Businesses have to deal with lots of challenges every day. However, sometimes these can grow out of proportion and become something much bigger: a crisis. Depending on its severity, a crisis may have significant impacts for your business. This highlights the importance of adequate crisis management—which can help your business avoid lots of negative consequences.

In this article, we’ll be exploring crisis management for businesses. We’ll be covering everything from the basics of managing a crisis at your business, to utilizing a popular productivity tool—a time tracker—to enhance your crisis management efforts.

What is Crisis Management in Business?

Let’s start off with the basics of the concept: what is crisis management? As the name implies, it’s the process of managing a time of intense difficulty—a crisis. Typically, this will include several stages:

• Planning
• Response
• Recovery

In a typical crisis management plan, these will be prepared in a way to minimize the damage of a crisis. They’ll also be designed to help the company return to its normal day-to-day operations as soon as possible.

Proactive Crisis Management vs. Reactive Crisis Management

There are two main types of crisis management: proactive and reactive. Their differences are pretty self-explanatory—proactive management involves planning for various crises, while reactive doesn’t. A company using proactive strategies will prepare for different types of crises well ahead of time. It’ll set out plans for how it can deal with such periods while minimizing their impact.

The Types of Crises a Business May Face

The crises a business might experience can fall into one of two categories: external and internal.

External Crises

An external crisis is one that happens due to factors outside of your control. Common examples of such factors include natural disasters and market changes in your company’s industry. As you might expect, you won’t be able to control any of these factors. Consequently, being prepared with an adequate crisis management plan is invaluable in such cases.

Internal Crises

An internal crisis is something that arises from within your business. There can be lots of reasons for an internal crisis, like mismanagement or simply human error. In many cases, they are not only avoidable but also predictable. A great crisis management plan will allow your business to detect and prevent such issues in time.

The Difference Between Crisis Management and Risk Management

To complete the basics of crisis management, let’s compare it to a similar concept: risk management. While they may seem to be the same at a glance, they differ in what they manage. A crisis is not something you may ever experience willingly. A risk, on the other hand, you may want to take to achieve a specific payoff.

One of the main objectives of crisis management is to reduce the damaging effects of crises. Risk management, on the other hand, aims to balance risk with its potential payoffs to achieve a positive result. In short—crisis management prepares for an unwanted event, while risk management prepares for the potential result of a risk you take.

Managing risks is something that every business can benefit from, as starting a business is itself somewhat of a risk. Crisis management, on the other hand, is something lots of companies don’t consider at all. However, a crisis can happen at any business—regardless of the risks it takes or the caution it practices. Let’s now explore why your company should take crisis management seriously.

Why Your Business Needs a Crisis Management Plan

Every business—no matter its size or industry—needs a crisis management plan. Crises can happen to anyone anywhere in the world, so being prepared for the unexpected is never a bad thing. While there are many benefits to such plans, let’s explore two of the most important ones: resiliency and trust.

Improved Resiliency

A solid crisis management plan will make your company more resilient. While this seems obvious, your business won’t just be resilient to crises—but also to their long-lasting fallout. If your staff act fast and remedy a crisis swiftly, your firm won’t feel the negative effects for long.

Enhanced Customer Trust

Having a solid crisis management plan will allow you to instill confidence in your customers. This can be especially important for your business if you handle lots of customer data—whether for marketing or product functionality purposes. You can even use your crisis management strategy to market your product as a trustworthy option for potential customers. Consequently, you’ll be able to outperform your competitors—especially those who handled crises poorly in the past.

The Role of Time Tracking in Crisis Management

Having covered most of the important details of crisis management, let’s now explore the role of productivity tools in them. Specifically, we’ll look at how a high-quality time tracker can help your crisis management plan—both during a crisis and outside of one.

Improved Collaboration

Collaboration is key when responding to a crisis. By working together during such an event, your staff can stay more organized—helping them resolve the situation quickly. High-quality time trackers with built-in collaboration tools are perfect for this. Using an app with a built-in team chat, like WebWork, is especially helpful for remote and hybrid teams.

Enhanced Accountability

By tracking your staff’s time and activity during a crisis, you can get detailed insights into how they helped resolve the issue. This will create an improved sense of accountability for your team, which will encourage them to perform their best. Besides crises, this increased level of employee accountability will be beneficial for your company during its everyday operations as well.

Better Processes with Tracked Data

Tracking your staff’s performance during a crisis will help you identify any bottlenecks in your management processes. For example, if identifying such a situation takes too long, you may want to improve your crisis management plan to fix this issue. Similarly to our last point, making data-driven decisions this way will help your business in lots of ways outside of crises as well.

How to Choose a Time Tracker for Crisis Management in Business

Before closing off this guide, let’s briefly explore what you should consider in a time tracker for managing crises at your business. While time tracking apps can come with endless features, the ones you should prioritize are:

• Tracking Functionality
• Detailed Reports

Lots of tracking functionality will help you make sure your staff perform their best during a crisis. You’ll be able to ensure your employees aren’t idle during such times and are prioritizing their tasks correctly.

After tracking your team’s productivity in a crisis, a set of detailed reports is essential to make correct use of this data. Having lots of reports available will also let you verify key data points like productivity.

Concluding Thoughts

Crisis management is an essential thing for any business. Having an adequate plan established will let your company handle difficult times with few negative effects. Your firm will be able to return to its regular day-to-day operations more quickly, improving its resiliency and reliability. At the same time, managing a crisis effectively will instill confidence in your customers, letting your business stand out from its competitors.