Crisis Management Report: Lynas Corporations Assignment Answer

Intoduction : Crisis Management Report: Lynas Corporation's Approach

The best definition of crisis could be sudden uninvited events or scenarios that could significantly affect the organisation's ability to conduct business activity. In addition to this, crisis can even injurious to the company's reputation. In this report, the crisis management is elaborated in context of Lynas Corporation. It is a mining company that extracts rare metal oxides from earth and processed it in order to add value to the bottom line of the company. Its industrial plant is located in Kuantan, Malaysia. The clients of the company comprise heavy metal industries, high powered magnets, oil industries, motor industries, etc. This report talks about crisis management team and plan. Moreover, it highlight the need of communication during crisis, training, and reviewing.

Initiating Crisis Management

It is advised to the Lynas Corporation management to keep their focus on the market pressure along with the production schedules. They need to have a proactive strategy to handle the crisis. The senior executives are solely accountable for the crisis that might hit the company. The first step should be determining all sorts of crisis that can hit the company (He, 2012). These comprise natural disaster, financial downfall, labour strikes, changing technology, legal and environmental constraints set by the government, accident during mining process, etc. The site manager and executive must be well-prepared for the potential crisis. There should be a crisis management and communication plan (CMCP) that has to be implemented and evaluated regularly (Antonacopoulou&Sheaffer, 2014). The first significant step in the direction of CMCP is endorsement of CEO. This is necessary for the thorough implementation of the plan at all levels of organisation.

Lynas Corporation's management should incorporate the advice from government authorities, human resource officer, finance manager, operation manager, and legal representative. This would ensure that all the areas of the organisational functioning has been covered (Elsbach, 2012).

Aims, Objectives, and Scope

Aim of the CMCP is "to manage the crisis with utmost professional behaviour to make sure the health and safety of the people working in the organisation and the local community and minimise the effects of mining on the environment.”

Objectives:

• To provide support to those who got adversely impacted by the operations of the company.
• To assist the news media and the stakeholders by furnishing them with accurate information and facts.
• To maintain shareholders and customer's confidence in the company and continue to carry out the company's operations safely and effectively.

Scope of the CMCP is that it covers all the potential crises, such as industrial emergencies, natural disasters, accidental events, medical emergencies, legal threats, workplace issues, political insecurities, etc.

Crisis Management Team Organisation

It is important for the Lynas Corporation to protect its employees from such crisis, to take remedial steps to nullify the negative aspects, and to establish the safe working environment for everyone. The organisation of the crisis management team depends on the organisational structure. Carroll&Buchholtz (2014) highlighted that crisis management must be flexible so as to deal with varying events and their consequences. The core team should not have large size and it should have a chairperson, crisis coordinator, administrative supervisor, and legal counsel. The team can be further modified, if needed. The team should be answerable to the CEO of Lynas Corporation who is further responsible to answer the Board of Directors.

The local crisis management team (LCMT) is the team formed for each operation or project undertaken by the company. This supersede the responses in emergencies. This is responsible for the in-situ crisis management and for communication operation during crisis. It is important to note that the roles and responsibilities of team member is specific to the projects and to the CCMT too.

Crisis Management Plan

The following part talks about the various stage of the crisis control or management plan. It is clear that the off-site crisis are handled by the CCMT and on-site by LCMT. The stages are elaborated below (Speakman&Sharpley, 2012):-

• Notification:This stage is all about releasing the notification throughout the organisation.This is done through emails and voice notes.
• Assessment: this is the stage of collecting information and data associated with the crisis and its impacts. This process requires skilled personnel as if this goes wrong, then the whole crisis management plan might fail.
• Anticipation: There should be a well-structured anticipation software or method that assists in predicting the potential risks and damages. This would help in taking measures and preparing plans accordingly.
• Crisis Protocol: for the management plan, it is essential that company formulate protocols for a large range of crises that bother the company. The protocol might comprise the environmental damages, industrial accident, natural disasters, workplace issues, medical emergencies, etc.
• Formation of Crisis Control Centre: Lynas Corporation should form the designated centre to manage and gather information regarding a crisis situation. In addition to this, such centre can also handle the virtual crisis too.

Communication during Crisis

The internal and external communications can make the situation worse during the crisis which negatively affects the public and the other important stakeholders of the company which damages the overall reputation of the company. This situation makes pressures in the company for protecting their reputation by giving the statements to the public and speaking in the media.

