How to manage brand and employee engagement during a crisis

When crisis hits, a key priority for businesses is to maintain their brand and employee engagement.

But how do we do this effectively?

This month I spoke to author, speaker, and educator Nick Westergaard on his podcast, On Brand.

One thing we covered was the importance of communication in business, and how to utilise it effectively during and after a crisis.

We at The Team have had some experience helping clients through this journey.

When your brand is most at risk, clear communication is more important than ever.

So, let’s start with what a brand is, and what it means to its people.

Brand value and people

A brand is a promise. And that promise holds all the businesses’ value.

At The Team we want to create a world of sustainable, stand-out brands where each one of them has some clear value.

So, we see every challenge as an opportunity to do that.

And for me, people build brands and brands build businesses.

That’s why people are so important- if you can engage your people with your promise and values, then everything will fall into place.

To do this, and maintain brand and employee engagement, brands must make the most of people’s time. Because time and accuracy is everything. Wasted time and poor accuracy is the enemy of business success.

Just as customers don’t want to waste their time buying from the wrong brands, equally employees don’t want to waste time working in the wrong businesses.

So, getting your brand right (the employer brand for employees) is critical.

Reputation matters!

According to the research platform GWI, 25% of people say they’ll do some research on a brand before purchasing, 10% want to know what’s a brands politics.

And if you’re a grocery brand (Coke, Colgate etc.) then 28% are looking to see if you treat employees fairly against 39% looking at quality and 49% at VFM.

So, the data speaks volumes. How people are treated matters to customers.

P&O are probably still recovering from the way in which they fired 800 employees via text messaging.

And the Covid legacy matters too.

Gallup notes that post-pandemic customers have higher standards. Convenience and transparency is held with higher regard and businesses must be empathetic to this.

So, what do you do when things go wrong?

As noted in Harvard Business Review, customers judge a brand on how it reacts when things go wrong.

Are they authentic? Do they listen? Are they responsive?

We’ve worked with two major brands during a time of crisis.

BP turned to us after the Gulf of Mexico disaster. They needed help resetting the culture and part of that was reshaping and embedding new values and behaviours.

We did that work.

RBS PLC then turned to us to help them do the same as it recovered from the financial crash. Today NatWest Group is one of the biggest corporate turnarounds in history.

How a brand responds matters.

For example, when posed with this question:

How do you feel when a company makes a public apology for a mistake they made?

According to GWI research, 56% answered that they were satisfied in some measure. Showing humility matters.

So what happens when crisis hits?

We have three core recommendations, to help you craft the best response.

Listen and be Visible

With bp, Tony Hayward made the fateful error of asking ‘to have his life back’ during the bp response to the Gulf of Mexico. It was an error of judgement that hastened the loss of his job.

bp learned from this, and spent time communicating with employees in the organisation to understand what went wrong.

Through detailed conversations and honest dialogue, with sessions run by internally trained change advocates, the business took a high-profile approach to exploring what needed to be put right.

A brutally honest and highly visible approach matters.

bp even stopped the launch of the values at a high profile senior leader conference when they felt that more time was needed to discuss the real-world implications of the values.

Constant Playback, Empathy and Action

Making clear what you’ve heard and acting on it is critical.

Bob Dudley – the CEO who replaced Tony Hayward at bp– was unequivocal in making clear that safety was the number one priority. He gave managers the permissions to shut down operations the moment there was any safety concern. These actions made clear that safety – not money – was the number one concern.

At TSB Bank, following a failed IT migration, we introduced a listening process to make sure that every frontline employee was heard and that customer (and employee) concerns were acted upon immediately.

And communication needs to be constant.

Our rule of thumb is simple: in a crisis, if you feel you are communicating too much, then you are probably doing it just about right.

Town halls, video messages, written communications: use all the channels to get your leaders out there delivering the same message and showing people that they have heard what is being said on the ground.

Authenticity and Appropriate Humour

Being authentic is what people want to see and you can show humour when appropriate. And by humour, we do not mean funny, we mean tapping into the mood. There will be a time to smile in the face of adversity.

When The Body Shop’s first ever online shop couldn’t cope with the unprecedented demand it was all hands-on deck.

Every employee free an able was called into the warehouse to help with packing and distribution. A small army of people who would otherwise be in HR, Finance or Legal departments found themselves in new temporary roles with, on some occasions, tea being served by the then founder Anita Roddick.

The humour was about tapping into a spirit of togetherness.

Who else has done it well?

We’re providing two examples:

KFC – The Big Chicken Shortage

It’s no laughing matter if you can’t get hold of your favourite bucket. But in 2018, KFC faced that very crisis when in the UK they ran out of chicken due to supply chain issues. They had changed their logistics supplier and it had not gone to plan..

700 of their 900 stores shut. They had unhappy customers and worried employees.

Here’s how they managed it:

• Employee concerns: The first thing a business can do is encourage employees to take holiday, but can not force them to do so. KFC paid salaried employees as normal, and non-salaried employees were paid based on the average hours they had worked over the previous 12 weeks.
• Transparency and Humour: KFC acknowledged the problem openly and used humour to diffuse the tension. They ran an apology advertisement in newspapers, rearranging the KFC letters to spell “FCK” on their bucket (apologies everyone), which aligned with their brand voice and resonated with their audience.
• Authentic and Dynamic Updates: A special website was created so that customers could track the chicken! They could see which restaurants had chicken in stock. KFC also got a dialogue going through chat features to help customers.

Southwest Airlines – IT Failure and Flight Incident

Flight Incident: Flying is still one of the safest forms of transport, but accidents happen in all walks of life. When a flight landed nose-first in 2018 causing a fatality, Southwest Airlines responded quickly. They had one of the best safety records in the industry at this point.

But Southwest controlled the narrative. They were first on social media to issue updates – before being pushed into doing so. This was in large part down to the company’s strategy of placing their social media team in the heart of the air traffic control function. It has meant they have been able to provide comprehensive support to passengers, make travel arrangements and provide financial assistance.

It is flexible and fast response like this that means Southwest can put their people in charge of the crisis quickly. In a crisis, putting trust in your people and letting them deal with the crisis demonstrates to people and to passengers that this is one team.

In addition, Gary Kelly the CEO made a quick, authentic, and to the point statement to passengers and their families. He made no excuses and put them first.

All passengers received phone calls and emails to make sure they were okay and to offer further financial assistance or formal emotional support. No questions asked. A $5,000 compensation payment, with no strings attached was made available to “ease the burden” of the situation.

Final Thoughts

As discussed, crisis moments are inevitable. But the best way for brands to deal with them, and maintain positive brand and employee engagement, is by demonstrating authenticity, accountability, and care.

Whether it’s rebuilding trust after a major disaster like BP and RBS or showing quick thinking and transparency as seen with KFC and Southwest Airlines, clear communication and decisive actions are crucial.

At The Team, we believe that by listening to stakeholders, engaging employees, and staying true to a brand’s promise, businesses can find resilience and growth in moments of crisis.

In a world where customer expectations are higher than ever, the brands that thrive are those that place people at the center of their response.