What does the 2019 Crisis Prevention Survey say?

Crisis officers (35 %) and communications managers (65 %) from 85 institutions participated in last spring's survey - 75 % from companies, 15 % from government agencies, and 9 % from associations. Just over half of the survey participants hold a management position (54 %). Three out of four surveyed organizations had to manage at least one crisis case in 2018 (75 %), and more than a quarter even had to manage three or more crisis cases (26 %). "The survey participants thus have comparatively extensive crisis experience. Quasi a premium sample and thus a stroke of luck for crisis research," says Frank Roselieb, Managing Director of Krisennavigator - Institute for Crisis Research, a spin-off of Kiel University, and head of the study.

Crisis prevention pays off

Beyond the 2018 reference year, one in two crisis officers had to deal with people-related crisis cases such as accidents, deaths or pandemics (55 %) or technology-related crisis cases such as cyberattacks or fires (44 %). Although media-related crisis cases such as scandals or revelations only rank third in the list of crisis types (29 %), more than one in three respondents saw the fairness of journalists significantly decreasing in this context (36 %) and more than half of the respondents saw the intensity of media coverage significantly increasing (59 %).

Unsurprisingly, the organizations surveyed therefore rely in particular on media monitoring (81 %), crisis teams (78 %) and crisis manuals (72 %) for crisis prevention. Every second organization conducts regular crisis exercises (59 %) or keeps crisis rooms ready for emergencies (46 %). As a result, crisis prevention appears to be paying off:

• Organizations without lived through crises use a larger number of prevention tools in parallel (7.4 versus 6.3),
• Are more likely to use systematic issue management (48 % versus 30 %),
• have more frequently appointed crisis officers (76 % versus 56 %) and more frequently seek DIN or ISO certification (38 % versus 23 %) than those with crisis experience.

Future agenda: hacker attacks, blackouts and online protests

In the event of an emergency, employees from an average of five departments meet in the crisis teams. The communications department (95 %) and the management (89 %) have a permanent place in almost all crisis teams. In contrast, departments with crisis-preventing tasks such as compliance management (32 %), quality management (27 %) and risk management (25 %) are surprisingly only represented in every third to fourth crisis team. Almost all organizations (95 %) require external support before, during and after the crisis. Consultants (60 %) and authorities (54 %) are contacted most frequently. There are clear differences in the quality of cooperation: While external consultants, followed by public authorities and works councils or staff councils, receive comparatively good marks, politics has to take a lot of criticism. Across all types of organization, they come last.

When looking at the future structure of their employer's crisis environment, most respondents expect a significant increase in the digitalization (76 %) and complexity (67 %) of crisis management, as well as an increasing importance of social media in crisis communication (74 %). This is also reflected in the expected development of crisis causes. According to this, increasing data integrity breaches and hacker attacks (60 %), blackouts and IT failures (48 %), and shitstorms and online protests (44 %) in particular dictate the future agenda of crisis managers. By contrast, survey participants are surprisingly relaxed about issues surrounding employee and management misconduct. Only a minority expect an increase in cases of discrimination or "MeToo" (13 %) or compliance and fraud (11 %).

Source: Crisis Navigator - Institute for Crisis Research, a spin-off of Kiel University

The long version of the Crisis Prevention Survey 2019 (22 pages) has been published in the series "Working Paper Crisis Navigator" (ISSN 1610-1855).