Crisis Management Communication - Case Study Example

Case study in crisis communication - Crisis Management Communication Introduction Effective communication during crisis enables organizations to handle the pressures associated with the crisis and the response from the public. During a time of crisis, attention is turned to the organization and different stakeholders demand to know the approaches that management are adopting to mitigate the situation. This places a lot of emphasis on the communication approaches of the organization as success will be determined by the satisfaction of the stakeholders and this depends on the communication effectiveness (Hale, Dulek & Hale, 2005). Timothy Coombs developed a three phase situational crisis communication theory that has been adopted by organizations to handle crisis. According to this model, communication during a crisis takes three steps which include the pre-crisis communication approach, crisis management communication and post crisis approaches. In 2010, British Petroleum (BP) experienced one of the major crisis to affect the company when one of its offshore drilling sites leaked, leading to a major spill in the gulf of Mexico. This spillage led to the loss of 11 lives and the loss of millions of gallons of crude oil from the drilling reservoir (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). The spillage affected the reputation of the company as it was exposed to major media scrutiny as their mitigation approaches were under scrutiny. However, with the help of the United States government, the oil spill was contained and the company compensated those who lost their lives in the crisis. In this paper, Coombs situational communication model during crisis will be used to evaluate the approaches that were adopted during the crisis. The organization’s ability to prepare for the crisis and address the concerns during the crisis will be addressed. At the end of the crisis, the company was left with a tainted image from massive media scrutiny making post crisis communication approaches essential to determine how the company regained its image (Wolf & Merji, 2013). Pre-crisis communication stage Pre-crisis communication is an anticipatory approach adopted by organizations to prepare for how to handle the pressures of a crisis and how the crisis may expose them in bad light. During this phase, early signs of a crisis are evaluated and the company makes frantic efforts to address them and ensure that any challenges that may arise are addressed promptly. Before the BP oil crisis, a breach of cement seals at the bottoms of the wells was noted. This increased the pressure on the readings which was an early warning on the possibility of an explosion, one that BP managers admit they ignored and therefore contributed to the crisis (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). The presence of these signs made it obvious that BP had indications that their drilling equipment needed an assessment to evaluate the stability of the pressure generated and the safety of the system. In a response to the pressure build up, BP initiated a number of preventive measures that were aimed at eliminating the oil spill. The company installed a number of centralizers which were used to ensure that the well casing was placed in central positions. However, the failure to incorporate a float shoe at the bottom of the casing affected their ability to periodically check the validity of the valve and monitor the pressure levels (Hale, Dulek & Hale, 2005). With the float shoe, the company would have been able to automatically activate an extra barrier in the event of an emergency like an oil spill. This prevents the automatic flow of hydrocarbons back into the system and enhances the mitigation approach by the company. Due to the vulnerabilities of BP oil, the oil spill crisis occurred even though it could have been prevented had the management responded to the early warnings. The negligent acts of BP that were allowed to progress due to lack of proper regulations within the drilling industry led to the explosion and one of the major oil spills in drilling history. During one of the general inspection of the facility, the rig crew misread the pressure test and this led to the decision to abandon the BP Macondo well. This increased the likelihood of the explosion as the company was ill prepared to manage the crisis as the evaluation and quality analysis reports had failed to identify any problems. The crisis management team at BP during the oil spill have been continuously accused of mismanagement of the crisis due to the communication approach. Immediately after the oil spill and the death of 11 crew members, BP established a crisis management team to oversee the crisis communication. The team was led by the company CEO Tony Hayward who was assisted by the spokesperson in the management of media communication and fielding of questions from journalists. The performance of the crisis management team was dismal and this has been attributed to the escalation of the situation and the negative publicity of the company. After BP failed to notice the warnings and the misreading of the pressure sets, the company was liable for the occurrence of the crisis. However, the crisis management team adopted a face saving approach that aimed at saving the reputation of the company by apportioning the blame to Transocean, the company that was subcontracted to undertake the drilling process (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). Tony Hayward, the company CEO acted as the spokesperson during the crisis and the exposed him to public scrutiny, social media ridicule and character assassination. Known as the ‘I want my life back’ CEO, Hayward’s response had little impact on the public due to his self-centered attitude during the crisis. Instead of addressing the challenges associated with the crisis, the CEO opted to give an image that showed the crisis was not as important as his private life. This clouded all the responses that he provided during the crisis and escalated the situation as the