If you’ve got a business and employees, you’ve got ingredients for a crisis. Whether it be an employee injury, a government agency inspection or other critical business issue, the steps you take now to manage a crisis will impact your organization’s reputation for the long-haul.

Here is a sneak peek of a seminar I’ll be presenting for the Institute for Human Resources on December 6, 2012 entitled “10 Smart Strategies for Reputation Management after an Occupational Crisis.” I offer a sampling of my top strategies for taking good care of your reputation amidst workplace turmoil. 

Strategy #1: Have a media plan. Most organizations are totally unprepared for media calls. Being unprepared can lead to unintended consequences: 1) You say things that are not helpful to your organization; 2) You don’t return reporter phone calls, and, as a result, you never get a chance to participate in the story; or 3) You respond with “No comment,” which can create the perception of guilt or wrongdoing.

Having a plan gives you a model to respond and allows you to be strategic about how you engage the media, if at all. A plan allows you to be organized and thoughtful, instead of chaotic and reactionary. Perhaps most important, however, it avoids inaction—a deer-in-headlights response—which is a reputational death knell. [Read more…]