Best Practices in Crisis Communications Using Your Intranet

Copyrights HospitalPortal.net 2016. All rights reserved.
BEST PRACTICES in
Crisis Communication
Using your Hospital Intranet
Anne La Francis
Director of Sales and Marketing
HospitalPortal.net
Angela Novak
Client Services Director
H2M

Agenda
 Best Practices in Internal Communication
 Creating an Internal Communication Program
 Using an internal communication program for crisis management
 Types of Healthcare Crises
 Key tips for using your Intranet for Crisis Communication
 Strategies for crisis communication preparation
 Strategies for crisis communication response
 How to better distribute and present crisis communication to staff
 Tools for providing leadership with valuable staff feedback during the crisis
 Post-crisis evaluation

HospitalPortal.net & H2M share a mutual client…
“We have relied on HospitalPortal.net to manage our intranet for many years. The “Central Line” as it is called is a
vital tool used for internal communications with our 900 employees and 80+ medical staff at Lake Region
Healthcare. Their easy-to-use interface helps us to keep intranet content fresh and relevant.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________
“Lake Region Healthcare has been a client of H2M since the fall of 2012 and have become an extension of our
marketing department. They treat our business as if it were their own, seeking to learn and understand our industry
and marketplace through in-person visits, extensive research and collaboration with our internal staff on projects
from media production to graphic design and PR to content development.”
Katie N. Johnson
VP, Marketing & Communications
and LRH Foundation
Lake Region HEALTHCARE

Creating an Internal
Communication
Program

Why internal communication?
 Employee engagement
 Brand ambassadorship
 Work smarter, not harder
For every 2% increase in employee satisfaction,
there is a 1% increase in retention…
Your Employees Power Your Long-term ROI.

Employee engagement
 Proactive transparency builds trust and
respect between the health system and its
employees.
 Regular internal communication unites
employees by breaking down the silos
and/or barriers between service lines,
departments and locations.

Brand ambassadors
 Your employees are your best brand
ambassadors.
 Because your patients spend the majority of
their time interacting with your employees,
consistency and authenticity in messaging is
key.
Patients can never love your hospital
until your employees love it first.

Work smarter, not harder
 You are already developing strong external
content, so capture the messages in one
centralized intranet portal, making it easy for
employees to stay informed and efficient for you
to publish.

What’s the best approach?
 An internal communication program that’s integrated within your overall marketing
communication department and that leverages multiple employee touchpoints.
 Tactics include:
 Become your own publisher
 Tell employees first
 Make it a two-way street
 Maintain a regular schedule
 Launch a brand ambassador program

Become your own publisher
 Manage all of your communication messages across
all channels with a comprehensive content calendar.
 Channels should include all communication
touchpoints throughout the employee experience.

Tell employees first
 Healthcare employees are accustom
to being empowered; they are on the
frontlines of making vital decisions
everyday.
 Healthcare employees should be the
first to know…and sometimes the
ONLY to know.
Daily Happenings
•Trainings
•Celebrations
•Menus
•Quality reports
•Census
information
•Births
Earned Media/PR
Updates
•Hospital
improvements
•New facility
upgrades
•Mergers or
acquisitions
•Community
programs
Leadership Updates
•Leadership blogs
•Leadership
academy
Social Feed
•Social network
updates
Crisis
Communication
•Emergency
preparation and
response

Make it a two-way street
 Successful internal communication offers
employees an opportunity to ask
questions, give ideas and participate in the
communication overall.
 This should happen both through your
intranet and in-person.

Maintain a regular schedule
 Proactive communication on a regular schedule is
key.
 Offer relevant, timely content and they will keep
coming back for more.

Launch a Brand Ambassador Program
 Empower though leaders and influential
employees to be your boots-on-the-ground
messengers.
 Arm them with key talking points and Q&As.
 Gather what they are hearings so leadership
gains frontline knowledge.

Healthcare Crises - Be Prepared
 School shooting, bomb threat,
flood…blizzards
 Leverage the channels your
employees already trust
 Red River Flood of 2009 – 100
year flood
When a robust internal communication program may mean the most

Red River Flood of 2009
 City was called to evacuate
 Weeks of Incident Command
 This is the time to execute and execute
well.
Images courtesy of documentingreality.com

Your communication style
 Timing should be consistent, frequent,
and aligned with staff schedules.
 Information should be relevant,
concise and action-oriented.
 Align your internal and external
messaging.
 Tone should be confident, calm and direct.

What is the main channel your organization
uses for crisis communication?
Email
External-facing website
Printed newsletters/material
Intranet
No consistent internal communication
POLL QUESTION #1

Best Practices for Crisis Management
 Have a Plan
 Put a Team in Charge
 Utilize Monitoring Tools
 Manage Reputational Damage
 Respond Quickly

Have a Preparation Plan
 Connect staff
 Create awareness
 Engage staff
 Identify staff and leadership
 Establish guidelines/standardize procedures
 Offer proper training/education
 Publish important documents
 Keep staff accountable

Have a Response Plan
 Timely communication & alerts
 Incident response team pages
 Ongoing updates
 Marketing/PR
 Reputation management
 Social & brand ambassadorship
 Staff and resource scheduling

