Six Crisis Management Lessons For IT Companies

Despite the negative effects of the Ukraine-Russia War on global IT services’ availability , the Ukrainian IT sector is alive and still aims at thriving, in my opinion, as a leader in the space. The conflict, however, is expected to cause information and communications technology (ICT) spending to lose $5.5 billion worldwide in 2022 alone, according to IDC.

Over the two years, my company has faced several challenges as result of the conflict, and I wanted to share some crisis management lessons based on these experiences:

Taking Care Of Employee Safety: We had to take care of everything from relocation strategies and evacuation plans to providing our employees with sufficient psychological and financial support. People are at the core of any business, so keeping people safe should be any company’s top priority.

Ensuring Business Continuity: Financially, in the first weeks of the war, my company had to deal with our transactions being frozen by Ukrainian banks. On the customer side, we had to pause or cancel some projects, particularly ones involving Russian companies or those paying taxes in Russia. The massive relocation of our employees forced us to adjust our IT infrastructures and work environments while maintaining the usual workflows and data security levels.

Addressing Client’s Concerns: We were lucky enough to work with amazing customers who supported our company from the outset of the crisis. However, even the most loyal clients had concerns. We had to make our workflows even more transparent and ensure we provided our standard team capacity and service quality.

Handling Unexpected Expenses: Any sudden adjustments come at a price, and my company needed to allocate extra finances to support our emergency plans. We also had to prepare alternative solutions for processing critical financial operations.

While dealing with these challenges, we learned several valuable lessons that can help a business hold its ground in times of crisis. Leading any business during a crisis is more than challenging but gives you new opportunities to grow. Adjusting myself to the new reality, I outlined a few principles that helped me and my colleagues thrive in these challenging times:

1. Know all your possible risks.

Crisis events can severely affect your business’s financial stability, technical availability, cybersecurity, reputation and customer relations. It’s essential to determine and prioritize your company’s potential risks and plan for possible ways to address them.

Continuous risk assessment should always be a standard practice. Before a crisis, you should know your key financial, technical and employee-related risks, and have several scenarios for mitigating them, which can help maintain the company’s stability in the early stages of a crisis.

2. Address your financial and technical risks first.

To save your business during a crisis, you might need to adjust your workflows, reestablish new working environments, relocate, equip and support your employees. To do that, consider having financial and technical reserves sufficient enough to keep your company going for at least several months.

Plan on your emergency strategy as early as when a crisis is on the horizon, and be ready to move the core of your IT infrastructure to the cloud to ensure that your people keep working virtually from anywhere.

3. Prepare crisis communication plans in advance.

Educate your managers on crisis management and communication . Make sure they know what to do and what to say, follow a unified narrative and can show sympathy and understanding to their colleagues. In my company, we had regular leader board meetings where we would discuss necessary changes, alternative strategies and employee feedback to improve our crisis management strategy on the go.

4. Establish open communication with your people early on.

Staying silent isn’t an option in times of crisis. So make sure to start talking to employees as early as possible, and do it often. Regular two-sided conversations will help you maintain a solid and resilient corporate culture in which your employees can effectively deal with their anxiety and feel safe and supported.

5. Be ready to support your employees on different levels.

To efficiently deal with unexpected circumstances, your employees might need informational, financial and psychological support. Include various forms of employee assistance and support in your crisis management plans.

We found it helpful, for example, to arrange companywide consultations with professional psychologists to help our people better deal with their stress and emotions. You should also account for financial and informational support for those willing to move abroad to safer places.

6. Be open with your clients.

When a crisis comes, hiding uncomfortable truths from your partners and clients may cause even more damage than the initial problem. Open discussion of possible risks and remediation measures, on the contrary, creates a solid ground for mutual trust and respect.

Open communication with our clients helped my company prove our reliability and resilience. Thanks to this strategy, some clients continued to work with us as usual, while others paused their projects for the first month but still paid for our services to give us time to recover.

Even in a crisis, you can still manage to keep every critical process, function and fund of your company available. Just start with the worst-case scenario , plan the key steps to mitigate it, then prepare plans B and C. And don’t underestimate the power of mutual trust, support and open communication, as they can help your people stay strong even in the darkest times.

The article was originally published at www.forbes.com.

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