Human Resources and Workplace Crisis Management

A wholesome Corporate Crisis Management Program doesn’t exclude solid executive leadership, and a proactive approach from your organizations Human Resources Teams.

Whether the emergency is within your workplace, building, or simply in your surrounding community, HR teams have a significant role in supporting business operations, and in protecting corporate reputation.

The below is only a sample of the many considerations that HR Teams may pro-actively consider as part of their ongoing preparedness and due diligence programs;

Crisis Communications

Although the importance and vast benefits of corporate communications during crisis situations have been recently highly recognized, the focus is often spent on communicating with the media, public, and authorities – Unfortunately employee communication is often neglected.

An unfortunate workplace crisis like an employee critical injury is rarely considered during the corporate planning stage. This type of event significantly impacts your employee mental welfare, thus potentially affecting decision making, production, and costs.

Proper preplanning for this type of event can allow for an appropriate, timely, and - a proactively considered corporate response. This not only enhances employee communication, it protects, and potentially enhances corporate reputation at the employee level – which is a direct pipeline to the public.

Corporate crisis communication plans require an innovative approach to corporate crisis management considering a vast array of “real world” crisis’ impacting your organization. Every industry has common risks, and each business has their truly unique risks.

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Corporate Incident Review Programs

Critical incident reviews, also called significant event reviews, are a way of reflecting on the causes and impacts of unusual incidents in your workplace. While the scope of review is broad, it provides a standardized format for use in reviewing the corporate level response to a workplace crisis (unusual incident).

This process provides industry leading – documented, due diligence that significantly enhances your workplace risk and safety program, and further supports your HR goals in employee engagement, leadership transparency, and management follow-up.

Depending on the incident, the below provides only a sample that these reviews may consider, and Human Resources plays a vital role;

Emergency Procedures

Were Emergency Procedures clear, effective, used and followed? Were they suitable for this type of work environment? Is there potential training and development considerations?

Senior Management

How did the company respond? Was there any employee communication?
Was it effective? Was there any follow-up required by any specialized internal department? What new procedures may be required to assist employees or operations in the future?

Supervisory Review

Have supervisory and management teams been provided with the right tools and support to eliminate or mitigate this type of incident in the future?

Business Recovery

Were tools available to all staff in order to ensure rapid business recovery? If it happened again, what have we learned and how could we be more effective? Is there a need to meet with employees with respect to Critical Incident Stress?

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Workplace Critical Incident Stress

A critical incident in the workplace, or indirectly involving the workplace, is a sudden event outside the range of normal experience — and outside workers’ control.

Critical incidents range in type and severity including workplace accidents, injuries, crimes, violence, and infrastructure failures that result in safety concerns. The results of these incidents have consequences that reach far beyond those workers directly injured or involved.

Workers who witnessed a critical incident, or who know the employees involved, in some cases may suffer emotional upsets. Workers, due to potential feelings of powerlessness, anger, fear or guilt may become distracted, and unable to concentrate on work, and make ineffective decisions. If not dealt with properly, the entire workplace may be impacted with effects including poor morale, decreased productivity, increased accidents and sick time, higher disability claims, and the potential for greater staff turnover.

HR Teams need to be cognizant of these post incident concerns that affect employee welfare, and operations. HR teams should be engaged at every level of workplace crisis planning, in order to develop clear policies and procedures, which centre on a sensitive response to workers, before an incident occurs.

www.nationallifesafetygroup.ca

“NLS Group provides innovative solutions to your truly unique corporate risks. We achieve this by utilizing tested and proven leadership and experience from both the private, and public sector, utilizing the principles of emergency management in everyday business and facility operations.”