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Communicating with Employees in a Crisis – a conversation with disaster management expert Angela Devlan
1 Playsin 7 hours
Lessons from major disaster management for organisations who are addressing a crisis.
Angela Devlan is a crisis management expert, founder and CEO of Meridian Ventures, and Co-Founder and COO of Novera Sports Agency,
In this episode of the Abeceder podcast The Independent Minds Angela and host Michael Millward discuss how disaster managers communicate key information to the front-line workers and the lessons that any manager can learn from their approach.
They discuss
- The importance of having a plan for the crisis and training your team in how to implement that plan.
- The role a leader plays in crisis management.
- Applying humanity to the way the plan is implemented
- Honesty and transparency in communications
- Acknowledging that some people are affected personally by the crisis
This podcast is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand how to communicate with their team during a crisis so that the team stay focused on completing the crisis plan.
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Transcript
Introduction to Zencastr
00:00:05
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Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast making and distribution process so easy. You'll find more information and a link in the description.
Independent Minds Series Overview
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abysseedah and people who think outside the box about how work works. with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:38
Speaker
I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abacida.
Crisis Communication Strategies
00:00:43
Speaker
In this episode of The Independent Minds, Angela Devlin, an expert in crisis management, and I are going to be discussing internal aspects of crisis management and answering the question, what do you tell your employees?
00:00:59
Speaker
Angela is based in Tampa, Florida. somewhere that i have not yet visited but if i ever get the chance to go i will take advantage of the trade prices on travel that i have access to as a member of the ultimate travel club i have added a link with a built-in discount on subscription fees to the description so that just like me you can become a member of the ultimate travel club and travel at trade prices now that i have paid some bills it is time to make an episode of the independent minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:35
Speaker
And also good enough to share with your friends, family and work colleagues. As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we will not be telling you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
Angela Devlin's Career Journey
00:01:48
Speaker
Now, hello Angela. Hello Michael, thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to have you here, if only so that you can tell me how warm and beautiful Florida is today.
00:02:00
Speaker
Well, we're entering into our it our hot season. June is is pretty warm, but it it is beautiful today. June here in the UK as well, and it's raining, but it has been warm earlier on. It's just we get a ah real mixture of weather.
00:02:15
Speaker
Could you please start by telling me a little bit about your career to date and how you got involved with helping organizations to manage their various different crises? Sure. My career actually started on the pre-hospital side in rural EMS in Eastern Canada, where I was born and and raised. So even when I was in high school, my dad was a firefighter and inspired my interest in emergency services. And I took the route of working on the the local ambulance service at the time. and continued on through college. And years later, when I moved to the US, I started working on the hospital side in 2001. So while there was a whole cross section of experiences that happened in the years leading up to that, the thread in my career has been working in healthcare care and disaster management.
Experiences in Crisis Management
00:03:09
Speaker
And when I later leaned fully into my entrepreneurial passion in 2009, it started with work centered around working with other healthcare care provider organizations and other communities internationally on planning for and responding to crises events, anything from something that would interrupt the operations of a or provider organization itself to what we conventionally think of ah as crises or disasters, your natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, that sort of thing, and have responded to most federally declared disasters since nine eleven in 2001 through to the most recent hurricanes we had here in Florida, Hurricane Helene and Milton, which impacted the community I live in. That must have been more stressful, I suppose, than other crises because you're dealing with the crisis, the emergency,
00:04:19
Speaker
and not really knowing what is happening to your your own home. I've been through that experience more than once. um Interestingly enough, one could ask some questions about that, but back in 2017, the wildfires in the Sonoma-Napa region of California, the wine region, we had devastating wildfires there. And my daughter, I have two two old lady pups now, but one of them,
00:04:48
Speaker
that I only had one of them at the time, and we were had responded to those wildfires. And I had a property that was in the midst of of all of that. So my daughter, my my pup, and I, we actually stayed in the shelter at the fairgrounds. in Santa Rosa and she supported the fairgrounds livestock response to that event. And I worked at the community and healthcare care level because we had two of our hospital clients that were directly affected and evacuated during those wildfires. So that was a combination personal professional response event. And then more recently with Helene and Milton, here in the Tampa Bay area. What was strange about that for me was
00:05:39
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living in my property. It wasn't so much the case with with the California because that was scenario because that was a secondary property. But this was where I lived and and it was a different experience for
Leadership in Crisis Situations
00:05:53
Speaker
a couple of reasons. One, I think after doing this for over 30 years, I was at a different stage professionally and personally. um id had been through a lot of events and I knew what to do professionally, but I still was carrying the heaviness of it affecting me personally. And I had people living with me that had lost everything in the in Hurricane Helene first. So when Milton happened, i
00:06:22
Speaker
was being spread personally and professionally in a host of different ways as, you know, shelter, as responder, as personally being affected. um and the lesson that came out of that for me actually was my friend who was living with me. And she said, Angela, she said, this is this is the time when You need to take what you've learned and hand the baton off to the next generation. you can't be the one out in the field doing everything anymore. I think that it was an important bit of feedback to receive, particularly when when you're a leader. you You can't always be in the trenches. There's there's a balance between...