 How-to Resources
 Action Sheets
 Incident Chain of Command
 Track, monitor and report on response actions
 Proactive planning throughout crisis
 Management dashboards
Have a Response Plan cont’d

Put a Team in Charge
 Designate a team/candidate to be the “speaker” or
the voice
 Identify the key stakeholders that should participate
and outline their roles and responsibilities for the
communication preparation and response
 Determine primary contact person for govt.
agencies/organizations and the first response
personnel for each department

Utilize Crisis Monitoring Tools
 Census Boards for monitoring hospital capacity
 Vulnerability analysis charts
 Quick links to emergency centers (FEMA, CDC) and
other local hospitals
 Weather alerts via RSS feeds from local resources,
media alerts and monitoring tool data
 Real-time monitoring
 Read acknowledgements/Notice of
acceptance

Manage Reputational Damage
 Train staff ahead of time
 Monitor media in real-time
 Brandwatch
 Cision
 Critical Mention
 Metro Monitor
 Build Trust
 Be Honest
 Don’t Argue with Commenters
 Take a Human Approach

Respond Quickly
 Engage chain of command
 Alert Employees First
 Keep Employees Constantly Informed
 Share intranet links to crisis
operational plan

Post-Crisis Evaluation Plan
 Outline challenges, successes and lessons learned
 Identify actions that prevented successful execution during any point in response and
crisis management plan
 Amend or revise crisis messaging or crisis policies and procedures if needed
 Evaluate short and long term goals
 Prepare debriefing reports and metrics on success of response
 Monitor reputational exposure and develop remediation plan if needed
 Refine crisis communication strategy and crisis operational plan if needed

Intranet
Features to
help with
Crisis
Management
Training/educational resources
Announcements (News, Scrollers, Image Slideshows)
Blogs
Contact & Emergency Vendor directories
Integrated Policies & Procedures
Mass notifications/alerts
Chain of commands lists
Emergency codes
Dedicated pages to crisis topic
Crisis Forums
Ticket management
Project teams real-time Chat

Training/Educational Resources
 Training videos
 Training modules for crises for new hires
 Relevant educational resources on
crisis topics
 Class registration for crisis
management classes
 RSS Feeds from emergency resource
centers
 Links to LMS providers and ongoing access
to crisis education

Policies and Procedures
 All content becomes searchable
 Search by policy keyword, title, number
 Job action sheets
 Facility maps
 Read acks on all policy documents
newly updated or revised
 Notice of acceptance feature to track
whether or not an authenticated
employee has reviewed a document

 Create images ahead of time for certain
types of crises
 Keeps the information front and center
and highly noticeable
 Can be hyperlinked to a emergency page
with additional information on the crisis
Announcements
Home Page Slideshow/Image Gallery

 Devoted section to the most timely crisis updates
 Images speak louder than words sometimes – easily add
images to your crisis communications
 Subscription based news – asking staff to follow stories if
potential crisis is on the rise
 Enable or disable comments for the most optimal
engagement about the crisis
 Ability to preset these to go live immediately and expire
on a set date
Announcements
Hot News Section

 Can be used for any type of mass
messaging
 Managing reputational publicity
 Often used as a crisis alert for:
 Fires
 Evacuations
 System Outages
 Local community crises
Announcements
Emergency Scroller Mechanism

 Collaborate, learn, and use 2-way communication
 during a crisis
 Enable comments to engage staff
 Access to past archived posts
 Manage PR messages by sending out facts what the
hospital is doing about it
 Examples
 Departmental, Personal, Leadership/CEO
 Adding a connection
 Vlog
Leadership Blogs

Crisis Forums
 Staff Forums dedicated to a
specific crisis
 All content becomes searchable
 Categorize by Crisis Topic
 Departmental Forums
 Project collaboration
 Other forum examples
 Hospital Wikis
 Classifieds
 Crisis team projects
 Ride sharing coordination

Crisis Dedicated Pages
 General emergency pages
 Dedicated crisis specific pages
(Ebola)
 Crisis staff team project
collaboration pages
 Quick links and resources
 Latest news updates
 Submit a ticket request
 Emergency contacts
 3rd party iFrame content from
emergency resources (CDC)

Crisis Management Tools
 Incident Command
System
 Emergency Action Wizard
 Emergency Codes
 Can be placed on any
pages
 Many clients create as
hidden component and go
live only during the
emergency

Forms & Workflows
 Over 100+ forms available in library
 Easy to custom create forms ahead of time for
certain crises
 Incident reporting forms
 Ask crisis management
 Time off request

Crisis Response Tickets
 Help desk ticket tracking
 Crisis response ticket management
for completing tasks associated with
the crisis
 Facility tickets for maintenance due
to crisis
 Log all issues for appropriate staff to
take action
 Email reminders
 Can pre-create crisis categories

Restricted View Pages
 Board & Physician Pages
 Crisis Meeting packets, notes and
archives
 Committee lists
 Calendars
 Crisis Dashboards
 Links to relevant crisis management
resources
 On call schedule(s)
 News and announcements

Q & A

THANK YOU!
Anne La Francis
HospitalPortal.net
Director of Sales and Marketing
ALaFrancis@HospitalPortal.net
Angela Novak
H2M
Client Services Director
angela@h2m.biz

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