Try This

Avoid This

• Interrupt comments or jokes that make light of the event, or it’s impact; say they are unacceptable in our culture.
• Praise others who interrupt such comments; communicate that doing so is in line with the organization’s values.

• Entertain debate or discussion about the validity of the tragedy.

Try This

Avoid This

• Start with the context: “The news this week of XYZ has been really disturbing.”
• Remind teammates that a wide range of experiences and reactions (including those listed below) are normal and to be expected.
• Reiterate that it is normal and okay if teammates and their work are impacted by the event.
• Explain that the team might have to be more flexible than usual in how they interact with each other. Ask for additional willingness to detour from normal ways of working together during this time.

• Mandate one way that all teammates must deal with the event.
• Direct people to Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) as the only resource available to them (as doing so could suggest that teammates are welcome to bring some aspects of who they are into the workplace, but are not welcome to bring other aspects, such as emotions like anger, grief, sadness, or fear into the workplace.

Try This

Avoid This

• Choose to use 1:1 meetings or a regularly scheduled team meeting, or to call a special meeting for the team to discuss the event.
• Share your own experience of the tragedy, starting with “I”.
• Share your own responses to the tragedy (how it may be affecting you personally, including how it might be interfering with your work, the way you are socializing, or your health.
• Remind teammates that your personal experience and response is just one, and a wide range of experiences and reactions (including those listed below) are normal and to be expected.
• Reiterate that it is normal and okay if teammates and their work are impacted by the event.
• Create space for individuals who wish to, to disclose.
• Explain that the team might have to be more flexible than usual in how they interact with each other. Ask for additional willingness to detour from normal ways of working together during this time.
• Model what you are doing to take care of yourself.
• Welcome teammates to tell you what they need to take care of themselves (thereby authorizing them to be honest about it).

• Make assumptions about who will be impacted and who won’t, or discuss the event with some teammates and not others.
• Make the tragedy about you if indeed it did not personally affect you or a group you belong to.
• Use an analogy of when something bad happened to you as a point of entry into empathy.
• Pretend to understand how others are feeling or are impacted.
• Ask “did you personally know someone who was impacted?”
• Bring a personal story that is extremely cleaned up, polished, and bullet-pointed.
• Pretend to know all the answers, be fully resolved in your feelings, or be fully confident in the team’s path forward or through the event.
• Mandate that teammates disclose how they are feeling.
• Over-engineer or over-design the session.
• Allow teammates who share to be challenged or invalidated; for their experiences to be denied or minimized.
• Center the comfort of unaffected teammates over the comfort of affected teammates.

Try This

Avoid This

• Involve impacted individuals in designing the meaning-making process.
• Seek out community members, elders, and experts who have navigated something like this before to bring in their wisdom and concern.
• Engage organizational partners such as employee resource groups, learning and development experts, or diversity and inclusiveness experts.
• Center the stories and experiences of those who were most impacted.
• Explore the cultural roots or drivers of the incident (e.g sex/gender/race/class/etc biases and stereotypes, microaggressions, hateful language, a culture of violence).
• Discuss if/how those same cultural roots or drivers play out in behaviors, policies, or patterns in the workplace. Discuss in relation to organization’s values, mission, and business goals.
• Allow for multiple perspectives and answers to emerge.

• Try to lead this process alone.
• Try to solve tensions, or avoid tensions.
• Operate as if there is only one definitive meaning to be uncovered, one story to be told.

Try This

Avoid This

• Co-create a ritual or artifact to acknowledge and remember the event.  
• Review organizational values, and
• Revisit organizational behavioral norms, policies, and processes to make sure they are in line with the organizational values.
• Revisit organizational external commitment, words, and actions, and acting into the organizational values.
• Identify timely issues, and start with small winnable campaigns, to build momentum.
• Build or join coalitions with other groups, organizations, or alliances who have aligned values.
• Archive and share the story of the entire process the organization went through, from acknowledging and normalizing through acting locally.

• Jump to taking action outside of the organization before taking action within the organization.
• Parachute into a community as a day of service, or through the lens of charity or salvation.
• Try to solve a systemic issue with a single silver-bullet strategy.
• Give up when change takes time.

Trauma & Triggers: Disparate impacts and needs

Individuals affected by the trauma

Individuals unaffected by the trauma

Affected individuals may experience the following, in an immediate or ongoing way:

• Pain, sadness, anger, or numbness

• Distraction, dissociation, or difficulty focusing on work
• Lower productivity

Over time, affected individuals may experience embodied racism^[5] or other embodied inequality:

• Increased rates of chronic disease
• Increased risk of stress, depression, the common cold, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and mortality
• Increased social isolation and mental health challenges.

Unaffected individuals may:

• Not know the event was significant, triggering, or traumatic
• Say or do things that minimize, deny, or invalidate the experiences of affected individuals
• Misinterpret the reactions and experiences of affected individuals in ways that threaten team functioning or lead to negative sanctions for affected individuals.

Unaffected individuals need:

• To be aware that an event was potentially significant, triggering, or traumatic for others.
• Know that it’s normal for traumatic events to impact coworkers negatively.

Individual

Team

Org

Immediate

If affected individuals feel that it is unsafe to be real at work about how they are being impacted, they may:

• Spend additional emotional and cognitive energy hiding their feelings
• Try to compensate
• Generally withdraw from their team

If no one shares that they are impacted, affected individuals are likely to:

• Feel alone, abnormal, or crazy
• Feel an intense emotional or personal distance from others on the team.

If unaffected individuals do not know that an event was potentially traumatic, or don’t know that the above listed effects of trauma are normal and common, they can misread these effects as:

• Performance problems
• Lack of drive, motivation, or engagement in work
• Personal problems, which ‘should just be dealt with outside of work’

There is an increased likelihood of negative events to occur between teammates, especially across lines of social difference:

• Group interactions that deny, minimize, or invalidate the hurt
• Microaggressions against members of targeted groups
• Misunderstandings and conflicts between teammates
• Activation of triggers. Reminders of (patterns of) past transgressions that went unaddressed or insufficiently addressed

• Individuals experience cultural breaches.^[6]
• Tensions in the organization (between values and business goals, for instance) arise, and the organization demonstrates low skill to navigate the tensions.

Long term

Affected individuals will feel a sense of not belonging:

• Feeling unseen
• Feeling they can bring some parts of who they are to work, but not others
• Feeling like ‘the only one’

Affected individuals will likely:

• Disengage from work
• Detach from the organization
• Quit
• Share with others about their (negative) experience on staff

• Increased social distance and mistrust between teammates
• Increased social distance and mistrust in managers or leaders
• Negative or toxic racial or gendered climate
• Inequitable outcomes across lines of race, gender, religion, etc.

• When words and actions remain unaligned, individuals doubt the organization’s integrity.
• When tensions go unmanaged, individuals get stuck in ambiguity, and productivity suffers.
• Individuals lose confidence in the organization’s vision, direction, strategy, and tactics.
• Individuals lose confidence in the organization’s skill and ability to navigate challenges and change.
• Individuals lose confidence in the organization’s ability to function as a diverse, inclusive, and equitable organization, or begin to doubt the organization’s desire and will to be inclusive and equitable.