Emergency Management Planning: Building trust before the crisis

By: Caterina Valentino

The question isn’t if there’ll be another crisis. The question is how long until the next crisis.

Communicators, now’s the time to nudge your organization’s culture to one of emergency management planning. It’s about shifting to an organizational belief that being prepared makes for a nimble organization. An organization that easily pivots to address any internal or external threat.

It’s about building an emergency management plan that fosters trust horizontally and vertically within an organization. It’s about opening communication channels and building social capital across external stakeholders. It about making your organization seen and heard – noticed as a trusted community colleague.

It’s about modernizing and reshaping one’s crisis management plan to emergency management planning.

Communicators, here are a few of the action steps you need to consider to pull your organization away from crisis reaction to emergency management planning.

Focus – Trust building

Crisis management’s focus is self-serving – protecting an organization’s reputation and ensuring its long-term viability during unexpected events. It’s prescriptive and in-the-moment. Its goal is to minimize damage and quickly restore business operations while ensuring your organization’s hard-earned reputation is maintained during a crisis. Crisis planning stays within the walls of your organization.

Emergency management planning is forward thinking. Its objective is to be prepared, trained, educated and ready to prevent further destruction. It looks beyond organizational walls to protect the environment, the community, and its stakeholders.

The communicator’s role in emergency management is to build and nurture rich communication channels and interpersonal networks with first responder organizations and non-governmental service providers.

To strategically maneuver an organization to a position as a trusted resource to external emergency management structures. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” illustrates the value of the social capital that accumulates and builds trust that allows organizations to be socially responsible corporate citizens.

Staying Connected – Win-win thinking

Communicators who wait for the crisis to happen and count on the golden hour play a zero-sum game.

Communicators who invest in emergency management ahead of a crisis play a win-win strategy. That’s a strategy that builds trust among all stakeholders.

Grunig describes trust as the willingness of an organization to open itself up to risk by engaging in a relationship with other parties. Corporations that build trust are seen by stakeholders as having integrity (fair and just), being dependable (reliable) and having confidence (walk the talk). A sure-fire way to destroy trust is being unprepared for the inevitable crisis.

Preparing – Strategic positioning

Strategic positioning is investing time and effort in building and nurturing interpersonal and informational networks. Hubs that build bonding, bridging, and linking social capital with emergency management systems at municipal, provincial and federal judications and with non-governmental providers of recovery services (such as The Salvation Army) before the crisis. It’s these connections that open doors and provide organizational leaders with early informational access to local emergency management information.

Communicators assist an organization’s disaster response by understating how to conduct and interpret a SWOT analysis. More importantly, being able to elevate the SWOT analysis to a SWOT/risk matrix.

A SWOT/risk matrix is a tool for rank ordering the likelihood and severity of the internal and external risks faced by an organization. Risks are not static. That makes it important that communicators monitor and review their SWOT/risk analysis regularly. The information provided from the SWOT/risk matrix guides organizational decision makers in strategically placing human and capital resources where they are best needed.

Lights, camera, action

Communicators who want to navigate tomorrow’s crises need to shift their focus from the reactionary position of crisis management to the preparedness focus of emergency management planning. That means that out of the phases of emergency management planning – mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery –communicators need to position themselves, their communication departments, and their organization squarely in the preparedness phase. Preparedness is where trust is built. Recent news headlines reinforce that being prepared is the key success factor to successfully riding the wave of a crisis — finding the pocket and avoiding a wipeout.

Alberta’s Forestry and Parks Minister Todd Loewen clearly stated in response to the 2024 forecast that the province could be facing a record-breaking season for fire, “we are declaring an early start to the 2024 wildfire season.” That’s an example of pre-emptive emergency management preparedness.

To reinforce the seriousness of the situation, Cory Davis, manager of wildfire predictive services with Alberta Wildfire stated that “probably the number one thing is having those resources ready and trained and in place for the beginning of the fire season,”

Nimble organizations call upon emergency management planning to quickly mobilize trained professionals and set them to work within an established emergency response framework. It’s the preparation of trained individuals who quickly react with crisis specific mitigation, response, and recovery actions that retains stakeholders’ trust.

Trust is built before the crisis. Building trust during a crisis is too late.