“I presume you will be writing about P&O Ferries in your crisis communication training blog.”
This was just one of the messages we received as anger grew at the firm’s brutal staff cull.
After sacking 800 employees through a video message, the leading ferry company has been the subject of widespread condemnation, faced large protests, and been accused of “gangster practise”.
A once-proud company has seen its reputation sink. And it is a story that will surely be used as a crisis communication case study for many years to come.
You can expect it to be explored in the crisis communication masterclasses Sean Ryan will be delivering for The Media Team Academy members.
Sean, the former foreign editor of The Sunday Times, said: “This was a masterclass in how not to break bad news - the clumsiness and cruelty of the announcement will live on in comms training for years.
“The condemnation of P&O in the media was swift, fierce and far-reaching, from ‘bunch of anchors…up ship creek’ in the tabloids, to a former Financial Time’s editor’s tweet that the company had ‘given capitalism a bad name’.”
Sean went on to say…
“The brand has been holed beneath the waterline. It will be fascinating to see whether the damage can be repaired.”
Ahead of those masterclasses, let’s take a closer look at the crisis media management lessons we can learn from the crisis.
The deadline to joint the next cohort is fast approaching. If you and your team would benefit from live masterclasses on crisis communication, media skills, personal development and access to our online courses, get in touch by the end of the month
And we’ll begin with a quick catch-up on the story.
It began with the Dubai-owned company issuing denials it was about to go into liquidation after announcing it was suspending services.
A statement said: "P&O Ferries is not going into liquidation.
"We have asked all ships to come alongside, in preparation for a company announcement. Until then, services from P&O will not be running and we are advising travellers of alternative arrangements."
That announcement was instead the news the company was axing 800 members of staff immediately and that the ferries would be “crewed by a third-party crew provider”.
If that was not bad enough, reports subsequently emerged of security guards in balaclavas, armed with handcuffs, boarding ferries to remove protesting workers. Although we should say that P&O Ferries has denied those claims and added: “The teams escorting the seafarers off our vessels were totally professional in handling this difficult task with all appropriate sensitivity.”
Some limited services resumed over the weekend. But there remains a fierce backlash.
Labour's Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh described the firing as a "despicable assault on workers' rights".
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called the decision “inhumane and unethical”.
P&O’s decision to sack 800 workers, without warning or consultation, is inhumane and unethical.
— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) March 18, 2022
Joining with @DoverBishop to call for proper consultation, urgent representations to the Government of Dubai, and assistance for Dover if this move cannot be legally prevented. pic.twitter.com/QLDFsgaxQc
And the RMT union called the company’s actions one of the "most shameful acts in the history of British industrial relations".
The crisis remains high on the media agenda and the focus of political attention.
Video
The biggest failing of the story has been the way the job losses were communicated.
No one should find out that they have lost their job through a pre-recorded video message.
It is cold and feels uncaring, cruel and cowardly. It also doesn’t allow those impacted to ask questions about their plight.
P&O only needed to look back a few months to see how firing people through video works out.
Better.com made headlines globally just before Christmas after its boss Vishal Garg decided to sack 900 people in a brutal three-minute Zoom call.
But at least that was live.
When organisations have challenging messages to communicate, they must show they care and understand the human implications.
Pre-recorded video messages to those who are immediately losing their jobs are not the way to do this.
There are obvious logistical challenges that mean, covid aside, it would have been difficult to get everyone together in the same place.
At the very least, however, the video should have been live and offered the opportunity for questions. Could they not have more senior leaders available to talk to staff in smaller groups? Could mental health support workers been made available on board to help staff with their concerns and go into more detail about available support?
Communicate
When you are in a crisis media management mode, you need to communicate. And then keep communicating.
It is hard to find much from P&O Ferries beyond brief statements. And most of those statements have been denials of what has been reported.
For example, it has denied it has acted insensitively in the way employees were removed from the vessels.
There has been little acknowledgement of the impact on employees. The only mention I have seen came in a statement that said: “We know that for our staff this redundancy came without warning or prior consultation, and we fully understand that this has caused distress for them and their families.”
There seems to have been little attempt to control the narrative. Even the corporate Twitter account has not been updated since Thursday (17/3) when the initial announcements were made.
Today we've announced changes to P&O Ferries. While we make these changes, many of our services will not be running over the next few days. Please visit our website for information on https://t.co/iKRph5GGeu
— P&O Ferries (@POferries) March 17, 2022
It would not have been easy. But there should have been more effort to communicate why the company took this decision and what actions it previously made to prevent this situation.
Message development and testing, for both internal and external audiences, is a crucial part of crisis communication. P&O Ferries doesn’t seem to have any messages that go beyond ‘it has been a tough time and we have to make changes’.
