Distance makes the heart grow fonder?

Classroom

Thursday’s class allowed for us to research and examine the crisis communication involved in a pandemic flu. We discussed possible solutions, planning and best and worst case scenarios, but ultimately decided that regardless of how the information is disseminated to the campus, it has to be timely, accurate, credible information tailored to the specific audience.

Regardless of the scenario, of the atmosphere, in these cases, isn’t that information tailored successfully and delivered successfully because there is someone or in some cases something that is trained to handle crisis communications—trained in that it’s reliable, and dependable.

We resolved as a class that any planning should be organized in buckets- technology, organizational and ethical processes- all of which have the same goal in mind. It’s about change management because even through the process planning, it’s about the people and having people trained and prepared to handle this situation with or without technology.

Among the discussion about pandemic communication planning, we discuss distance learning and telecommuting and the accessibility of the intended audience. Is distance learning a model we should leverage for pandemic communication planning?

Cubicle:

I began to think if we had a crisis communication plan in place. I assume that I would be the party that would be trained to handle and distribute these communications. I know that a phone tree does exist and in fact that is how we would disperse critical emergency information. It seems like it makes communication even more delicate. I am charged with sending messages from the internal email mailbox- if a system outage occurs- I am contacted and I distribute to the 3000 employees.

We need to work on our crisis communication or even our support system for internal communication. But besides this – how would my client site handle a pandemic communication? Employees already complain about too many emails sent- I believe that it may be highly likely that if someone received an email from the internal mailbox- that some resources would probably delete it.

Distance learning is similar to “telecommuting” – it seems there is a stigma surrounding both. If you are not in the classroom, you are not learning. If you are not on the work site, you are not working. Disregarding those stigmas and ignoring the network issues that may occur (ie site access), you could really leverage these aspects for crisis communication/ even crisis situations.