TBJA 428 Crisis Management: How to be Proactive Instead of Reactive

Phoebe Chongchua: Hello Brand Journalism community, I'm Phoebe Chongchua. Thanks for tuning in to The Brand Journalism Advantage Podcast. Here we go with the inside scoop. On today's show, it's a little bit, different folks. We've got two people coming on with us. We have Bob May and Steve Albrecht, both from Mainstream Unlimited. And I love these guys because they are really going to help set the stage for you to be prepared for any crisis that goes on within your company or at the government level, within cities. So, welcome to the show. Bob, Steve, how are you guys?

Bob May: I'm doing great, thanks, Phoebe.

Steve Albrecht: Thanks Phoebe, doing well.

Phoebe Chongchua: So, we are really talking about something that most people don't think about, and that's a crisis. I think in our home, personal life, we don't think about it as we listen to financial planners. They're telling us, "Be prepared, have this slush fund." And then if you look at what statistics show us, most people aren't prepared there for a financial crisis. In the workplace, even worse because you've got all different kinds of people in there. You have a lot of responsibility, and the brands and the companies eventually come into these crises, city governments, all these situations, where things go wrong. Even police departments as we've seen, especially recently.

The three of us, by the way, Brand Journalism Community, Bob, Steve, and I work together at Mainstream Unlimited dot com. I'll drop that in the show notes in case you're looking for some assistance, how you get started on this, what our team can do. You're going to learn more about that, but I really want to focus on these two guys because they have a lot of wealth of knowledge in this area. So, let's first start off, Bob, why don't you just tell us just briefly about your background and how it applies to crisis management.

Bob May: Well my background, I spent well over 40 years in the California Fire Service, and that was the main thrust is responding to crisis', both at a personal level with the families, and also catastrophic events when you have wildfires, earthquakes, those types of things. And it boils down to, after you've gone through the event itself and you go back and look at it in retrospect, many things fell through the cracks in crisis management planning. So one of the things that we focus on at Mainstream is getting agencies ready for those types of things that may happen in the future, and allow them to be prepared and practice those types of things on a regular basis.

Phoebe Chongchua: We're going to dive into that more because what really does that mean? I know you're listening folks, and you're running businesses, and you're thinking, "Wel, wait a second, how can I even think about what the things are that are crises that are going to come up, let alone build those planning documents, then practice and train those things?" But it is critical. So Steve, share with us your background. You've been working the space of workplace violence prevention, harassment, drug and alcohol awareness, a lot of different things. Give us just a little brief taste of what all you've been involved in.

Steve Albrecht: I started with the police department in San Diego. I worked there for 15 years, and in that time span, I wrote the first book in the country on workplace violence, a book called "Ticking Bombs." I interviewed a double murderer, a guy killed two people at work, and that was in 1993. The book came out in '94, and at that time, people didn't care much about workplace violence. They saw it as sort of a post office thing. The switch for us was when Columbine happened in April of '99, and then it was off to the races in terms of policy, response, changes in the police response. A lot of differences, and now we know it's a pretty mature subject.

Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, I mean this is something that if you don't have a plan in place if you don't know how to get your employees safely out of a building, for instance, you have to do this today. You can't wait any longer. So, let's talk about some of the biggest crisis, and this is ranging the gamut from PR crisis like we saw with United Airlines' removal of a passenger. That's something that it was just handled poorly all the way around. If we recall, I think it was a doctor, was pulled off the plane and just the whole thing went berserk. The community online went crazy with this, and the CEO didn't react in the right way. At first, sided with the company, didn't really have the right knowledge about it, and then had to backpedal. What are your thoughts on that, either of you?

Bob May: Well I think we've seen, Phoebe, in those types of situations, where someone has a compelling need to speak to the press before they know all of the facts of the situation. As you eluded to earlier, the three of us have been in those situations where an agency calls us up after the fact, after they've already said something to the press that they've regretted saying those types of things. And then they get a hold of us and say, "How do we fix that." So I think one of the things people need to be mindful of is that the first 20 to 60 minutes of an incident is the most critical of those, and that you have to have your framework in place to manage those events from a strategic approach, which basically means, don't say things that you're not factually able to back up or support.

Phoebe Chongchua: Steve, your thoughts.

