Russ Berland, CCO at Aventiv Technologies, chats with Tom Fox about how his team is managing the current COVID-19 crisis, and his role as CCO in particular.
Crisis Management In The COVID-19 Crisis
Tom comments that crisis management should always be at the forefront for every CCO. He asks Russ to share how Aventiv is managing the current crisis. Russ is proud of his company’s proactive and successful response to the crisis. He manages the company’s enterprise risk management system, part of which is their risk register. A pandemic is one of the events on that register. As soon as the CDC announced that COVID-19 could become an issue for businesses, their team created a formal risk management plan that included “a list of all the people who are going to be part of the response team and all the actions they could take and what the elements were that would trigger the plan. That was written, circulated, approved and was ready to go several days before we needed it,” Russ says. The operational team now uses this oversight and governance document to execute the company’s response. Russ comments that this shows that risk and compliance “can look and see what’s coming, can prepare a way of dealing with it and then start the process.”
The CCO’s Role
Russ says that as CCO, he has two additional roles during this crisis. The first is to see the risks that might come up because of the crisis. The second is to make sure that other risks unrelated to the crisis, are also being addressed. “Crisis management is just risk management,” Russ says. “You just do it in a different time frame.”
Resources
Aventiv Technologies