For companies, one of the most important things they can do is make their stakeholders feel confident in the company. Part of this means being prepared for crises that may and will happen in the future. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Failure to plan is a plan to fail.”
In my time as a student majoring in communications, I’ve come to understand the importance of being prepared for problems that may arise. It shows professionality, and the ability to show your company values innovation. This is why I wanted to create a risk management plan for my senior project.
A risk management plan will save companies time when needing to prevent or respond to crises. The hardest part of coming up with a risk management plan is finding the type of crises that a company will potentially face. This is where my time as a public relations emphasis came in helpful.
In Sister Russel’s Crisis Communication class, you will learn about a risk matrix. A risk matrix will help you rank crises based off the level of severity they are, and how likely they are to happen. This helps a company know how quickly they need to respond certain crises. I also created an escalation matrix, which helps companies know who needs to be the person to respond to a crisis.
Having these in place already give the company better direction on how to handle crises.
After I created the risk and escalation matrix, I focused on coming up with the response plans for all the crises on the risk matrix. The hardest part about this was finding the right responses for crises.
This meant I had to work with the company to learn about what was the best plans for response for a data research company. The people I worked with at Clear Insights the most were Wyatt Lee (Call Center Manager), Samantha Richardson (Director of Operations), and Maddie Hall (HR manger).
Samantha was the person who gave me the idea for the escalation matrix. I checked in with Maddie and Wyatt often for the progress I was making on the project and was able to get their opinions on what would be best for responses.
Something that sister Russell recommended to me was creating templates for responses so supervisors could respond quicker. I created template responses for No Call No Shows and Poor Employee Performances.
Supervisors are allowed to make updates to these templates any way they see fit, but now they are going to be able to employees much quicker.
Overall, this project gave me a lot of experience in what I am going to be doing in my career moving forward. I learned a lot about working with higher ups in companies to learn about company values and what are crises they really want to be prepared for.
This enlightened me on how two things make a workplace a better place to work at. This first one is clarity. When people have clarity and are getting answers to their questions, they are not only going to work better, but they are also going to appreciate that company values them and doesn’t ask them to do work that they’re unsure to do.
The second one is development. When an employee is at a company and sees that the company puts time and effort into developing procedures that help the employee learn and grow, they are more eager to work and do their work well.
These both help a risk management plan because a risk management plan is supposed to help a company avoid a crisis, but if a crisis does happen there is a clear path to take to get out of it, and to learn how to avoid it again in the future.