Communicating in Crisis: The Role of EHS in Managing Communication

In Part Two of the series “Communicating in Crisis,” Scott Gaddis explains the role of the EHS function in gathering information to help the organization make informed decisions as part of crisis management efforts. Read Part One, “Communicating in Crisis: The Role of the EHS Practitioner.”

The EHS function often plays a role in internal and external communication during crisis management.

The EHS practitioner is likely to work along several paths in dealing with and communicating in a crisis.  In an emergency, the practitioner has multiple audiences that will need to be informed including employees, senior management and government agencies. The media and the public also are a consideration, but usually with the idea of supporting that activity with data that will be shared externally by others.    

It is imperative to gather as much information as you can about what happened. Taking for granted that people have … Read more...

How Crisis Management Planning Could Save Your Business

Crisis management planning is one of the most important ways of protecting your organization and your workers from injury, loss of productivity and disaster. A solid crisis management plan that has executive sponsorship and cross-functional support can mean the different between an incident from which your business recovers and a disaster that costs time, money or lives.

Yet crisis management planning is also one of the most difficult initiatives for which to get executive support. Very often, crisis management is considered too expensive or simply requires too many resources for an event that many executives would consider a statistical improbability. This attitude relies on the idea that a crisis is never likely to happen and that, even if it did happen, everyone would instinctively know how to deal with it.

But what if it does happen? How would the organization deal with a crisis in which people were injured? Or … Read more...