The world’s leading platform for integrated safety & security management.
Apply best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises. Built on ISO standards, you can respond faster with better collaboration using plans and playbooks, smart workflows, and real-time dashboards and insights, to ensure better incident response, decision-making, and continuous improvement.
All the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS and other national standards. Keep your whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture - from any place or device.
All the tools needed to automate your safety management system in one easy-to-use platform, following ISO standards. Increase efficiency with powerful automation capabilities and provide real time insights to all levels of your business. Configurable notifications, workflows, analytics, and mapping empower your safety personnel to make better decisions wherever they are.
Maintain a comprehensive view of the wellbeing of your workers, their needs, and the wellbeing initiatives conducted in your organization. Through various assessments, checks, analytics, and resources you can easily manage both the physical and mental wellbeing of personnel across various locations and programs.
A suite of tools to collect risk data from across your organziation from a range of stakeholders, in real time, and based on ISO standards. Fully customisable, with everything from a simple pre-task assessment though to an organisational risk register, we make it easy to capture risk data and provide the analytics to derive rich insights, to keep your organisation safe and compliant.
Track all your assets from your vehicle fleet, fixed or mobile plant and equipment though to your critical infrastructure using our range of tools. Plan maintenance ahead of time and by collecting lead indicator data from checklists and assessments on any mobile device, then enable users to update the status of your assets to track utilisation, share documentation and report issues.
Save time and money by enabling contractors to self-register and progress through a customizable workflow, to check documentation before becoming an approved contractor. Contractors can then be automatically followed up using workflows and notifications to keep their organziation compliant.
Streamline visitor sign-in using a QR code on a form tailored for your organisation. Visitors can complete inductions, answer questions and acknowledge content then have notifications triggered to their host based on their responses. Once on site, manage visitor cards, broadcast notifications and understand visitor trends to optimise your processes.
All the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS and other national standards. Keep your whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture - from any place or device.
Proactively manage all aspects of physical security operations from anywhere, on any device. Based on ISO standards, streamline your operations using workflow automations to guide information capture, enrichment, follow up tasks, and notifications. Validate threats and risks to drive better investment of your resources.
Manage cyber threats, risks, and treatments based on industry best-practice guidelines and ISO standards. Plan objectives and set targets, manage all elements of standards-compliance, and schedule and record audits and inspections. Manage non-compliances and corrective actions, and drive continual improvement review cycles.
Streamline visitor sign-in using a QR code on a form tailored for your organisation. Visitors can complete inductions, answer questions and acknowledge content then have notifications triggered to their host based on their responses. Once on site, manage visitor cards, broadcast notifications and understand visitor trends to optimise your processes.
Consolidate the threat and risk picture across all your assets, easily demonstrate compliance with security obligations, and gain an ‘all threats’ perspective encompassing physical, cyber, personnel and supply chain. Address and manage cyber threats without having to implement costly new ICT systems and drive continuous improvement and review cycles.
All the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS and other national standards. Keep your whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture - from any place or device.
Manage cyber, emergency and security threats, risks, and treatments based on industry best-practice guidelines and ISO standards. Plan objectives and set targets, manage all elements of standards-compliance, and schedule and record audits and inspections. Manage non-compliances and corrective actions and drive continual improvement review cycles.
Track all your assets from your vehicle fleet, fixed or mobile plant and equipment though to your critical infrastructure using our range of tools. Plan maintenance ahead of time and by collecting lead indicator data from checklists and assessments on any mobile device, then enable users to update the status of your assets to track utilization, share documentation and report issues.
Save time and money by enabling contractors to self-register and progress through a customizable workflow, to check documentation before becoming an approved contractor. Contractors can then be automatically followed up using workflows and notifications to keep their organziation compliant.
Follow ISO standard approaches to determine disruption impacts and develop plans & recovery strategies to address risks. Track gaps, dependencies and tests, capture exercises, and manage insurance details. Scale up to any incident and back down to business as usual as quickly as possible and drive continuous improvement.
Apply best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises. Built on ISO standards, you can respond faster with better collaboration using plans and playbooks, smart workflows, and real-time dashboards and insights, to ensure better incident response, decision-making, and continuous improvement.
Manage cyber, emergency and security threats, risks, and treatments based on industry best-practice guidelines and ISO standards. Plan objectives and set targets, manage all elements of standards-compliance, and schedule and record audits and inspections. Manage non-compliances and corrective actions and drive continual improvement review cycles.
Ensure preparedness across your organisation. Conduct business impact assessments and quickly identify essential functions. Assess hazard and threat risks. Identify technology, assets, facilities, and critical personnel. Gather and assemble essential information and documents. Develop, test and maintain your COOP plans. From readiness and preparedness to reconstitution, manage all four phases of the Continuity of Operations Plan to minimize business loss and disruption.
Crisis Management Software
Published May 19, 2021
Even though crisis is a fact of corporate life, organisations often fail to prepare themselves adequately. That is despite the clear risks associated with poor corporate crisis management and corporate emergency management, i.e., lack of a corporate crisis management plan and corporate crisis communication plan. Notable risks arising from ineffective crisis management in corporate communication include as harm to stakeholders, material losses, up to and including bankruptcies. Why do businesses take the risk?