Steve Albrecht: I think because we're in such a litigation oriented society, that a lot of CEO's and company leaders are afraid of litigation, so their first response, and you've seen this a lot in your career, is denial. They deny the incident; they deny who was involved in it. They sugar coat it, or they minimize it, and then what happens, later on, is an employee comes forward and says some things off the record, of which gets publicized, or other people talk about it. It picks up social media energy, and then what we see is the back peddling. Then there's a lot of going backward and saying, "Well, what we really meant was this," or, "What we meant to do was that." And it just looks bad. So there's an optics issue, which I think a lot of CEO's are not prepared for, and denial seems to be their first response.

Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, what I always like to say is, "Listen first," kind of like newsgathering. When I would go out on a story, and I'd hear all this ... I'd survey the situation, but then I would really listen to the different sides and try to get all the information in, as opposed to jumping out there and just telling the story in a live shot quickly, without all the information. And that's the same position that a CEO can be in, and that's exactly what happened with the United Airlines removal and why their stock plummeted. And then, having to come back and apologize after that, and then further down the line, to actually settle. So, that was a huge disaster and blunder.
Let's go into something that is a little bit more, obviously, physical and needing these plans to be in place. And let's explore this. We saw the YouTube shooting incident, and I think even as big as YouTube is and the company, I'm not so sure that they expected something like this, even though Steve, you know that this is happening. We all know. We see it in the news, but still, it's a shock to us. So, what are your thoughts on workplace violence, what we saw with the YouTube shooting?

Steve Albrecht: Well, to start with, I do a lot of webinars where we do poll questions, and we ask the listeners, "Do you have a workplace violence response plan or policy?" And below 50 percent is the answer, which I find unusual, even in this day and age. The second thing is, we don't put a lot of energy towards physical security in our workplaces until something happens. So as Bob and I know from doing site assessments, they're often times driven by events. They don't call us when things are going well, same as you. They don't call you when things are going well.

So there's always a physical security breach of some type, so when the shooting incident on YouTube, there was ... She got into the inner courtyard and shot these folks and herself, and the idea is that we respond to physical security changes after something's happened, and we're always in the defensive position. We're trying to get ahead of that. It's a difficult conversation to have. They don't want to spend the money, and then they're driven by events, and they have to spend the money.

Phoebe Chongchua: Bob, what are your thoughts?

Bob May: No I agree. I think part of what we see, again in crisis management, is that the leadership that should be making decisions or overseeing the events, quite frankly lack those essential skills to manage an incident. And primarily that's due to lack of planning and lack of practice. And as Steve just talked about, they call us after the fact. We'd like to get out ahead of those situations and identify those weaknesses in the organizations, and then allow them to build strength or build a stronger foundation so they can prevent things from happening. And allow them obviously the creativity and provide communication linkages so they can communicate their message efficiently and effectively to those that need to have that message.

Phoebe Chongchua: You know, when you look at this kind of situation, it's like I started off with the financial slush fund for homes. It's the kind of thing where people go, "Oh yeah, I should do that," but somehow they don't get around to it because they spend their money on other things and that fund never appears. In this case, a lot more, I feel, is at stake, especially when you're talking about workplace violence prevention. If you are a leader in the organization, and what Steve said, that 50 percent or less, I think, have a workplace violence prevention plan in place. Take us through, one of you, both of you. Take us through how this gets set up, just briefly, step by step. What should someone do first, because they're busy running their businesses and most people don't get into business thinking, "Hey, I have to do this workplace violence prevention plan," but does indeed need to be done?

Steve Albrecht: Phoebe, from my perspective, the driver for most of these activities is going to be the human resources function of the organization. Lots of companies have HR, and a lot of companies don't have security as a function. The larger they are, they may have a security manager or security director, but that's not always common for most small businesses. So HR is the driver for this. And we know that they're the driver for a lot of policies about employee behavior and employee performance. So when it comes to workplace violence, it starts with HR, they're the keeper of the keys. They know the labor laws, they know the response protocols that they want to create. And a lot of this stuff they can get online. They get it from places like SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management. They don't have to start from scratch.

Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, so what if you're a smaller organization because entrepreneur ship's on the rise. You've got these small offices popping up, and it's certainly not uncommon these days. A shooting can happen anywhere, even for that matter, we should talk about schools as well, what needs to be in place there. But let's address first if you're a smaller organization, you don't have an HR department, what do you do?

