Crisis management and business continuity are crucial for businesses facing natural disasters, workplace violence, market crashes, or public relations catastrophes. Contingency plans must be in place, and both plans should be reviewed and evaluated periodically. Maintaining business continuity during a crisis can reassure customers, employees, and the market.
Crisis management and business continuity are business concepts that revolve around the essential functionality of a business or company. Crisis management is a business strategy for dealing with system-level crises that threaten the business. Business continuity is an ongoing process that ensures that a business is functional and accessible, for both workers and customers. When a problem turns ugly, good crisis management and business continuity plans can prepare a business to deal with the problem and ensure that customer service and business functionality are impeded as little as possible.
Many companies face crises; Natural disasters, workplace violence, market crashes and public relations catastrophes can throw a once efficient organization into total chaos. To survive threatening situations, it is important for a business to have contingency plans in place for a variety of difficult problems. While employee and customer safety is often the first concern of crisis management, maintaining business continuity is usually the second most important issue in a crisis.
The relationship between crisis management and business continuity works both ways. In crisis contingency planning, a business must create a plan for how the business would operate at the time the crisis occurs. Some considerations may include the use of automated customer systems or websites, remote and redundant facilities, and reserve funds to sustain a business through a monetary crisis. Business continuity can aid crisis management by analyzing the market and function of a business and predicting potential areas where a crisis may be more likely.
Some business experts suggest that crisis management and business continuity plans both benefit from a consistent management schedule. Periodically, both types of plans must be reviewed and evaluated to ensure they are timely accurate and understood by workers. Some experts suggest a continuous cycle of reviewing, adapting, training and implementing crisis management and business continuity strategies. Keeping both systems up-to-date and open to improvements helps ensure training stays current and all employees are on the same page.
In general, a business going through a crisis will have a better chance of survival if it doesn’t appear to be moving in confusion about what should be done. One of the best ways to maintain a public reputation of trust and attitude is to ensure that customers experience little or no inconvenience as a result of the issue. By maintaining business continuity during a crisis, companies can reassure customers, employees and the market, and can also garner some reputation points for being able to face a challenge with a cool head.
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