When we talk about crisis communication, we typically think of incidents that are over relatively quickly.
Yes, the overall aim of managing a crisis is to protect the long-term reputation of your organisation and its bottom line, but crisis incidents typically last a few weeks or maybe a month.
But what if that crisis lasted for a year?
Does your finely-tuned crisis plan cover a scenario like that? Would your team be able to cope with being in crisis mode for 12 months or more?
That was the situation the British Medical Association found itself in from around the middle of March last year when covid first began to dominate the UK news agenda and impact so much of our lives.
You will perhaps not be surprised to hear the organisation found itself inundated with media enquiries and requests for interviews.
The BMA went from typically receiving 12,500 media hits per annum (the number of times the BMA is mentioned across print, online and broadcast media) a year to receiving just under 44,000 in 2020. That’s an increase of over 400 per cent.
So how did it cope?
Well, Helen Robinson-Gordon, the BMA’s head of news and media relations, joined Keme Nzerem – one of our expert tutors to share her experience and the insight she had gained.
Taking part in the first of a series of webinars we will be hosting this year, Helen said one of the big challenges she faced was not knowing how long the crisis would last.
“I think it is a crisis where we had no sense of how long it was going to last for,” she said.
“And I wished in some ways we had fully understood how long it was likely to go on for because the impact was difficult and it was stressful at times.
“And to go from being an already busy, popular newsroom, to an endless barrage of media enquiries 24/7 took some dealing with. We quickly learned to triage them so we could manage them.
“It is a situation that would throw most crisis plans out the window. I would guess that most teams have a crisis management plan of some kind, and in my time, most of the crises I have dealt with have lasted a few days, a week, maybe a month at most.
“Generally, they have had that initial busy period, then management and recovery periods, and then it begins to tail off. Covid hasn’t been like that – it has just been full on from day one. And we quickly realised the crisis plan we had was not fit for purpose and was not going to give us the support we needed. And we had to work through a new plan as we were dealing with the crisis we were in.”
One of the ways Helen dealt with this surge in demand was to increase the size of the communication team.
“The first thing we did was to get more staff in through a PR agency,” she said.
“That provided us with a mixture of bums on seats, with people who could triage the call and help us set up interviews, and others who were able to give us slightly more long-term and strategic advice.
“But we realised that was not something that was going to sustain us for a long period, so the next step was to bring people in as staff in a more permanent manner.”
Bringing in a PR agency helped the BMA meet that initial demand, but it was not without its challenges. In fact, it led to one of the moments Helen found most stressful.
She said: “There was a day where a decision had been made to go with a story about whether we thought it was right for schools to reopen, last June, that ended up being on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph.
“And the following morning, there was quite a bit of criticism from within the BMA. A number felt it was the wrong direction to have gone in and thought we should not have waded into that particular argument.
“It was a decision that had been supported and promoted by the PR agency as a way to go.
“But it resulted in quite a bit of criticism for the media team and me, and that was a difficult time because it felt quite personal. And because of the stress we were under, it felt that we had done a lot of good work but were being criticised for a decision that had not been ours.”
Helen describes her team as being ‘young, enthusiastic and amazingly talented’. How did they cope not only with the fatigue and stress that comes with crisis management combined with the added challenge of moving to remote working overnight?
She said: “Remote working was something the BMA had done a lot of planning for. We had a test day where on a particular day everyone was going to work from home and see if the IT we had set up worked. And we never went back to the office after that day.
“I think there was some trauma around that because what we had thought was a day of testing became never going back to the office again. That was 17 March last year, and many of us have not been back to the office in anything like a permanent basis.
“We did, and still do, catch-ups every single morning where for half an hour we got together as a team. For me, it was a case of me saying to them ‘how are you’, ‘how is it looking today’, ‘how are you feeling?’.
“And we had a good deal of honesty between us where people could say ‘it is not that great’ or ‘I’m fine’.
“As a team, we wanted to do our best, work as hard as we could, deliver results and give it our all. And we absolutely did that.
“Maybe what we should have done is not all of us give it our all at the same time – once we got more staff, we should, perhaps, have staged it a bit better.”
As the BMA increased the size of the communication team to meet rising demand, Helen faced the challenge of not only bringing in the right people, but also making sure they could quickly be brought up to speed while working remotely.
“This was challenging,” Helen said. “I would say pick the new people carefully. It is easy in a crisis to say ‘yes, you’re free, come in and help us’.
“But you have got to pick the right people and pick them carefully to make sure they fit in with the team and have some background and experience in the environment they are going to be working in.
“And make sure the way you do things is easy for them to follow. For example, we publish all our press releases through something called Gorkana.
“It is a bit clunky; it is not the best way of doing things, but it is how we do it. Just make sure that kind of thing is easy for them to find and that you can explain it because they are not going to have the luxury of time.
“Normally, an induction at the BMA is done over three or four weeks – that was condensed right down.”
On our crisis communication training courses, we use the acronym CARE, which stands for Compassion, Action, Reassurance and Examples.
Helen was keen to ensure that all the BMA spokespeople showed plenty of compassion in their interviews.
She said: “The BMA is the trade union for doctors, but it is also a professional association, and sometimes those two areas can be uneasy bedfellows.
“I think from a trade union perspective, it was easy at times to get blinkered into the very difficult time doctors and nurses were having, the amount of stress they were under, and the amount of hours they were doing.
“That is all true, and they worked under some of the most appalling conditions. It was horrific. But it was also horrific for the patients and their families. And for briefings ahead of interviews, I would always say ‘it is not only about you – it is about the patients you are caring for and their families’.
“And we always tried to instil that so it did not come across as ‘poor doctor’ all the time because it was actually ‘poor a lot of people’.
“If we were veering into discussions around pay and remuneration, we were careful to remember there were a lot of people who had lost everything and had no income coming in. We had to be mindful of the context.”
Looking back at the peak of the crisis, is there anything Helen would like to have done differently?
“I would like to have brought more people in earlier,” she said.
“And I would like to been more assertive in saying ‘we need to work differently, stop trying to work within the confines of the way the organisation is used to working’.
For example, we have an on-call rota for which team members are remunerated. But the on call got so busy, they needed more than money. And, so, they now have a day off after every weekend on-call and half a day after four-week day evenings on call. This wasn’t in any policy or HR plan but it works well and I hope it will be adopted for the future
“Not everyone in the organisation was having the same work experience as us. HR and IT, for example, did not have the same experience as us. That’s not a criticism, it is the reality.”
Asked by Keme to provide some key crisis communication tips from her experience over the past year, Helen identified five main areas:
- Is your team big enough?
- Could you cope with a doubling or a trebling of your workload?
- Are all your work processes easily accessible and up to date.
- Be caring and compassionate, and remember it is ok to say “I’m stressed”. And give people regular breaks over and above their annual leave entitlement
- Think now about who your spokespeople would be, whether they have had recent training and consider if they might need a refresher.
Helen was joined in the webinar by Tienie Loubser, the BCF’s learning and development director, who discussed how managers and team members can identify signs of burnout and how it can be avoided.
And, our managing director James White looked at some of the training trends that are likely to emerge this year as things return closer to normal.
You can watch the whole webinar here. And you can ensure you avoid missing any of our future webinars by signing up to our mailing list.
Media First are media and communications training specialists with more than 35 years of experience. We have a team of trainers, each with decades of experience working as journalists, presenters, communications coaches and media trainers.
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