With remote or hybrid work now the norm for 63% of UK adults, managing crises remotely is no longer unusual – it’s an expected part of modern leadership.
Even if your organisation doesn’t operate remotely by default, you still need to be ready for it. A serious incident – whether it’s a cyber attack, extreme weather event or pandemic – can force teams to work from home at short notice. And when that happens, your planning needs to account for the specific ways remote setups can complicate crisis management. These include:
- Fragmented communication – With multiple digital channels in play, vital information can easily get scattered, duplicated or lost.
- Reduced situational awareness – A shared space helps ensure a shared understanding of what’s going on. Not having one can hinder coordination and decision-making.
- Hidden stress – Employee isolation makes it harder to spot signs of burnout or disengagement before they escalate.
With these challenges in mind, organisations need a clear, structured approach to remote crisis management. The 7 essential practices described below provide a framework to help you lead your team through any crisis – wherever they’re working from.
Create a remote-ready crisis management plan
This is the foundation of your crisis response, and a core part of your business continuity plan.
In our latest Data Health Check survey, 85% of organisations said they now have a business continuity plan in place. Of those, 82% also have a crisis management plan.
A clear, well-rehearsed crisis management plan helps keep teams aligned, reduces confusion and supports decisive action under pressure, especially when teams are working remotely. Your plan should cover:
- Roles and responsibilities – Define the structure of your crisis team, outlining who is responsible for what, who has decision-making authority and how responsibilities are managed across remote locations.
- Incident assessment and escalation – Set out how crises are identified, how severity is assessed and when to escalate.
- Communication strategy – Determine how and when you’ll communicate with internal teams, external stakeholders and the public – including pre-approved messages and channels.
- Response procedures – Detail clear actions for likely scenarios and what resources – from personnel to technology – must be in place for remote execution.
Who should lead your crisis team? Charlie Maclean-Bristol, Director of Databarracks’ PlanB, considers the question here.
A good crisis management plan doesn’t need to cover every possible scenario, but it should provide a clear framework to act quickly and confidently no matter where your staff are working. Ask yourself: can your teams easily access the plan during a crisis? Is it up to date? And do they understand how it works in practice – not just that it exists?
Need help writing your business continuity plan? Watch our step-by-step guide and download your free Business Continuity Plan Template.
Train your teams and exercise your plan
A crisis plan is only as good as your team’s ability to use it. Regular training and exercising is needed to turn theory into real-world readiness.
- Train your team – Everyone in your team must know how to spot early warning signs of a crisis and escalate them without delay. Roles, responsibilities and comms protocols should become second nature.
- Exercise your plan regularly – As James Crask, Managing Director at Marsh, said on The BCPcast: “The more you prepare and practise how you’re going to respond, the better you are on the day.” Training and exercising shouldn’t stop with your primary responders. Crises don’t wait for the right people to be available – and over longer incidents, availability will change. Deputies must be trained, confident and ready to step in if key individuals are unavailable or need to stand down.
- Run remote crisis simulations – Practise under the same conditions you’d face in reality. When running virtual exercises, keep facilitators in the background, with cameras off, to maintain realism.
- Learn from real events – Review how others in your sector have handled crises. What worked? What would you change? Use those lessons to improve your own plan and hone your exercises.
- Build a crisis-ready culture – The goal is a team that can stay calm, communicative and decisive under pressure. It takes regular practice and leadership commitment to get there.
Learn exactly how to run a tabletop Business Continuity exercise with Databarracks’ Director of Resilience, Chris Butler.
Stay calm and lead with focus
The first moments of a crisis can trigger panic – but strong leadership means moving quickly from reaction to resolution. This is when your crisis management plan proves its value – follow it and lead with confidence.
- Pause before reacting – Take a moment to think clearly before you act. A brief pause can prevent rushed decisions that cause more harm than good.
- Balance speed with thought – Act decisively where needed but stop for deeper analysis when it matters. Don’t let urgency override judgement.
- Focus on what you know – This keeps decision-making rooted in facts, not assumptions.
- Lead by example – Stay calm, communicate clearly and demonstrate control. Your team will follow your lead.
Distribute the recovery effort
Crisis response is demanding and spans shifts, not hours. In a remote setup, it’s easy for workloads to become uneven, so leaders must plan for the longer term, actively share responsibility and manage people’s time and capacity to avoid burnout.