media and the public followed the event with sadist and sarcastic comments to his responses (Wolf & Merji, 2013). In this stage, BP made a number of mistakes that affected their response to public concerns and also influenced their mitigation measures negatively. As the CEO, Hayward could not serve as the spokesperson because his position placed him at a cross road during the crisis. Every member of the public and the stakeholders will demand a pound of his flesh and the blame of the crisis will be squarely on him. Thus, acting as the spokesperson during the crisis placed him directly before the hit from the public and the stakeholders to the company (Coombs, 2006). In the case of a crisis, a trained communication expert should be placed in charge of communicating the approaches adopted by the company during the crisis and the progress so far. This will give the CEO time to handle the main issues associated with the crisis and let the communication department handle issues associated with communication. Bp should have established a crisis management plan in anticipation of any eventuality as this would have guided the company’s response to the crisis. With a crisis management plan, crisis communication, response and handling of the questions from the stakeholders, the media and the public would have been pre-arranged. However, this was not the situation at BP and this contributed to the confusion that marked the company during the initial phase of the oil spill as the public patience was running out (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). Crisis event Due to the nature of the crisis, the BP oil spill crisis was easily recognized by the management of the organization and the stakeholders due to the explosion that accompanied it and the number of lives lost. On the 20th April of 2010, an explosion occurred within the Transocean drilling facilities at the Gulf of Mexico and 11 people were reported missing following the explosion (Wolf & Merji, 2013). Search and rescue operations were initiated immediately by the company assisted the US national response team. However, on 23rd of the same month, the search was suspended as all the eleven missing crew members were presumed dead. This marked the beginning of a major crisis for the company as it attempted to address the containment of the spillage while addressing the question of the relatives who had lost their loved ones (Millar, 2004). Media relations during crisis play an essential role in mitigating the challenges associated with communication and public needs. According to Coombs approaches to crisis management, different options can be explored by an organization during the crisis in an attempt to save face and ensure that the efforts are not derailed by the too much media attention. During the BP crisis of 2011, the company adopted a number of media relations strategies which enabled it to respond to the public and other concerned parties. Some of these strategies faltered and worsened the already tense situation for the company while others enabled it to rise from the rumbles (Coombs, 2006). In an effort to eliminate the negative media reviews that the company was getting from a number of media houses in the United States, the company adopted a reassurance strategy. Through this strategy, the company used a number of media houses as platform to convince the public that it was actually in control and was in the process of arresting the situation. During the initial stages of the crisis, the company released a media statement in which it highlighted that the situation would be contained in time and that it will cause minimal impacts to the environment (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). This speculative assurance strategy worsened the situation for the company when it became apparent that they were actually not in control and that the oil spill had devastating impacts on the environment. The reassurance strategy did not work to help the company eliminate the negative publicity it was receiving but instead highlighted the devastating inability to handle the crisis (Millar, 2004). One of the media relations approaches adopted by BP was the dissemination of self-serving information as the organization believed that the crisis they were facing was short lived. As a result, the company decided to restrict the nature of the information it was providing to the public at any point in time with the belief that this will reduce the PR damage and attract less attention. During the early days of the crisis, the company was not forthcoming with the information and this provided fodder for the media to gain momentum and develop various theories about the situation (Coombs, 2006). This affected the perception that the organization’s communications received as they were perceived to be either inadequate or incorrect even in instances when the information was accurate. This affected the company’s image before the different media houses as it was seen to be either unwilling or unable to address the issue with the urgency that it deserved (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). Though the company faced a number of logistical and publicity challenges, it managed to contain the spill and compensate those that were affected. The approaches adopted and the massive impacts of the oil spill extended the extension time to over five months with massive consequences to the public. After the oil spill crisis, BP America was faced with an enormous task of winning back public trust, confidence and demonstrating their commitment to ending this devastating event. On the background of this struggle by the organizational management, different media houses and congressional committees were busy trading accusations and blaming the company for its poor response to the strategy. This dented the overall public image of the organization making it essential for the company to develop public relations communication strategies aimed at restoring public confidence and trust. With the intense pressure and public outcry, BP response at the initial stages of