Panic Never Helps

The following is a piece I wrote for Ragan.com and reposted here:

It’s time to vaccinate against panic

How to save your employees’ butts without scaring off their pants

Panic is a part of human nature. It’s also inconvenient, as panic influences individual decisions and can derail your most well-intentioned advice. How you deal with it reflects on your skills as a communicator.

For example, somewhere there exists a perfect formula for chest compressions and rescue breaths that will give a dying patient the greatest chance for survival during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). You’ll never hear about that perfect ratio in a First Aid class because it’s not a round number and therefore discourages people from even attempting CPR. What is optimal in a controlled environment doesn’t always translate to the real world.

Which brings us to swine flu.

Many companies have reached onto the dusty bookshelves and found the white binder with the Avian Flu Pandemic Communication Plan, or something else they cobbled together three years ago. It’s quite possible parts of that plan were copied over from the Incidents of National Significance Plan, or whatever your HR people called it so the word “terrorism” wouldn’t scare people in the title.

You need to blow off more than the dust; it’s time to update that plan to reflect the world we live in now. First, the essential premises:

• The public at large is poised to panic, and will prepare for the worst thing they can imagine.
• The public at large has a small understanding of real threats and the probabilities associated with them. (Most can’t give you a ballpark estimate of how many Americans die from the regular flu each year: 36,000.)
• Panic often breeds its own problems related to stress, health and anxious behavior.
• In a vacuum, people will feed their desire to feel like they are informed.

Your old plans didn’t incorporate Twitter and blog searches. Under ordinary circumstances, these tools can be important for people who want to quickly share information. But they can also be hazardous in spreading incorrect advice with lightning speed. It’s not enough to be up to date; people want to be up to the minute.

Count on your employees to want that sort of immediacy in messaging, and their desire to seek sources other than your “official” corporate messaging. Help them feed that need by recommending sites you know will be accurate, starting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Consider spooling links from those sources into an RSS feed that dynamically refreshes with the latest headlines, so employees won’t forage outside the ‘trusted zone’ to feel better.

Most importantly, set the expectations early about what you will communicate, when you will send it, and what sources your organization uses to inform your corporate decisions.