Corporate Communications and COVID-19 – It’s a Case of Adapt to Thrive
By Adam Noyes
Covid-19 is officially a pandemic, and is having great effect over the industry as a whole. NewTek recently posted an article detailing how your business can still succeed in the live streaming space. We’re going to take a look at that article below.
There are a lot of words starting with C flying around right now; Coronavirus, COVID-19, contagion, crisis, and of course corporate communications being among them. Now that the World Health Organization have declared the current events a pandemic and the public health authorities are taking unprecedented steps to help manage the outbreak, corporate communications teams must quickly work out how to be effective whilst managing the impact of the situation on their own resources.
As social distancing practices are beginning to be more commonplace and employees are being encouraged to work from home or avoid coming into the workplace, it becomes harder to communicate effectively across the organization. The science behind why social distancing can be effective is complex but it is understood to extend the period of time available for vaccine development and to slow the spread of infection. It is also understood to work best if it is enacted swiftly and for a reasonable duration ͣ.
For the Corp Comms team, that means that they will need to keep their stakeholders informed, often in a fast-changing environment, for a material period of time. And they will have to do so while many of their resources are impacted or unavailable. They need to be effective in a sustainable manner.
Let’s look at one way that this could be achieved.
I was once given a really powerful piece of advice about how to handle a crisis situation at work. Run towards it, don’t ignore it, and don’t wait for someone else to deal with it. Tackle it head on and in the open.
If you are going to run at a crisis, you need to have a pretty good idea about what you are gong to do when you reach it and that suggests that you’ll do well by having a plan worked out in advance. The plan will need to be flexible, but not loose and not so detailed that you can’t execute it swiftly and on the move. It’s good to have thought about setting up an Emergency Steering group, with the authority to create and adapt policy as required. Equally, having a communications strategy on the shelf and ready to go will mean you can keep stakeholders informed swiftly, enabling your organization to take care of your people and your business.
That communications strategy should address how, when and where you will craft a messaging framework, who will be communicated to, how often and by what means. It is likely that your communications will play out over a number of channels, including corporate Intranet sites, mobile networks, all-hands emails and town hall meetings. For an increasing number of organizations that are looking to reassure, engage, coordinate, and collaborate with their teams in a highly effective manner, video distributed over IP (Internet Protocol) provides a powerful solution. In a fast-moving situation, if video can be captured ‘live’ and be broadcast ready in real-time, vital messages can be created and delivered in an extremely expedient manner.
