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An emergency is any situation in which there is an imminent danger to property, animals or the physical integrity of people.
In corporate management, a corporate crisis is understood as a threat to the continued existence of a company or a significant business area.
Crisis management is a special form of top-priority leadership whose task is to avoid or manage all those processes in the company that would otherwise be capable of substantially jeopardising the company’s continued existence or even making it impossible (source: The Big Encyclopaedia of Business, 2009).
Business continuity management (BCM) refers to the development of strategies, plans and actions to protect activities or processes whose interruption would cause serious damage or devastating losses to the organisation (such as business disruptions), or to enable alternative operations. The aim is thus to ensure the continued existence of the company.
A crisis manual includes scenarios and approaches, stakeholders (internal, external), crisis organisation incl. deputies, alerting process, tools in staff work, important telephone numbers and checklists.
A crisis team in a medium to large company ideally includes a crisis manager (e.g. CEO), a crisis team leader (e.g. COO), staff functions (e.g. operations, HR, communications) and a support team. In a smaller company, at least two management functions form the crisis team.
This depends on the size of the organisation and its complexity. A crisis team includes a minimum of two people, in large companies a crisis team can include fifty or more members.
That is never possible. A crisis team usually functions as a militia organisation. That means whoever can come, helps out. It therefore makes sense to staff the functions in the crisis team with at least three people if possible (1st priority, 2nd priority, replacement or replacement).
Stakeholders or stakeholders are persons for whom it matters how a particular company behaves because of their interests (e.g. shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers).
The 4Cs are the different disciplines in crisis management. C1: Command (crisis organisation), C2: Communication (crisis communication), C3: Care (care of affected persons or relatives) and C4: Compliance (adherence to all legal provisions and internal guidelines).
For a crisis management exercise, a realistic scenario is developed for the respective organisation. The exercise takes place announced or unannounced. It must also be defined whether partner organisations are to be involved and whether the exercise is to take place only in the crisis team (table top) or also on the damage site.
A table top or desktop exercise is a planning exercise. No incidents (e.g. explosion, fire, etc.) are acted out on a 1:1 basis, but the corresponding approaches to solutions are dealt with theoretically in the crisis team.