You’ve invested in building your reputation, but what are you doing to protect it?
When it comes to the value in your business, it’s pretty easy to put a figure on your assets. Harder, perhaps, to articulate the value of your team. But what about your reputation, how do you quantify that?
A lot of time and money is invested in building your reputation – from the hours you put in, to the relationships you build, and the juggling of demands and responsibilities. You’re probably already aware of the important role of marketing in building your reputation too, across strategy, brand development, articulating your proposition, and the nuts and bolts of delivering engaging content through varied communications channels. You may even be able to calculate a figure for how much you’ve invested in building your reputation. And yet, despite how precious it is, many companies overlook the importance of protecting their business from reputational damage. That’s why we offer a three-tier approach with a Reputational Vulnerability Audit, a Crisis Comms Plan and plug and play Crisis Comms Support.
What is reputational risk?
Reputational risk is any incident or issue that could damage your reputation.
While it is easy enough to define as a generic term, it’s much harder to itemise as a list of potential threats. This may be a reason why so many organisations focus entirely on how they can build their reputation, rather than considering what they need to do to protect it.
The reality is, of course, that you cannot protect your business from every unknown threat, or from the curved balls that could be thrown at you due to circumstances beyond your control. But what you can do is mitigate risk by identifying vulnerabilities that could affect your reputation and ensure you have a plan in place that enables you to react quickly and effectively should an issue arise.
What kind of issues can cause reputational risk?
The list of issues that could potentially cause reputational risk is not just long; it is limitless. The construction sector has complex health and safety challenges, delivery structures and contractual requirements. Add to that factors that can affect any business, such as unscrupulous competitors or business interruption, along with emerging threats, such as viral social media clips, hacking and AI clones, and anticipating all the potential scenarios is clearly an impossible task.
But that doesn’t mean that businesses should just shrug their shoulders and keep their fingers crossed. Far from it. What is means is that your organisation needs to be prepared for any crisis, rather than every crisis.
Be prepared!
Preparedness is not a new concept in the construction sector. In fact, it is everywhere you look. It’s the health and safety training, the first aid kit, the defibrillator, the fire extinguisher, the public liability insurance, the hard hat! In an industry where so much focus is placed on mitigating risk, it’s extraordinary that reputational risk is so overlooked.
And yet putting measures in place to protect your reputation is much easier than you might think.
At CME, we have a proven three-stage methodology for helping companies from all segments of the construction industry to improve their crisis comms preparedness and protect their reputation. It is anchored in the understanding that preparation delivers resilience.
Here’s how it works:
1. Crisis Vulnerability Audit: a deep dive that enables us to summarise your key areas of vulnerability and actions that can be taken to mitigate reputational risk.
2. Crisis Comms Plan: a bespoke planning document that acts as a handbook to help you control communication channels, designate spokespeople and define messaging so that you can take swift action to communicate effectively and minimise the reputational impact should a crisis occur.
3. Reactive Crisis Comms: this service would only be triggered if a crisis should happen and ensures you have 24/7 support from our team to advise and support you when you need it most.
Right first time
There are times in everyone’s career when we’d like to have the opportunity to press rewind and do things better with the benefit of hindsight. But there are no second chances to get things right first time, especially not when your reputation is on the line.
If you’d like to build crisis comms into your business resilience strategy, get in touch with our team to find out more about how our approach could help you improve your preparedness while you continue to build on your success.