Your Crisis Plan Is Only As Strong As Your Tuesday Afternoon

A team member at Children's Minnesota asked to burn four hours of PTO because she was too distressed to work. Her boss, Nick LaFave, senior director of organizational communications, said no — not because the request was unreasonable, but because she shouldn't have to spend vacation time on a trauma response.

"I reminded them of the services that we have for employee well-being and therapy opportunities through the hospital," LaFave said at Ragan's Employee Experience Conference in Nashville. "Then I told them there was no way in hell that I was approving the PTO request. I'm not taking four hours of vacation away from you because you are struggling."

That one decision — small, quiet, made in the middle of a bigger crisis — is actually the whole lesson. Crisis communications isn't just a plan in a shared drive. It's a relationship you either have or you don't.

THE GROUNDWORK THAT SAVES YOU WHEN IT GETS BAD

LaFave was blunt about the sequencing: "If you waited for a crisis to hit before you laid that groundwork, you have waited too long."

He's talking about the unglamorous work — learning how your team members communicate, noticing when something's off, talking to people about things that have nothing to do with deliverables. When the Annunciation Church School shooting happened, one of his team members lived blocks away from the school and had friends there. She didn't know if they were alive. Her day was done, and LaFave let it be done.

But he could only do that because he'd already built enough bench depth to absorb the gap. He knew exactly who on the digital team could step in. He knew his plans B and C. That kind of operational flexibility isn't improvised — it's built over time, in normal circumstances, on purpose.

SHOWING UP IN PERSON ISN'T OPTIONAL IN A FEAR-DRIVEN CRISIS

When fear of ICE arrests spread across Minneapolis, Children's Minnesota didn't send an email. LaFave and colleagues from HR and compliance spent a full week — ten-hour days — walking every clinic and unit in the system.

"We walked them through step by step what happens if ICE were to show up in our facility," he said. "We assured them that all the normal protections that protected their rights and their information were at play."

A blog post can inform. A face-to-face conversation can actually reassure. There's a difference, and employees know it. When the stakes are personal — immigration status, safety, community violence — abstract messaging lands like nothing at all.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR PR STRATEGY

If you're building or stress-testing a crisis communications plan, LaFave's approach gives you a useful checklist that has nothing to do with message matrices:

• Know your people before you need them. Their communication styles, their personal situations, their limits. You can't make good calls under pressure about someone you only know through Slack.
• Build redundancy into your team structure. If one person going down takes your crisis response with them, you don't have a plan — you have a single point of failure.
• Match the medium to the moment. Digital channels work for updates. Showing up in person works for fear. Know which one you're dealing with.
• Let people step back when they need to. A communicator processing personal trauma while trying to manage a hospital's crisis response is not a hero story. It's a staffing problem.

LaFave's closing line is the kind of thing that sounds simple until you actually try to operationalize it: "Culture has become such a buzzword. It is humanity that we're talking about, and when you show your people basic humanity, culture is going to take care of itself."

Hard to argue with a guy who turned down a PTO request to protect someone's vacation time during a crisis. That's not a communications strategy. That's just what it looks like when the values on the wall match the decisions in the room.

If you want help building communications strategies that actually hold up when things get hard, Winsome Marketing works with teams on exactly that — the real stuff, not the polished version.

This post was originally inspired by Employee support sits at the center of Children's Minnesota's crisis comms plans via ragan. We encourage you to read the original piece for full context.