Objectives- To handle the above situation the team of the crisis management should adopt the four objectives of communication. These are mentioned below:

• Implement efforts that generate trust among the public and shareholder on the company ability to managing the crisis effectively and efficiently.
• It is important for the company to directly communicate with important communities and employees.
• Assist social media to focus on the positive actions of the company.

Accidents in mining are the big news that provides damage not only to the property but also to the environment and the humans and the social media actively try to cover the whole incidents. With this, the company spread its message and information with this source (Dorward and Kling, 2018). Iynas Corporations provide up to date and accurate information to the stakeholders with regular updates. Communication with the communities of interest assists in providing regular updates that assist the company to alert the community about the situation of crisis and the ways the company resolve the crisis.

For achieving the company objectives the three main strategies are formulated. These are mentioned below:

• For ensuring the communications timely, the company publishes the templates by defining the scope and objectives of the Crisis development plan of the company. It is essential that the company release the information by handling the crisis information timely and accurately (Robinson and Thelen, 2018).
• For detecting the unbalanced and inaccurate coverage, it is important that the company provide correct information.
• It is important for the company to communicate actively with the coordinator and communications personnel for establishing the services of monitoring and respond to the information for monitoring the external actions.

Training and Reviewing

Training

It is important that any emergency plan will be properly tested by understanding the specific roles and responsibilities in the plans of crisis management. For testing the plans of the company it divides into four main categories are explained below:

Recommend the techniques of management that provide the opportunity to the personnel's to realize the characteristics of crisis and handle such crisis (Abualenain, 2018).

It is important to analyze the situation and made discussions before taking any actions. This exerted pressures on the managers to handle the complex situation by building teams and provide theanopportunity to raise the issues as per the perspectives of the outsiders.

For practicing the crisis management plans of the company to bring out the group people by building the crisis situation by involving the actors reordered audio, television pieces and telephone calls.

Review

To site the emergency plans of response and the local crisis management plans should be reviewed on a regular basis so as to fulfill the operations needs so that the company reflects its operation effectively.

To resolve the situation of crisis, the team of the crisis management should conduct the analysis on the effectiveness of implementing the plans of crisis management (Hung-Baesecke, et. al., 2018). This includes by analyzing the ways how the crisis will be avoided or reduced and what is better during the response of the initial crisis. It also includes the assessment criteria of the media and social coverage. This all can be accomplished by taking the under mentioned initiatives:

• Through interviews with the external stakeholders
• Assess the relation with the media
• Appreciation
• Conduct a survey in the internal stakeholders

Conclusion

With the above-mentioned discussions, it is concluded that the Iynas corporations must take effective and efficient plans to assist the company to overcome with the threats related to the crisis and take effective measures to reduce its impact over the communities includes external and internal stakeholders. The company has to develop the strategies by closely monitored the actions that need to be taken by the company and raise confidence among the shareholders to face such a situation. The above crisis management plan assists the Iynas Corporation to protect the reputation of the company and maintain the confidence among the public by maintaining the critical situations and in the first few hours of the crisis.

References

• Abualenain, J., 2018. Hospital-Wide Interprofessional Simulation-Based Training in Crisis Resource Management.  Emerg Med,  17(3), pp.93-6.

• Antonacopoulou, E. P., &Sheaffer, Z. 2014. Learning in crisis: Rethinking the relationship between organizational learning and crisis management.  Journal of Management Inquiry,  23(1), 5-21.
• Carroll, A., &Buchholtz, A. 2014.  Business and society: Ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder management. Nelson Education.
• Dorward, R. and Kling, A., 2018. Crisis management from an embassy point of view: A qualitative study on internal crisis communication.
• Elsbach, K. D. 2012. A framework for reputation management over the course of evolving controversies.  The Oxford handbook of corporate reputation, 466-286.
• He, N. (2012). How to Maintain Sustainable Competitive Advantages-----Case Study on the Evolution of Organizational Strategic Management.  International Journal of Business Administration,  3(5), 45.
• Hung-Baesecke, C.J.F., Chen, Y.R.R., Stacks, H.D., Coombs, W.T. and Boyd, B., 2018. Special Issue: International CSR© 2018 Institute for Public Relations.  Public Relations Journal,  11(4).
• Robinson, K.L. and Thelen, P.D., 2018. What Makes the Grapevine So Effective? An Employee Perspective on Employee-organization communication and Peer-to-peer Communication.  Public Relations Journal,  12(2).
• Speakman, M., &Sharpley, R. (2012). A chaos theory perspective on destination crisis management: Evidence from Mexico.  Journal of Destination Marketing &Management,  1(1-2), 67-77.