Have we lost the art of communicating?
Sometimes you don’t know what you need until a crisis situation arises, and when it comes to any crisis you can never overcommunicate enough.
Irecall back in 2003, not long after Toll took over TranzRail, the new CEO of Toll was overheard asking a fellow senior executive colleague of mine “what does the PR sheila do”?
He soon found out and was extremely pleased to have “the PR sheila” around when a major rail mishap occurred, and it was the PR sheila who dealt with the media, kept all stakeholders informed, and made sure everyone who needed to be communicated with was.
In other words, sometimes you don’t know what you need until a crisis situation arises, and when it comes to any crisis you can never overcommunicate enough. Hopefully, that is one of the great learnings to come from Auckland’s recent catastrophic weather events.
While everything was happening in Auckland, I was particularly interested in what was happening in the Cook Strait after a mayday call was put out by the Kaitaki Interisland ferry.
I still rate as one of the toughest days ever in my work as a GM of Corporate Affairs the Friday evening I got a call from one of the Interislander ferry bosses telling me, in exact words “we have an issue
. . . one of our ferries is heading for Brisbane”.
Taking into account that our ferries only travelled between Picton and Wellington, I knew we had a serious issue on our hands. It turned out rough seas had caused one of the rail wagons (it was a rollon roll-off ferry) to derail and put the whole ferry on a lean, making steering the ship extremely challenging.
A three-hour crossing with 300-plus people on board turned into a 13-hour journey and, while no one breathed a sigh of relief until the ship berthed, what did help is that everyone, across all organisations involved, had regular incident management exercises so everyone was well drilled that when something like this occurred, we knew who to inform, how to inform and whose job it was to do what.
Also of highest priority was customer management, those on board were informed before they stepped to shore that all fares were to be refunded, and once the incident occurred everything on board such as keeping people fed and cups of tea and coffee, etc, were free.
When I saw how KiwiRail handled the recent Kaitaki incident, it was evident again that everyone was well drilled, the communication seemed spot-on and I never saw any negativity from the 800-odd customers, even though it had been an extremely stressful few hours after all were told to put on life jackets.
Compare that with some of the scenes we saw around Auckland, from the airport to the local communities.
Sure, they may not have had to deal with anything on this scale before, but we live in a country where natural disasters seem to happen on a regular basis.
What training had been in place, what teams had worked together? In other words, what was the drill and who had even practised the drill?
The resulting chaos would suggest not a lot. The emergency personnel were certainly in action. What I am questioning is the communication and overall leadership.
A concern, not just of mine but of other senior communicant professionals too, is how many organisations no longer seem to have a person responsible for communications and dealing with crises on their leadership teams.
They report to someone else who has no experience and therefore doesn’t have the same relationships or authority when a crisis arises to either advise directly — or influence those who need to act — how to act, and who to act with.
In today’s world of compliance and responsibility, my warning to any chair or director would be to ask to see the updated crisis plan for their organisation, and ask when it was updated.
Most importantly, when was it last tested? Tomorrow, literally, could be too late — even for the best of PR sheilas. Sue Foley is a former director of corporate affairs with Westpac NZ and GM Corporate Affairs at TollNZ.