00:07:10
Speaker
your role in the trenches and being visible and actually allowing other people to step into that role and benefit from your mentorship. Yes. I suppose training is one of those key things about what you do tell employees either during the crisis or in the preparation for how people will deal with it. You've got to have people with the right skills and knowledge this Absolutely. And I learned that externally when I worked for the last CEO that I worked for had responded to Hurricane Katrina in a leadership position before he came on to be the CEO of the health system that I worked for. He was such a great leader to learn from.
00:07:56
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in terms of getting the cross-section of experiences of being the responder and also the responsibilities of being the leader and striking that balance between visibility and mentorship. It just was many years later when I had to be reminded of that lesson and apply it in in my own life because it is different when you're both in a response role or in a leadership role and directly affected by the same event.
00:08:26
Speaker
There's almost an aspect of it which is we've got to deal with the situation now and then that was a close shave. the The reality of what you have worked through doesn't always hit you immediately, it's it's afterwards that you can feel the trauma of the event.
00:08:44
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Absolutely. And a lot of the leaders in organizations that are listeners of your podcast might find themselves in that exact same situation where they are directly impacted by something that is happening within the community they serve or the organization that
Effective Crisis Communication Techniques
00:09:03
Speaker
they lead. And then also needing to provide guidance and support and communications to employees as well. Yes. It's right it's oftentimes not an either or. And a lot of times planning assumptions suggest that it is an either or. Your nervous system is operating from a different place when you are personally impacted by the exact same event you're trying to support others in navigating.
00:09:33
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A confusing time for everyone. Yes. But the training takes over and that's what gets people through it. Absolutely. It's in both you know day to day as well as in crises.
00:09:48
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The way in which we perform is reflective of our level of of planning. right And so it you know it does reveal itself in those times. What I think really sets apart the great leaders that I've worked with is the ones that strike the balance between still being able to effectively lead and honor the planning that has been done, but also show up with visibility and humility and humanity in their presence and communications without overstepping or undermining frontline leadership and staff in the
00:10:30
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the part that that they have in the response or in the communications in navigating the event. Because again, the leader themselves can't can't and shouldn't do everything. No, that would mean if they did, they wouldn't be a leader.
00:10:45
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They'd be an operator and that's to discredit the role of leader. So the challenges aren't always the obvious ones or people in these crisis type situations there are logistical ones the organizational ones the electricity goes down those types of things but an awful lot of the challenges seem to be much more related to leadership skills soft skills getting the focus on what needs to be done now in this very second rather than worrying about what may be happening on an individual level
Decision Making in Crises
00:11:25
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think that whether I say to people all the time, i operate in thinking about things and what I start, many people probably refer to it as a rule of threes, but I bucket things into threes. And part of that came from these experiences because you cannot respond to everything and you can't respond to everything at the same time. And an organization needs to prioritize what they continue to have operating, how they allocate the resources that are available to them, keeping messaging succinct in such a way that the people who need to receive it
00:12:08
Speaker
can retain it. And i will often say, like what are the top three things that we need to be thinking about right now based on the information we have available to us? Because particularly during crises, you're not going to have all of the information that you need available to you to make decisions. So you need to still make a decision, still communicate what you can communicate based on what you know in that moment and being able to distill it down into what are the top three things right now, recognizing that may pivot in real time, which again, also communications is such an important part of that. And I will say to people, it's okay to say to people that you don't know
00:12:55
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what the answer is, but you are looking to get the data that you need to answer that question. And i will circle back every hour on the hour with updates on what we have or whatever the the cadence is that needs to be set. Because in the absence of information,
00:13:16
Speaker
people will make something up. So I would rather say we don't have the information, but this is what we're doing to get it. um And this is when we'll be providing that update so that people are not trying to close that gap on their own.
00:13:31
Speaker
and can have confidence in what action is being taken so that that gap can be closed. it It works from a decision support standpoint, both for leadership and for everyone else that is impacted by the event.
