When ISM Canada announced in late January that a computer hard drive containing hundreds of thousands of files had turned up missing from its Regina office, the staff at the Saskatchewan Workers' Compensation Board didn't give it a second thought.

After all, the WCB had ended its contract with the company to manage and mail the financial records of its annuity clients in August 2002.

So when they got the call from ISM saying that files containing confidential personal information of more than 4,600 of the WCB's clients were on the missing hard drive, they were surprised to say the least.

"We were caught a little off-guard," says Janice Siekawitch, spokeswoman for the Saskatchewan WCB. "We understood that all data that ISM may have held for us had been returned to us and destroyed on their storage devices."

But for reasons that aren't yet clear, that wasn't the case. And that meant Ms. Siekawitch and her colleagues at the WCB had a big problem on their hands.

Fortunately, they were prepared for handling a crisis and were able to leap into action. And in less than an hour and a half, they had a strategy in place on how to deal with the problem.

Unfortunately, most Canadian businesses aren't that prepared. In fact, Canadian companies lag far behind their European and US counterparts in crisis preparedness according to Jo-Anne Polak, senior vice-president and national service director of crisis and communications training with Hill & Knowlton in Ottawa.

"We're not as sophisticated a market communications-wise as the others are," she says. "Everyone there has a crisis communications plan in place, and it's been that way for years."

So instead of being able to act quickly and effectively to resolve a crisis, most Canadian businesses end up floundering. But it doesn't have to be that way. With even a little bit of planning ahead of time, a crisis can be managed, according to experts.

At the Saskatchewan WCB, events moved quickly once they were informed of the missing hard drive. Ms. Siekawitch says a seven-person action team of executives, communications staff and IT specialists was assembled quickly to determine the extent of the problem.

"We looked at what risk there was to our client group in terms of this information being in unknown hands, particularly for the potential of criminal action but also in terms of protecting their records with us," she says.

Within 48 hours of being alerted to the problem, the WCB had mailed letters explaining the situation to its more than 4,600 annuity clients (the only ones affected by the missing hard drive), set up two dedicated phone lines for clients to call for more information on how to protect themselves, and began manually checking that all recent transactions in their files were bona fide.

Being prepared helped the WCB respond to the problem quickly, but most companies can't say the same. "The majority of our crisis work is still people who call us after it hits the fan," says Ms. Polak. "We get lots of calls where someone says, 'We picked your name out of the phone book, can you be here in 15 minutes?'"

But it doesn't have to be that way. Planning ahead for worst-case scenarios can benefit businesses of all sizes.

Crisis strategies have to be simple. Ms. Polak says she helps clients create strategies that fit on two pages only because there isn't time for anything more complicated than that when trouble strikes.

On the first page, you should map out a list of stakeholders, people and businesses that will be affected. You should also decide and note who the best person is to contact each stakeholder, whether it's a sales representative, communications officer, etc.

The second page should be the messages you want to convey to your various audiences, including employees, clients and the media. It's important to make your messages as meaningful and substantive as possible, says Bruce Rozenhart, principal of Counterpoint Communications Inc. in Vancouver.

"If you don't fill that information gap and people have to answer their own questions, they will reach their own conclusions, and that turns a crisis into a disaster," says Mr. Rozenhart.

In the midst of a crisis, it's important to keep your employees apprised of what's happening. "The easiest thing to do is tell everyone to go away while you focus on the problem," says Mr. Rozenhart. "But if you don't tell your own people what's going on, they can very rapidly turn into part of the problem when the media start interviewing them."

That is especially true for frontline workers. "The person who is often at the lower end of the pay scale but greets the most people and certainly the most strangers usually has the least training in [dealing with a crisis]," says Mr. Rozenhart.

And it's for that very reason that receptionists and other frontline workers need training in how to remain calm under pressure and why they need to be kept abreast of the information you have to disseminate.

Ms. Polak says practising your crisis plan-by making sure everyone knows who they are supposed to call and drafting messages for different scenarios-even once a year will help keep it in people's minds for when the real thing happens and ensure that the actual crisis is handled smoothly.

"Bad things happen to companies all the time, and people understand that and can forgive mistakes," says Ms. Polak. "What you need to do in a crisis is convince and instill confidence in all your audiences that you have the ability to manage the company through it."