COVID Communications: A Report From the Field

There’s been enough written on communicating during COVID to choke the proverbial elephant. Much of it came on the front end—providing advice based on experiences in other crisis communication experiences.

The problem is that there are not very many crises like this. You get your oil leak, your employee embezzlement, your product defect…in those cases a narrow swath of people are impacted in the internal and external environment. Yes, there are impacts but most of the people in the world look on from an arm’s length.

Not in this case. Not a single person has been unaffected.

Which is why this research from the University of Maryland, Wayne State and Central Florida is interesting, as published in Inside Higher Ed. Researchers surveyed college presidents about the actual response to the pandemic, looking back.

The whole article is interesting, but I point you to three things.

Wait, No One Used Their Plan?

First, an extraordinary finding…italics added.

“We talk about crises being highly uncertain events, and that was to the extreme in this crisis,” said Liu [a paper author]. “We have extensive literature and we teach our undergraduates how to develop crisis plans, how to do exercises and simulations to test and refine those plans, and none of our participants used their plans, even though most of them had a plan for an infectious disease crisis.”

That’s right. None. Not one.

And you know what? I suspect that’s more common than you would think, as shocking as it sounds. A crisis starts and you are driven by events. You’re playing whack-a-mole and you don’t need a plan to tell you to whack the next mole.

Except you do. The whole idea of a plan is to take control of the process and create order. For example, your plan probably talks about establishing a predictable message cadence…something that you needed in the days when this was hot (e.g., updates as 12 and 4 everyday) and you won’t get that when you let events dictate when you respond. Your plan also identified other stabilizing factors, such as accessible repositories of information, principles to communicate. Overall, rather than whacking the new mole, you whack the ones that need to be whacked.

Part of the problem might be the plans themselves. This from a graduate student at Maryland.

“Though some interviewees advocated for more robust and complicated plans, most others said they believe developing guiding values and statements of ethics could help institutions better navigate the ethical tensions in a crisis.”

He went on to note that approach is different than the one in the literature. Indeed it is. For my money, I can see how that approach might be helpful in terms of guiding the overall effort…such as “Complete Transparency.” So, when faced with a decision in a crisis, you can say “Is this complete transparency?” and guide your decisions that way. You could choose your general direction that way. But you’re going to need a road map to reach the right destination—just going North isn’t good enough—and your plan provides that.

Why Behavioral Data Matters as Much as Epidemiology

Secondly, University professionals reported consulting heavily with public health officials for their expertise, but failed to consider other areas where professional expertise might be helpful.

“Very few of our leaders took advantage of their internal social science expertise,” said Liu. “Only a few had social and behavioral science advisory committees. They have folks like us, crisis management, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and those experts know a lot about how people behave in response to adverse events like this.”

The researchers went on to cite an example that is very familiar to those of us in the field: the desire not to communicate because people will “panic.”

As Dr. Seeger—from Wayne State—reports, “Well, we know from 40 or 50 years of research that panic is largely a myth. It’s much harder to get people to comply with our recommendations than to be concerned about panic.”

Amen. You know that’s true. It’s not even close.

Maintaining Community is a Retail Endeavor, not Wholesale

Lastly, there was this observation:

“They were doing really caring things like writing handwritten notes from senior leadership and presidents to students, pairing faculty with students over the summer and having movie nights and paint-by-numbers nights and doing all these really, really creative things in an online environment to help maintain that kind of community,” said Liu. “I think that the larger institutions could learn a lot.”

Indeed they could. Spare me your “we are a big company that thinks like a start up.” You either aren’t or you don’t. Or both.

I’m reminded of a post I did earlier about a CEO that asked his employee base to email him individually and say how they were doing. He got 800 emails and answered each one.

So, not easy. But, if you’ve establish a principle like “inside-out” and an objective is to protect the mental health and well-being of your community in a crisis, you’ll put some thought into developing things like this, even if they don’t scale that well.

Don’t tell me you don’t have enough people.

So, an early opportunity to learn about 2020. There will be more.