Steve Albrecht: I think the next response would be to go to your company attorney and the person that you've hired to provide your legal advice, which is often times an outside counsel, and say, "Can you help us put together an employee handbook?" Often times employee handbooks address workplace violence, or employee policy manuals that they can get are kind of [inaudible 00:11:10] and have customized. They can also hire some HR support consulting help to get them rolling, but often times, the policy manuals, and employee guides, and things like that are already created, they just draft them for their own use.

Bob May: Well at least in California, we have two statutory schemes that require employers to provide a safe workplace for their employees. One is Cal OSHA Title 8, general safety orders, and also in the labor code, basically says that you provide a safe workplace for your employees, which really when you look at it, is very broad in scope. And it requires the employer, obviously, to ensure that their employees can perform their duties in a safe manner. So, as Steve said, it's imperative that employers have that, and then they also need to be able to train their employees in recognition of things that are not right with either their employees or the clients that they serve. And that's one of the things that we spent a lot of time training on is recognition of signs of bad behavior, or poor behavior that could lead to workplace violence situations.

Phoebe Chongchua: So is it better to say ... You know Steve talked about hiring out if you're a smaller company, or even if you're a larger company, consulting with people like the company that you two have formed. Is it better to get somebody like that involved to do the training, just because of a lot of times ... And I worked for Channel 10, and we certainly had this in place, but we brought in a lot of folks to help us. And often, even back then, things would fall through the cracks. There would be people who still didn't know in the case like that, and we were in the news business.

Bob May: Well I think a lot of that again, stems from the leadership of the organization. And again, as Steve and I go out and do our training with cities and counties right now, basically it has to be done on a regular basis. It can't be just done today and then forgotten about for the next several months or years quite frankly. It has to be done on a reoccurring basis, and we try to encourage those folks to use the 15 minute drill, which basically you practice those types of things in the workplace, so your employees know how to respond when something does rise to the level of response, and they're not standing there frozen, quite frankly. That's where a lot of folks become injured or become victims–they freeze, and they don't know how to react to the situation.

Phoebe Chongchua: So is most of this training, we've been focusing on workplace violence if you're just joining in this podcast, but is most of this about training them where to physically go, those types of things? Are you also training about what to say? So for instance, the representative who's going to be the key spokesperson, are you training in that area as well?

Steve Albrecht: That's kind of a secondary thing. We try to do ... Our best response is when organizations of some size create a threat assessment team. That would be HR, their legal representatives; it would be somebody from the CEO's office, it would be someone from their risk management side, insurance. And if they have access to the employee assistance program, those people might be there as well. That's why we do a secondary training, is to bring those people up to speed to handle the media, to address the post-traumatic issues that may happen after an event.

And I think one thing to think about is, we always consider workplace violence to be a shooting, but there are lots of things around bullying, and threats, and harassment, and hostile employees that have been terminated, hostile taxpayers, customers, visitors, clients, people that we provide services to. Those can be workplace violence perpetrators as well, and often times our main driver is threats, and language, and things like that, not just the shooting part. I think sometimes people get too much focus on the shooting, which is still pretty rare. It's mostly about behavior, and that's what we try to work on.

Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, that's a very good point, and I am going to take us back just because this is fresh at the time of this recording, to an incident that happened at Trader Joe's. And I can't remember, maybe you guys can refresh my memory. Do you remember what city that was in where they were held hostage?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, it was in Los Angeles.

Bob May: Los Angeles.

Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, so I don't know. Do you know whether they had a policy because that was unbelievable what she was able to do? If you're not familiar with the story, I'll drop it in the show notes at thinklikeajournalist.com, Brand Journalism Community, so you can read about it, but that employee sounds like she either just intuitively knew what to do, but really calmed the situation. She did a lot of the negotiating, and I think it was only one death. Am I correct in that?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, that looked like a friendly fire situation where LAPD may have shot one of the hostages by accident, but that's a really dynamic situation. You're right. Some people really rise to the occasion of those critical incidents, especially life-threatening. Bob and I always talk to people about, "Can you do the right thing? Can you fight back in a situation where a perpetrator comes into the room, and you have no other choice?" That's the motto in this country. Run out of the building if you can. Hideout as best as you can with as many people as possible, and then fight back. What we see these, people aren't Navy Seals that are doing these things, these are folks with guns that are disturbed, and we can stop them if we do it as a group. In that situation, it was very brave of her activities.