the crisis had a lot of public relations mistakes that did not conform to the principles of public relations communication strategies during crisis. In April 2010, as this crisis was picking up and drawing the public attention and criticism over poor response, the company released its first quarter financial report (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). By releasing this report, the management planned to cover for the raging crisis that was occurring and drawing the public attention from its impacts. In this report, the company highlighted its massive success over the first quarter of the financial year which had posted massive profits for the company. This report provided the company with a great opportunity to address the oil spill crisis and outline how it was planning to handle it and mitigate its devastating consequences (Millar, 2004). However, the company said little about the crisis, describing the events and the response approach adopted by the organization in three lines. At the initial stages of the oil spill, 11 crew member of the organization disappeared in the ravaging fire, a fact that the company failed to mention within the three lines they chose to use to highlight the problem. Through this flawed report, BP opened itself for accusation from different quarters as its sensitivity and factual representation of information was questioned (Coombs, 2010). The response to the report further worsened the situation for the company and this panic and pressure mode did not allow the company to strategize and adopt a more comprehensive response. Within the public relations organizational communication perspective during crisis, any communication made to the public must address the actual problem and provide empirical information on how the company is responding to the crisis and the actual situation that far. However, when the pressure from the public escalated after the release of the financial report, the chief executive officer committed the second public relations blunder. The manager publicly declared that this oil spill was actually not the company’s mistake as the actual drilling process within the Gulf of Mexico was conducted by a different company (Coombs & Holladay, 2001). Despite BP being in the middle of the crisis, the company’s executive chose to blame another company whose presence had not even been highlighted since the crisis began. The company made a desperate attempt to dissociate the company’s name from the crisis by highlighting that this problem was actually gulf of Mexico issue which had no relation whatsoever to the company. This notion was not bought by the mainstream media which continued to highlight BP’s evasive approach to the crisis further denting the image of the organization (Coombs, 2010). By May 2011, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill had become a full responsibility of the BP and the company adopted a public relations communication approach that enabled it to demonstrate its commitment to ending the problem. The company developed web 2.0 based interactive platform in YouTube through which the company would make updates of the events and approaches adopted. Through this platform, Hayward, the company’s CEO, addressed different questions from media houses, environmental organizations and the public. He demonstrated thoughtfulness in his response and the company’s commitment to positive change in the face of this crisis (Coombs, 2006). From this case, it is evident that the company had poor disaster and crisis response mechanism which affected and compromised their ability to effectively communicate with the stakeholders during this crisis. Crisis and disasters are eventualities that occur without prior warning and thus require the development of adequate response mechanism. BP must develop a proper communication channel within its internal structure that will guide all employees during crisis. During this crisis, the response of the employees was hampered due to poor internal communication strategy that resulted into confusion, fear and emergence of grapevines (Coombs, 2010). The crisis communication department must thus be developed and this department should develop proper communication strategies and approaches for the company during disasters. The development of such approaches alone cannot assure the organization of success during crisis of this magnitude thus making it important for the organization to implement drills and disaster response practice in the organization. The company consistently referred to the crisis as a minor accident whose impacts would be minimal thus denting the image of the organization and their determination to end the crisis (Millar, 2004). From this analysis, it is evident that the communication strategies that the company adopted failed considerably and this contributed to the extension of the crisis. Instead of addressing the facts surrounding the crisis, the company resolved to denial, accusation and attack on any elements that were viewed as being against the company. References Coombs, W. T. (2006). The prospective powers of crisis response strategies: Managing reputation assets during a crisis. Journal of Promotion Management, 12(4), 241-260. Coombs, W., & Holladay, S. (2001). An Extended Examination of the Crisis Situations: A Fusion of the Relational Management and Symbolic Approaches. Journal of Public Relations Research, 13(4), 321-340. Coombs, W. (2010). Parameters of Crisis Communication. The Handbook of Crisis Communication. Ed. Coombs, W. Timothy and Holladay, Sherry J. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 17-53. Hale, J., Dulek, R. & Hale, D. (2005). Crisis response communication challenges: building theory from qualitative data. Journal of Business Communications, 42(2):112-34. Millar, D. (2004). Exposing the errors: An examination of the nature of organizational crises. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Wolf, D. & Merji, M. (2013). Crisis communication failures: The BP case study. International journal of management and economics, 2(2), 48-56. Read More