Communication in a crisis situation

There are many reasons why companies can come under public pressure. Some can be self-inflicted, for example in the case of rotten meat scandals or criminal behaviour such as balance sheet fraud. Others come out of the blue: incidents can occur due to earthquakes or power failures, but IT systems in particular are often the victims of outright attacks by third parties, sometimes causing devastating damage.

In such a crisis, it is important to find the right form of communication both internally and externally. Well-functioning crisis communication takes into account the entire context of the case: what happened, what caused it, how can it be resolved? In order to calm the minds of customers and suppliers, the company's own shareholders or suppliers, a skilful balance must be struck between transparency and restraint when deciding what needs to be communicated and when.

This is because such a crisis often continues in the form of false or unconvincing communication. Many companies are reluctant to disclose unpleasant truths and often there is not enough information about the extent of the incident to appear confident in public. Was there a leak of personal data or not? Does your own IT department know exactly what has happened, or do experts need to be called in to check the infrastructure that has been attacked? What responses are necessary?

What to do? Waiting until enough information is available is not an option - the press has long since got wind of it, as have the competitors. Crisis communication always tries to swim in front of the wave: The more actively you address stakeholder expectations through your own announcements, customer mailings, interviews and other contributions, the more understanding there will be for the crisis and the efforts to resolve it. Even the amount of fines for data protection violations can be positively influenced if the factors of the crisis are dealt with conscientiously and openly.

Even companies with decades of experience in public relations can be thrown off course by a crisis: What if a cyber attack has taken all the IT systems with it? Put the mail server out of action? All the usual means of communication knocked out of your hands? It's not so easy to restore the technical conditions to the point where targeted communication is even possible. And time is running out: the first journalists may already be calling, customers are extremely nervous about the outage, surely something has to be said to them?

When the basic functions are up and running again, many people are still at a loss as to what has actually happened and how they should be informed. How do you manage the balancing act between your own lack of knowledge and providing the most comprehensive information possible to affected customers or other stakeholders? What information needs to be reported to the supervisory authorities - and by when?

The basics of communicating correctly in a crisis include:

• Reliability - providing every statement with a clear perspective
• Expectation management - inform early, update regularly
• Comply with language rules - clear statements, no speculation
• Openness - always answer enquiries, but also angry protests

It is clear that exceptional circumstances must be cushioned by communication in such a way that the company can concentrate on eliminating the causes and restoring operations. Incorrect and inappropriate communication ties up far more resources that are needed for the actual tasks than successful crisis communication.