Employee Support Lens: Responding to Social or Political Crises
Overall environment of inclusion
When a crisis occurs, employees will assess your company culture to gauge how to respond and determine how comfortable they feel being authentic with their thoughts and feelings in the workplace. If you want employees to feel supported and to trust your messaging, then you must commit to the continued action of creating a culture of inclusion.
An environment of inclusion is one that supports equity in all areas of the employee experience and makes employees feel seen and heard for the full array of experiences they have. It creates channels for difficult discussions among peers and across seniority levels while providing the resources necessary to facilitate these conversations. An inclusive environment not only provides resources and benefits to employees, but ensures everyone is aware of all benefits and is assisted in accessing them if necessary.
When employees see consistent, supportive actions, they will be more likely to trust and participate in initiatives that occur in response to a crisis. A built in sense of security enables employees to have productive conversations and know that their thoughts will be received respectfully. Below are starting points for building transparency around your resources and creating an inclusive environment.
Make your resources easily accessible. Do you offer mental health resources, sick or mental health days, wellness perks, or an Employee Assistance Program? What resources should your employees be aware that they have access to? Have you made employees aware of who to contact if they require assistance in accessing resources or benefits?
Train managers to understand their role in difficult conversations around DEI and conflict resolution. Managers should know how to respond to situations as they arise and when to utilize HR for assistance.
Provide leaders with tools for more supportive employee supervision. Provide general cultural competence and inclusive leadership education and encourage supervision methods that openly address power dynamics, provide direct reports with a sense of agency, and support problem-solving through a framework that supports the supervisee’s strengths and experiences. Create space in regular supervisory meetings for staff to discuss wellness needs related to their work day.
Create channels for conversations in response to global situations. Whether through Slack or Teams, a newsletter column, a forum on your intranet, etc, create a location with clear sharing guidelines for employees to respond to events and support each other. Guidelines are an important part of this process as these conversations are often emotionally charged and personal. Include that posts that do not follow the specified guidelines will be removed.
Internal transparency around your company’s inclusion efforts and corporate social responsibility will inform your employees on your organizational commitments.
Practice support skills frequently. Strengthen your culture of inclusion by regularly discussing the above resources, skills, and practices with people leaders. This will build confidence and ensure everyone knows their role.
Have a written protocol ready that outlines the ways you will and will not respond to a major social or political event. Consider your company’s values and core focuses, and assess what may be appropriate for you to do versus peers in your field or others. Consider what you would have the organizational resources and knowledge to implement if a crisis occurred tomorrow. Is your current capacity to respond different from how you might hope to respond to a crisis that occurs in the future? Knowing this will allow you to build processes to increase your support capabilities while ensuring your response is within the scope of your mission and values.
Utilize Holistic’s Inclusive Language Toolkit for assistance in discussing identity in everyday conversations.
When events occur
When an event occurs, you may decide that an individual or organization-wide response is necessary. Your response will be best received based on your previous relationship with creating inclusive, respectful, and responsive spaces. Without this culture of support, team members may be hesitant to share their experiences or needs or to request help or resources. Below are some steps you can take when events occur.
Personal steps:
When checking in on a team member, center the thoughts and feelings of those who are most impacted by the event. Know that added emotional weight from those outside of the impacted groups can become burdensome to those who are processing the event.
Set the expectation that a response isn’t needed when checking in on employees around the event.
Some affected employees may wish not to share their feelings or offer advice and that’s okay.
Be patient and empathetic and don’t assume others’ experiences.
Be aware of your own biases. Remember that just because a person identifies with a particular group does not mean they will be having a particular experience in response to an event.
Some steps for assessing biases: What groups might be most impacted by the event? What are your gaps in knowledge related to the impacted groups and their experiences? How can you build your knowledge independently? As you build your knowledge, do you feel any biases (assumptions or judgements)? Consider why you feel this way and how these biases compare to the information you are learning about these groups.
Base the way you reach out on your relationships.
If you have not typically spoken about personal events with a teammate, keep your support more work focused. Offer to assist with projects or help your teammate advocate for deadline extensions.
If you typically discuss personal matters with your teammates, offer to listen to your teammate if they need someone to talk to. Don’t put weight on your teammate to reply or respond.
If you don’t have any interaction with a co-worker who has been impacted by an event, consider if there are other ways you can be an ally rather than approaching a coworker about an event. Can you attend the listening session or help with a company initiative instead? .
Remember there is a time and a place for providing support and not every space needs to be this space.
A mandatory staff meeting may not be the place for employees to discuss their feelings as this may be overwhelming for some who are still processing the event.
In some cases, one-on-one conversations will be more useful than group conversations.
Some employees may feel more comfortable sharing their feelings electronically via email or a form rather than in person.
Base where you have these conversations on the culture and relationships within your team.
Use ‘I’ statements so you can own your feelings and prevent transference when discussing the event. (I.E. I’ve been finding it hard to focus since learning about _____. I think it could be useful for us to provide ______ to those affected on our team.)
Organizational steps
Remind employees of resources in place: sick days, mental health resources, EAP, etc.
Support your ERG’s. Rather than placing the burden on Employee Resource Groups to respond for their group in times of upheaval, check in with your ERGs on their capacity to provide feedback. Encourage ERGs to interact and support each other when one group may still be processing an event. Offer to accept feedback from ERGs when events occur, but emphasize that they are not obligated to lead the path forward.
Provide employees the opportunity to give feedback on what their needs or changes they would like to see organizationally
Utilize a grief counselor or trained facilitator when providing grief support services and listening sessions. Ensure the facilitator has experience in these deeply personal conversations.
Listening sessions can be a useful way for employees to share their thoughts and make recommendations for how your organization can support them.
Set guidelines at the beginning of any listening session.
Outline your goals for the session
Explain what a listening session is and what it is not
A listening session is: A chance to discuss thoughts and experiences around a topic and set goals to support employees. Everyone should be given equal opportunity to speak.
Consider this framing: “We would like to hear your thoughts so we can better support you during this time. Learning about our employee experiences and concerns helps us to consider meaningful, organizational changes both permanent and temporary.”
A listening session is not: group therapy, a support group, a venting session, an unfacilitated conversation.
Remind participants to be aware of the space they are taking and set parameters to allow everyone a chance to speak
Provide support for empathetic listening and a culture of respect
Send information prior to the event around the intention of the space, what will guide the conversation, and what the flow might be like.
Utilize Holistic’s Inclusive Language Toolkit for assistance in discussing identity and its relationship with the crisis situation.
Post-events
Because this communication is part of creating an overall environment of inclusion and support, following up on actions taken and resources available is a best practice.
Share what initiatives were taken after the event. This may involve philanthropic work or donations, listening sessions or educational events, transparency on resources provided, summaries of communications had and ways employees supported each other, or other positive work.
Update employees on your continued commitments. Stating how you plan to continue supporting employees and living by company values builds an active rather than a responsive culture of inclusion.
Remind employees that resources are still available to them and encourage your teams to advocate for their needs.