First it was Bloomberg alerting the world, mistakenly, that Steve Jobs had passed away. A horrible blunder that got plenty of coverage in the blogs, but really died out (sorry) quickly as a story, mainly because all major papers have these types of stories ready to roll in case the inevitable occurs.
Yesterday I was alerted of the mistake made by the HR department of Carat, a large media agency in New York. Seems that an email was sent out with the talking points around upcoming job cuts, before the cuts were actually made. Ouch.
These types of things do happen, of course, but it made me think about what a company can do when handeling documents of a sensitive nature to minimize these PR nightmares. Now most of the documents you have to handle probably don’t involve job cuts of Jobs death, but you should still think about the following:
- Minimize the amount of people who touch these communications. Sure it’s always nice to involve a bunch of folks because you want to be nice, but STOP it and own it yourself. Not everyone has to see everything and it will protect more people at the end of the day.
- Put these documents on your hard drive, not the network. Reduce the chance for people to find it and/or send it out by mistake.
- Don’t push it over email as a file or copy. If someone needs to review it print it out (don’t worry about the trees in this case).
- Please don’t leave it on your desk…and yes, this does happen.
- Place passwords and privacy restrictions on the document. Sure these are not full-proof but they are easy enough to do using Microsoft Word and of course your file server permissions.
- Don’t send to a newswire until the last possible minute.
Protect your information.
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Don’t leave a copy of it on the public printer. :-)
My suggestion takes a bit of forethought, but seems it might be worth it. Before you set up distribution groups, think about the titles. My guess is that in the Carat case, there were groups of “AllStaff” and “AllManagers.” Hit the letter A and autofill the wrong one…and crisis in the making. If the second group was titled “Managers” instead, you are slightly less likely to make a distribution mistake.
Oh, and if you are under a great deal of stress (say, being the HR manager at a company facing layoffs) do your best to eat right and try and sleep. Stress can compound on itself, making one more prone to mistakes.
In my previous lives in politics and PR, I always would try to slow down during periods of high stress. By being more deliberate in my actions, I know I avoided (or caught mistakes) before they became real problems. It takes training yourself and discipline to slow down when everyone around you is speeding up (and freaking out) but it’s paid off for me.
Jen
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