Crisis readiness when nobody is in the office

We reviewed thirty-one crisis plans for clients this year. Every one of them began by assembling a team in a room: a named meeting room, a deputy room, sometimes an alternative site with its own key holder. In the year we reviewed them, none of those rooms was used.

Here is what we now recommend for a crisis team that will meet on a call.

• Name the call, not the room: one standing link, tested monthly, that everyone can find without asking.
• Appoint a chair whose only job is to run the call, and a separate note-taker whose only job is the record.
• Agree a written record that is updated live and that everyone can see, so that nobody relies on memory of a call.
• Decide in advance who may approve a statement, and how approval is recorded when nobody can sign anything.
• Hold a short call on the hour, every hour, rather than one long call that never ends.
• Keep a list of personal mobile numbers that does not depend on the company’s systems being up.
• Assume that at least one key person will be unreachable, and name their deputy.
• Test the plan at an inconvenient time: a Sunday evening, or the first morning of a holiday.
• Agree how the team will communicate if the usual tools are part of the problem.
• Brief spokespeople on how to give interviews from home without a bookcase behind them that becomes the story.
• Write down when the crisis team stands down, and who decides.
• Review the plan every six months, because the way people work has not finished changing.

None of these is difficult. What they have in common is that they replace the informal things a room provides, such as seeing who is missing or noticing that someone has stopped talking, with something written down.