Phoebe Chongchua: So how about talking to the employees from the perspective. Right now we've been talking a lot about the outside coming in, but maybe something's brewing. What do you guys do to help see and uncover if there's a situation that might turn deadly, or might just turn into something like you talked about? A bullying situation, or harassment, or any other trouble?

Bob May: Well we spend a lot of time when we do our workplace training with employees, and we talk about the basic components that, or display bizarre behavior or things that people need to be mindful of when they're in their workplace. And Steve and I did a presentation not too long ago for the Independent Cities Risk Management Authority about workplace violence and how that looks. And what we do is we basically track down the areas that OSHA has identified as those things that are problematic to an agency.
And basically we look at the five warning signs of escalating behavior: being confused, frustration, blame, anger, and hostility. And we talk about those with employees, both for internal customers, and external customers, to kind of give them some tools, if you would, to recognize the things that are changing in their situation, and bring up those red flags to say, "I need to change where I'm at," or, "I need to change my situation." Those are critical, as Steve talked about, for someone to react to potentially violent tendencies of folks.

Steve Albrecht: Phoebe, if we go back to the schools for just a second, one thing I think we try to get is hotlines and tip lines put into schools so the kids, and parents, and teachers, and staff, have an anonymous way to call in and say, "Here's what I'm seeing, here's what I'm hearing from other kids." We train the bus drivers, we train the school lunch ladies, we train the crossing guards, we train everybody we can to use these hotlines. In an organization, we hope that HR is the pipeline to these types of things where people have the courage with a capital C, to come forward and speak to HR about what they've heard or seen.

Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, and I think that that's really worth repeating because a lot of times employees don't like to go to HR. They feel like they're tattling. They get this level of uncertainty like, "Should I really be bringing this up?" That really needs to be an open door so that you know that you can go in and share something if you see it's not right. I mean look at in movie theaters, this is just a sign of the times. You go in, and before you watch your movie, one of the first things that comes up, it says, "If you see something suspicious, if something doesn't feel right, go and tell somebody." That's just a sign of the times of where we're at. You have to report these things.

So, this has been really invaluable, everything that you guys have shared. Obviously Brand Journalism Community, you can tell that Bob and Steve are very well versed in this. Another really nice component of what's done at Mainstream Unlimited is, I join them, and we talk about what can be done for sort of the aftermath. And that's kind of where we were leading up to, how you can start campaigns to rewrite your story, and navigate to a different place if you've been really swatted down by consumers, and your online reputation has been damaged. We can focus on that area to help you as well after the dust settles if you will. I want to close out the show. Before I do, Bob, Steve, do you have any final comments you want to share with the audience?

Bob May: I think it's important that the organizations develop their policies, develop their procedures, and then practice, practice, practice, to ensure safety in the workplace for these types of events. And also, to understand what the impacts will have not only on their business but also their employees as well.

Steve Albrecht: My part is really about, we take sexual harassment as a mature subject, we have a policy for it, we have a training response. Often times they bring in consultants, or HR does the training or the lawyers. Same as workplace violence. We should have a policy for it, we bring in outside people that know how to talk about this stuff, and then we get back to business.

Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, and the bottom line is you want to be proactive instead of reactive. You don't want to wait until the crisis hits, and then you're left going, "What do I do now?" Because that's a huge mess to clean up, as the three of us have seen a number of times. So, gentlemen, thank you. I love what you've shared. This is great. It'll all be at thinklikeajournalist.com, Brand Journalism Community. Go there and take a look at the show notes. There will also be links so that you can reach Bob and Steve. A few key points to just close out with this is, remember, just really quickly. Don't speak to the press before you consult with PR and crisis management experts. Of course, you'll know that if you have a plan in place.

The first 20 to 60 minutes of an incident are most critical, what goes down in that timeframe. You don't want to deny what's going on, you want to do your research first, and you want to listen. Develop a workplace violence prevention plan now, today, if you don't have one in place, so that you're not always playing defense. Gentlemen, thank you, I appreciate it. And good to chat with you. Thanks for being on the Brand Journalism Advantage Podcast.

Bob May: Thank you.

Steve Albrecht: Thanks.