Crisis Communications in the Business School

• Natural disasters and other crises are occurring more frequently, and often simultaneously, causing disruption of operations for business schools and their communities worldwide.
• Past events emphasize why it is critical for all schools to have agile communication protocols and cross-functional teams in place, long before the next crisis occurs.
• Leaders should encourage training and exercises around their communication policies, to ensure that they are not only actionable but effective.

Transcript

Lee Miles: [0:15] Business schools are affected by a multitude of different crises, and you can think about this in many different ways. Obviously, some business schools are actually in disaster-prone areas, and they will be regularly suffering from the effects of, say, earthquakes or mudslides.

[0:30] This might be the case particularly in the developing world, in our global world of business schools. But, of course, we also have those that are affected by climatic events, storms, rainy seasons, and those kind of elements which are regular, but operate and affect the campuses worldwide.

[0:47] There's also an important point, really, and that with climate change, we see increasing vulnerabilities of business schools. What I mean by that is a very simple point that we see rising sea levels, we see rising heat temperatures.

[1:00] We see parts of the world where we face urban fires now, and wildfires, which are now affecting business school campuses or bringing them in close proximity to danger in the ways they weren't before.

[1:11] We can think about the pandemic and the public health crisis that it created. We lived for a long time actually, where campuses, our business schools weren't operational in the same way, so those kind of crises can have very important effects on the way that we have.

[1:24] What the pandemic tells us is that for some instances, we might be facing multitudes of crises at the same time, in a pandemic, a situation, we might also face flooding or issues of damage to our campuses.

It's very important for business schools to develop concise, factually accurate, and informative statements and crisis communication, both internally to their staff, their faculty, and their students, and also externally to the wider audience.

[1:37] We also increasingly, of course, our business schools are influenced because of the internationalization of business schools, more international students. In some instances, business schools have overseas campuses in other countries.

[1:51] That, of course, brings the very simple challenge that we face the impact of international political events of different kinds and to what extent students, staff, faculty, expect their business schools to make statements or policy positions about that. That requires business schools to develop what kind of policy or what kind of view they're going to take on these kind of issues.

[2:14] It's very important for business schools to develop concise, factually accurate, and informative statements and crisis communication, both internally to their staff, their faculty, and their students, and also externally to the wider audience, the region, and, of course, to the public, those parents, those members of society, those alumni that are interested in the welfare of the business school itself.

[2:42] The important thing about a crisis communications policy, it allows for the deans to identify what is the context-specific challenges that they face, the aims and objectives that they're trying to achieve in dealing with that, and also to build organizational crisis communication teams to be able to write those statements in coordination with, perhaps, marketing departments in their universities.

[3:07] There's one lesson that I've learned from the many experiences I've had with crisis in business schools, is that often your best crisis communicators may not necessarily be in your marketing department. Crisis brings out the best and sometimes the worst in all of us.

[3:21] Therefore, it's important to also train and exercise around those crisis communication policies so you really know what you've got inside the business school so you can deliver an effective response and put wellbeing in place. That's the space, but there's also the time.

Crisis brings out the best and sometimes the worst in all of us.

[3:38] What crisis in business schools tells us, is we live in a 24/7 world where the expectations are for very quick amount of information and it to be timely information.

[3:48] Really about understanding the channels in which you are going to communicate, social media, press releases, and those aspects, but also an expectation of how quickly and how timely you can produce these concise, factually accurate, and informative statements that are important.

[4:07] You might have slight variations in that crisis communication policy or plan, depending upon the type of actual crisis that you may be facing. I'm thinking here, for example, that universities and business schools may face financial crisis, for example, going back to the 2008 financial crisis that affected many business schools.

[4:27] That may require more factually informative type information which may have a more long-running aspects, too.

[4:35] In contrast, the impact of, for example, a flood, or a fire, or a natural hazard on a campus would require more quicker responses. We need, therefore, to have a crisis communications policy which might have a slight different emphasis within it.

What crisis in business schools tells us, is we live in a 24/7 world where the expectations are for very quick amount of information and it to be timely information.

[4:51] A crisis communication policy has to do with a number of aspects here. It has to deal with the 'why' of the types of crisis that are going to be affected by the crisis communication policy.

[5:04] The 'what,' which are the aims and objectives that you're trying to achieve in the business school to develop a very good crisis communication for your staff, students, and faculty.

[5:13] The 'who,' who in the business school would be involved in the development of that policy and whether it needs to be changed in terms of the skill bases around that.

[5:23] The 'where,' where effectively, which types of social media platforms and messages are going to take place.

[5:30] Finally, and most importantly, the training and exercising to ensure that the communication policy is achieved, so the 'how' becomes a reality and not just a statement on paper.