00:13:48
Speaker
The event can come as quite surprise if it's for example, a terrorist attack. Obviously, we have no knowledge that that's going to happen until it actually has happened weather crises, we know that the storm is arriving, the hurricane is arriving, we know that the route that is likely to take but it can have habit of changing its mind every so often.
00:14:12
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And then things like the infrastructure type disasters, bridge problem or big highway accidents, all those sorts of things, blackouts, electrical blackouts, they all happen by surprise as well. But what you are saying, I think, is that once you know that something has happened, you then have a plan for keeping people up to date with the information that they need to do their job.
00:14:43
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but also the information, because they're working in their own communities, the information that they will need to know about their own part of that community, their own family and home, so that they can focus on the bigger project, the bigger work that they
Communication to Reduce Misinformation
00:15:01
Speaker
need to do.
00:15:01
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Absolutely. i think that to be able to say to people, even very early on, because people want to know that that someone knows what's happening, right? Even if you don't know all of the details of what's happening. But to be able to say, here's what we know, here's what we don't know, and what we're doing to find out, and here's where you can get more information in the cadence with which we're going to provide updates as we learn more. And then you can say, this is what it means to you, so that they then can, within
00:15:34
Speaker
the boundaries of their responsibilities make decisions about what they need to do. Then at the staff level or at the frontline leadership level, they within their own can be OK, here's what we know. Here's what we don't know. Here's how it impacts us and use that information for decision support to decide what do we keep operating?
00:16:00
Speaker
Do we call people in or do we send people home? Who do we need to communicate with external to the organization that we've been impacted in some way? Those considerations are very, you know, tactical and tend to be more at the at the frontline level within various segments of frontline or department level leadership. as they're trying to make operational decisions, as leadership is trying to make organizational decisions and casting, ideally, a wide net with consistent communication so everyone is is is reading the same baseline information from which they're making decisions.
00:16:42
Speaker
So if everyone is getting the same information, they're able to analyze that information for themselves. you're going to have fewer different interpretations of the information because the that people understand the format in which the information is coming to you and what it means. So they're more likely to interpret it in the same way, which is very important in that. But that comes from their knowledge of the information that you are giving them.
00:17:11
Speaker
They know the systems behind how the information has been created. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it offers some transparency, which is why I do say to people in crisis communications, it's okay to say this is what we know and this is what we don't know. yes Because then, and also qualifying what you're doing to i you know to get the information that you need to close that knowledge gap. It provides a compass for people.
00:17:40
Speaker
As much as everyone would like to have more information, it gives them some comfort in knowing that we know what we don't know. And there's at least some guideposts to inform yes with some autonomy to make the best decisions we can right now bit based on what we know and what we know we don't know. Because the the lack of decisions are still decisions, right? So we don't want paralysis, you know, analysis paralysis happening where there's no action because of the overwhelm of content that no one is doing anything with. We don't want people to feel like they can't do anything because we don't know everything yet.
00:18:30
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Right. So it's kind of like saying, OK, here's what we do know. here's you know what we would like what it means to you. And with some level of autonomy and frontline leadership, make the decisions that you need to make based on the impact to your area, your staff, your and you know clients, or in my case, in a healthcare care setting, your your patients, um that a kind of that kind of thing.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yes. Because It's not just information. This information that you are providing to people is what equips them to go into the situation that everyone else is running away from.
00:19:12
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Absolutely. You're giving them the information that equips them to know how to deal with a particular situation, what equipment they'll need, what risks they're likely to face within that situation, which then, because they have confidence in you, they trust you.
00:19:28
Speaker
they can then go in and do the work that needs to be done. Absolutely. It's very complicated when you get into all the detailed planning, but I often say to people, try not to get lost in all of those pieces.
00:19:42
Speaker
What you want to be able to do is distill it down into the things that are common for everyone that allows them to act because people want to know that they can do something in a crisis. They don't want to sit back and not do anything.
00:19:58
Speaker
So if you can distill it down into fundamental actions on what people have the ability to do on their own, you know, even if it's just here's who you communicate with again, here's where you go and get more information and to be able to interpret this in a way as to what's the impact on you. And then within your scope of service, your scope of responsibility, and the culture of the organization that you work within can have some guidance around actions that you're able to to take. um But you know for for your frontline leadership, they're thinking about things like
00:20:42
Speaker
you know, they're thinking about the people that they're responsible for, the processes that they're responsible for, and what resources they need to provide the needs for those people and continuing what's most critical within the processes or services that they're responsible for.