- Share the load – Distribute responsibility in line with your plan and trust your staff to deliver. Be aware that over-reliance on key individuals increases fatigue – and risk.
- Balance workloads in real time – Recovery teams will be under strain – make sure tasks are reassessed regularly and adjusted where necessary to avoid overload.
- Coordinate across time zones – If your team is distributed globally, be deliberate with scheduling. Use asynchronous updates where you can but also build in overlapping working hours to keep momentum and context.
Communicate with clarity and consistency
In a remote setting, communication gaps can grow quickly. You lose the corridor conversations and desk-side updates that help keep everyone in the loop. Without these informal channels, it’s even more important that your messaging is clear, consistent and structured
- Centralise communication and set a consistent update cadence – Use one clear source of truth for updates to avoid confusion and fragmentation. Stick to agreed channels and establish a reliable update rhythm, even if there’s no major change to report.
- Ensure leadership is visible – In remote settings, leadership presence matters more than ever. Stay engaged in team channels, offer direct support and make space for 1-to-1 conversations.
- Encourage two-way communication – Create space for feedback and input from staff, particularly front-line teams who see the crisis as it unfolds.
- Avoid an “information vacuum” – Don’t neglect staff who aren’t directly involved in the recovery effort. Without regular updates, they can be left in an information vacuum, which increases uncertainty and anxiety.
When it comes to external crisis comms, it’s important to guide the narrative from the outset. Explore standout examples from TOMRA and Nottingham City Council.
Look after your staff
Your team’s wellbeing is essential to sustaining your crisis response. In remote settings, signs of stress and fatigue are easier to miss – so support must be intentional and embedded from the outset.
- Hold regular check-ins – Crises are mentally and physically demanding, especially for staff working in isolation. Create time for short, structured conversations to check on wellbeing, not just progress – and signpost support resources where needed.
- Actively maintain morale – Recognise the pressure your team is under. Provide reassurance, be honest about challenges and regularly highlight the impact and value of their efforts to keep motivation high.
- Lead with empathy and trust – Crisis leadership means empowering people to act with confidence. Give teams the autonomy they’ve trained for, while offering steady support from the top.
Reflect and rebuild
After the crisis, your focus should shift from restoring operations to reflection and improvement. It’s your chance to learn, improve and acknowledge the effort it took to get through it.
- Review and learn as a team – Hold a structured, blame-free post-incident review. Walk through what happened, what worked and what could be improved.
- Update your plans and training – Feed what you’ve learned back into your crisis management plan and future exercises to strengthen resilience.
- Recognise effort and celebrate recovery – Crises push people hard. Acknowledge the individuals and teams who went above and beyond. Celebrating the recovery helps build morale, trust and a sense of collective achievement.
Key takeaways
The ability to lead a remote team through a crisis is now a necessary leadership skill.
Remote working adds complexity, but it doesn’t have to undermine your response. With the right foundations, you can lead with clarity, protect your staff and weather even the most challenging disruptions. Focus on the seven essential practices we outlined above:
Create your crisis management plan
Train your teams and exercise your plan
Stay calm and lead with focus
Distribute the recovery effort
Communicate with clarity and consistency
Look after your staff
Reflect and rebuild
Building and embedding a culture of resilience and preparedness makes all the difference. The more you practise, reflect and refine, the more confident your team becomes in their ability to respond under pressure.
In our Data Health Check, 77% of organisations said they were confident in their ability to respond to a crisis, while 71% were confident in their crisis communications plans. This is encouraging but shows there is still room for improvement.
Next steps
Preparedness doesn’t stop with a plan on paper. Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining a mature crisis management capability, the resources below will help you embed resilience, train your team and lead with confidence.
📄 Templates
Business Continuity Plan Template
🧠 Blog Posts
Training Your Team to Respond in a Crisis
BC command structures – Gold, Silver and Bronze
Who Should Lead Your Crisis Team? (PlanB)
What is a Polycrisis? (PlanB)
🎙️ Podcast Episodes
Managing the Crisis – Who’s in Charge?
🎥 Videos
What is Good Crisis Management?
How to Write a Business Continuity Plan