become strategic through data analysis

HR in times of crisis needs to be even more attentive when analyzing company data. After all, this will give the sector strategies to deal with the situation and become more efficient.

A proactive sector is better than a reactive one. Therefore, HR needs to study the existing possibilities through the results of the analyzes carried out, providing improvements not only for the financial side of the company, but also for the team’s professionals.

7-make effective decisions

In difficult times, having crisis management makes you make more effective and assertive decisions. After all, every step taken is important for a company to continue producing with quality. Therefore, HR needs to have excellent management to be able to make the right decisions.

How to do strategic planning for a crisis?

Crisis management requires good strategic planning . Therefore, it is necessary that the team that will be responsible for making all this plan is very strategist and has the approval of the leader. But we emphasize that it doesn’t have to be anything very complex, just efficient!

Now, here are some crisis management tips for you to set up your strategic planning.

1-analyze the scenario

The proposal of planning must be to seek solutions for the scenario that a company faces. So the first step is to do your analysis correctly. Through this verification, you will be able to understand the possible impacts that the crisis can bring to your business and, from there, devise efficient strategies to avoid being hit.

In this way, it is acting in a preventive way. After all, it will analyze the scenario to eliminate the risks of the business being negatively affected.

2-Outsource demands

During a crisis, you need to think about whether there is a possibility of outsourcing some type of demand. We know that, in this context, layoffs tend to be in large numbers, so one sector or another is lacking.

So, so that the production process is not affected, how about outsourcing some service? It’s a more cost-effective way to continue keeping your work efficient.

3-Recreate the annual plan

Normally, at the end of a year, an annual plan for the next is already made. Project forecasts, executions, hiring, vacations and so on. What is not foreseen are crises and that is wrong.

Therefore, in crisis management it is necessary to review the annual planning to verify which steps need to be recreated. Certainly, higher financial expenses will have to be eliminated, as the scenario will call for savings. So get the whole team together and review which strategies should be rethought and which can be maintained.

4-align goals

Aligning goals is one of the important points in times of crisis. After all, if the intention was to move forward to gain more space in the market, at this point, you may need to slow down a little. But only postpone and not cancel ideas.

Here, it will also be necessary to gather your entire team and discuss what the new goals of the company will be. At this point, it is necessary for everyone to have the same vision to achieve the proposed goal.

5-Have focus

When developing a strategic plan for times of crisis, it is important that you keep in mind what its real role will be. Maintaining operations or restructuring some may be necessary to continue producing and not stop activities.

Therefore, in addition to an A plan, it is important to have a B in reserve. That’s because if one doesn’t work out, you can continue to keep your company open. After all, that’s the focus, not stopping activities.

6-Empower the team

We know that the moment of crisis is economic. But empowering does not involve training, but all its professionals in the same process to have the same vision. So get your entire team involved to discuss what the new plans will be.

At this point, everyone must have a specific role so that the organization continues to function normally. So empower everyone with meetings, in-house support, and provide tools to get everything done as planned.

7-Optimize internal processes

This is an essential step. HR in times of crisis needs to know how to create improvements to optimize internal processes. Then review the whole scenario, what is already applied and works efficiently, and what can be changed to further improve production. For this, normally, a meeting with the board is necessary for them to approve such changes.

8-Improve internal communication

Times of crisis cause noise to arise in the company’s corridors. And there’s nothing worse than endless conversation, right? Therefore, the ideal is that the internal communication of an organization is very clear and direct for all employees to avoid the dreaded gossip.

To do so, send marketing e-mails with the new procedures, post advertisements on the institution’s bulletin boards in visible places, hold meetings with all professionals and, finally, make yourself available to clarify any doubts.

9-Metric the results

Measuring the efficiency of your actions is essential in normal times. But in times of crisis, this is fundamental! After all, you need to know where you are hitting and if this is the right path.

However, in quiet times, this measurement is done every year or semester. However, in a crisis, it is necessary to perform this data analysis on a weekly basis. Preferably with feedback for everyone involved.

HR in times of crisis needs to use tools that help it metric results correctly. The People Analytics is an effective solution that helps the sector in the normal and also to make their crisis management.