Role of Frontline Leaders
00:21:00
Speaker
In some cases, depending on the severity of the event, they may need to ah actually close down those services, they may need to continue some critical subset of those services. And in some cases, and again, this is true oftentimes for for our hospital clients, they need to level up, right? They need to do more with less. So the way in which they are
00:21:32
Speaker
allocating resources and the succinctness of communication that allows for them to make rapid decisions and coordinate that with the command center, because they'll set up a command center where leadership will be sitting in that space, making the the, you know, what they sort of the command decisions, if you will, it's just that the terms that they use, but they, that group will be the the communication coordination hub of the decisions that need to be made in order to be able to respond to, communicate about and recover from that event.
00:22:13
Speaker
So you're talking about also, as well as you're collecting information and passing it out to other people you need information from them as well yes yeah it's a two-way street and that the people at the sharp end actually out in the field need to be doing the job but also telling you what it is that they're doing and the impact that it's having so that then you can make the more strategic decisions about where resources need to go and which stage you can move on to next in dealing with the crisis. Yeah, the data collection process can be as simple or sophisticated as the their workflows and crisis management plans support. But at the end of the day, if they can standardize
00:23:00
Speaker
the data collection process from the department leaders to that central hub, whether they call it the coordination and communication center or the command center. But ideally, like, you know, what do you have? What do you need?
00:23:15
Speaker
you know, are you operational or not? Yeah, but you right. And like maybe sort of the top three things, top five things, top 10 things that you need to know, and then having someone that is, at you know, putting that information into an aggregate format for decision support so that resources and logistics to get those resources where they need to be can be facilitated. Yeah. Yeah.
00:23:43
Speaker
There's an awful lot of planning goes in. I think before any crisis actually happens and I suppose as a crisis manager you've got to have perhaps a very vivid imagination to imagine all of the things that might happen during during a crisis and then work out how to deal with
Crisis Preparedness with Simulated Scenarios
00:24:02
Speaker
them. Well, I'm sure many of your listeners have participated in things that ah they like they might call disaster drills or tabletop exercises or those types of things within their organization that runs those scenario-based events for them to respond to, to simulate what it would be like to go through something like this. And they can be a lot of fun. Sometimes the scenarios get a little wild, but it's also to stress the team and sometimes just to have a sense of humor.
00:24:34
Speaker
ah One thing that was popular for a long time was the zombie apocalypse scenario. It was just like, let's make something as wild and crazy and fun as we can, just so people are engaged and they're not being like, oh gosh, okay, another fire drill, right? it's It's actually something that's a little bit more um
00:24:56
Speaker
unlikely and still drives the point and the training and stresses the system enough for folks, but without... generating too much you know fear or um or or or the alternative of just apathy because it's not interesting enough.
00:25:16
Speaker
I suppose nowadays you can use AI to make these things more interesting and more realistic. Yeah, absolutely. i mean, you could take And they're they're available online, all kinds of different types of real scenarios or even shared after action reports from tabletop scenarios and exercises.
00:25:41
Speaker
by by industry. You could ask, yeah, you could do a search on that and come up with some examples and load that into a project in one of the AI tools that you use and say, can you create a new scenario? It's designed to meet this objective or these objectives. This is what we're testing. These are the types of individuals or departments that are participating. and we need three different segments with questions at the end of each of those segments for the groups to all answer together. you know And it would produce ah a tabletop exercise following that format, which then, of course, I would encourage people to go through and make sure that they review it and edit it and further stylize it in their own voice. But it would provide a ah good first draft for something like that.
Episode Recap and Zencastr Promotion
00:26:41
Speaker
You have very interesting job, a very interesting job and an essential one as well. I really do appreciate the time that you've spent today telling me about it. Thank you very much. It's been great. Thank you for having me. It's been my pleasure. Thank you.
00:26:56
Speaker
I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Angela Devlin, an emergency planning and crisis management expert.
00:27:09
Speaker
You can find out more information about both of us by using the links in the description. The Zencastr system has worked really well for us today, but if you've experienced some buffering issues by listening to this this episode of the Independent Minds on your smartphone, you may want to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data. So listening on 3.0 means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
00:27:36
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There is a link in the description that will take you to more information about business and personal telecom solutions from 3 and the special offers available when you quote my referral code.
00:27:47
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I'm sure you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of the Independent Minds as much as Angela and I have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:27:59
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. You'll probably also want to share the link with your family, friends and work colleagues as well. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abusida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
00:28:17
Speaker
Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.