Those at the top would have known these job losses were coming, so why were messages not better prepared?
There’s nothing more meaningless than an insincere apology. And we have seen plenty of them already this year. So, when Wilko found itself in the media spotlight this week because of “reckless” covid guidance, it was good to see it produce a response that ticked a lot of the ‘good apology’ boxes.
Visible
If you’ve seen the video P&O employees were shown to reveal they were losing their jobs, you will have noticed it didn’t come from the top.
A job loss announcement of this magnitude should be led by the CEO. So, where was Peter Hebblethwaite?
Well, apart from a letter to the company’s remaining staff, and the promise of some ‘all hands’ meetings, he seems to have kept a low profile.
The letter said the decision was “pivotal” and “very difficult”, which was only taken after “seriously considering all the available options”. It also acknowledged people would “feel surprised by the suddenness of this news”.
But there was little else in the way of warmth or empathy.
Maybe that is not surprising. After axing 1,100 jobs in response to Covid in May last year, Mr Hebblethwaite gave an interview to Cruise & Ferry magazine, where he said: “Only the fittest survive and we had to get fitter.”
Speculation
I also wanted to briefly touch on the speculation that surrounded what P&O was about to announce.
The company created a strange situation where it said it had suspended all its sailings ahead of “a major company announcement”.
A vague statement like that will also spark interest and the lack of any other information led to furious speculation it was going into liquidation.
"P&O Ferries is not going into liquidation," the company tells me.
— Simon Calder (@SimonCalder) March 17, 2022
"We have asked all ships to come alongside, in preparation for a company announcement. Until then, services from P&O will not run and we are advising travellers of alternative arrangements”https://t.co/x2YdCQ5C2Y
Was this a tactic? Was the company trying to distract from the job news and present it as not being as bad as what people were thinking?
Whether deliberate or not, this speculation should have been avoided.
Links
This story doesn’t just damage the reputation of P&O.
A risk we sometimes look at during our crisis communication courses is ‘crisis by association’, where links with a company in the spotlight can tarnish the reputation of other brands.
And that is particularly evident here. DP World Limited, the owners of P&O Ferries, have spent tens of million pounds on sponsorship of The European Golf Tour.
It is now known as The DP World Tour - and that link poses risks to its reputation.
Prince William has also been caught up in the story and has been urged to cut his ties with DP World.
The company has provided £1million of funding for his Earthshot Prize for eco-initiatives. It is also the ‘principal partner’ of United for Wildlife – a task force trying to tackle the illegal trade in animal parts.
Former Home Office minister Norman Baker has called the link “an embarrassment” and has said he should consider cutting ties with the company.
"Prince William did not create this situation. But it's an embarrassment to him and he can't simply ignore it. In my view, he needs to use his personal connections with his friend, the chief executive, to get P&O to change policy on this and to reverse what they've done.
"If he can't do that, then he should consider cutting all links with DP World. It's not a great look for Prince William to be associated with such a company.”
Prince William urged to sever his ties with the boss of P&O Ferries’ parent company https://t.co/JvTvlQKkH4
— Mail+ (@mailplus) March 21, 2022
Should the Prince and the golf tour address the issue or sit quietly and hope the anger dies down?
That question has been particularly pressing for the recruitment company that supplied the replacement labour. Clyde Marine Recruitment has denied any prior knowledge of the mass redundancies or that the replacement workers were cheap labour.
Ian Livingston, the managing director, said: "We were as surprised as everyone else in the UK shipping business when the news broke that 600 crew and 200 officers were to lose their jobs with immediate effect.
"We fully understand the anger being felt by the crews, their families and their supporters."
He added: "The claims that Clyde Marine Recruitment have supplied P&O with foreign crews on lower rates is wrong. All the crew and officers we have supplied to P&O are on full UK industry rates."
And spare a thought for P&O Cruises, a separate company, which is having to work hard to try to distance itself from the story.
P&O Cruises is part of Carnival Corporation & PLC and as such is entirely unrelated to P&O Ferries.
— P&O Cruises (@pandocruises) March 17, 2022
Our thoughts go out to all those affected by yesterday’s news. However, please be assured it’s business as usual on our cruises and our crew look forward to welcoming you on board soon. 2/2
— P&O Cruises (@pandocruises) March 18, 2022
I want to take you back to Mr Hebblethwaite’s letter. He wrote that P&O Ferries “had the best ships, on the best routes, under the best brand.”
The actions of his company and the events of the past few days have put the last part of that sentence under severe scrutiny.
Can the company salvage its reputation, or has it suffered a PR shipwreck?
*A previous version of this blog reported that Stephen Nee appeared in the video. This has been corrected and we apologise for the error.
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