When words fail: 8 tips for preparing your employees for a crisis.

Imagine you are driving down the highway on your way to work. You have lots on your mind, reflecting upon your children's progress in school, the upcoming presentation at tomorrow's meeting and your plans for a relaxing weekend with your family. Your complacency begins to drift into autopilot.

Suddenly, the screech of tires jolts you back to reality and you are three seconds away from crashing into the back of an 18-wheeler. If you are fortunate enough to reduce your speed in time, you will survive the encounter unscathed thanks to a variety of physical and biochemical processes. This is known as the "fight or flight" response, which helps the individual take an immediate, reflexive action.

This response may also unfold during critical incident events that occur in the workplace, especially those that involve an escalation of violence, such as a robbery or an irate customer. When employees and managers are transformed from feeling relaxed to feeling at-gunpoint terror, their ability to perceive these events in a normal manner is changed dramatically.

Contrary to popular belief, most individuals will neither flee nor fight during a critical or traumatic event: they will freeze. Once people are paralyzed with fear, their performance under pressure and their ability to make effective decisions deteriorate rapidly. They enter a quasi-altered state of perception of extreme sensory overload known as tachypsychia (speed of the mind). The overload can cause perceived slow-motion and distortions in time and sensory awareness.

How successful an individual is at coping with the critical event depends on many factors including fitness levels, psychological and spiritual resiliency, as well as preparation and training for such an event.

Proactive managers and administrators benefit greatly from educating their staff on how the human body reacts to the stress and trauma of critical events such as a physical assault or armed robbery. Here are tips for professionals to effectively cope with work-related critical incidents:

1. Plan for possibilities