One explanation might be that organisations tend to conflate business crises with consistent slow-burn issues. Though the latter might turn into crises if not handled effectively, they are not crises, which are, by definition, episodic and of more significant magnitude.
Indeed, a business crisis constitutes an unanticipated event or issue that disrupts day-to-day business operations; such an event has the potential to create significant financial, safety, security, or reputational harm.
Types of business crises
What then can be done? Well, the task of preparing for, managing, and recovering from a business crisis falls under the banner of corporate crisis management. A crisis management process is one designed to prevent or minimise the damage a crisis can inflict on an organisation.
Businesses can go a long way towards mitigating the damage associated with crises by treating corporate crisis management as a critical business function, with activities implemented for each crisis phase.[i] The phases include:
When building or enhancing corporate emergency management competencies, organisations should also take intelligence gathering and constant monitoring as their default mode, using a suitable crisis management software platform. That entails approaching crisis management as a life cycle, taking a strategy-oriented approach for each of the following stages:
Understanding the crisis management lifecycle will help organisations enhance mitigation, response, and recovery activities. These activities should be catalogued in a corporate crisis management plan, with relevant annexes for crisis management in corporate communications.
So, what then goes into the corporate crisis management plan?
Well, the short answer is it depends. Specifically, the crisis management plan hinges on a couple of factors:
When committing a plan to paper, organisations should take the following steps.
1. Have a firm grasp of performance objectives. What would constitute success? What are the KPIs they will be tracking?
2. If organisations can’t answer those questions immediately, that’s ok. Some of the responses will depend on performing a vulnerability audit. That is a multi-disciplinary risk assessment which organisations undertake to determine areas of operational weakness and come up with strategies to mitigate or eliminate said weaknesses.
Of course, the fundamental purpose of the audit is to uncover current and potential threat, whatever form they take, e.g., arising from normal operations, most common to the industry, and unexpected external events.
3. From there, organisations will develop a list of potential crises and rank them in order of likelihood of occurring and associated costs of dealing with the impact.
4. Then, after incorporating a list objectives and likeliest crisis scenarios into the plan, organisations will proceed with drafting the rest. The plan itself will have to be flexible enough to adapt to multiple situations, i.e., modules rather one-size fits all.
5. The final step, often forgotten, is defining what constitutes a crisis within the plan ahead of time. Organisations must know when to call in the crisis management team. And to do this, they should document all the criteria and indicators which will be used to determine whether a crisis has occurred.
When crisis response goes awry, flawed communication is often the culprit. In crisis, bad corporate communications can either mean withholding too much information from the public, having important internal spokespeople saying different things (i.e., not being on-message,) failing to correct the record, giving too much information to the wrong publics, etc.
Combatting those common errors requires planning ahead of time, i.e., developing a crisis communications plan. The plan should include the following:
Many smaller organisations, of course, don’t have dedicated, in-house PR resources. For the purposes of crisis communication planning, those firms should consider investing in an external PR resource in a contract capacity. Make sure that person weighs in on the crisis communications plan and is fully abreast of subsequent.
Indeed, crises are a fact of business life, making corporate crisis management an essential organisational competency.
However, building such a competency takes time and effort. And so, firms themselves have to get serious, investing in the right crisis management technologies to execute best-practice strategies that will serve to improve the management of critical events and exercises.
What capabilities matter most? In close, we suggest the following:
Finally, the precipitous rise in corporate crises necessitates a best-practice approach, paired with advanced technology capabilities, to ensure effective critical event response and better coordination. The up-front investment might seem like much. But the results speak for themselves: peace of mind, improved collaboration, and, of course, longstanding organisational resilience.
Sources:
W. Timothy Coombs: Crisis Management and Communications. Available at http://www.facoltaspes.unimi.it/files/_ITA_/COM/Crisis_Management_and_Communications.pdf.
Ibid.
Dawn R. Gilpin, Priscilla J. Murphy: Crisis Management in a Complex World. Available at https://books.google.com/books?id=_7rW6w7duDUC&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=crisis+management+lifecycle&source=bl&ots=jwJDoU7dfa&sig=BCQOC9MNz632lPo6dCivA9fFQsg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJ_sPfxZ7ZAhUB3GMKHdO4CMcQ6AEIbzAO#v=onepage&q=crisis%20management%20lifecycle&f=false
Gwyneth Veronica James Howell, Queensland University of Technology: Description of the Relationship between the Crisis Life Cycle and Mass Media. Available at https://eprints.qut.edu.au/15827/1/Gwyneth_Howell_Thesis.pdf.
Jonathan Bernstein, Bernstein Crisis Management: The 10 Steps of Crisis Prevention. Available at https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/10-steps-crisis-prevention/.
Ibid.
Michelle G. Hough and John Spillan, Journal of Business & Economics Research: Crisis Planning: Increasing Effectiveness, Decreasing Discomfort. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242581268_Crisis_Planning_Increasing_Effectiveness_Decreasing_Discomfort.