Emotional Terrors in the Workplace: Protecting Your Business Bottom Line - Emotional Continuity Management in the Workplace

There are scores of emergency planning texts available that can help your company formulate a drill. For example, you can take an IT contingency book and retranslate the technological risks into emotional risks. What are your company's emotional mainframe, software, hardware, database, applications, platforms or communications systems? In other words, who are your strong leaders , your soft followers, your knowers, your doers, your standard- bearers and your communicators ? Or, you could call an emergency management provider in your community and ask them to help you create a drill. This book also offers some guidelines. What is important to know is that a drill doesn't need to be fancy but it does need to be formalized .

Best practices say that a drill should be mandatory, well-planned and regularly scheduled. Until participants have had some practice in drilling, a surprise exercise would cause too much emotional stress, and that is the opposite goal you would want to have. Emergency preparedness drills which include emotions are intended to prepare participants for a traumatic event and to give participants confidence that they can survive. If the real deal happens, it has been rehearsed and will have a less shattering effect than something that is considered unthinkable. Unthinkable incidents happen and people are emotionally overwhelmed by the difficulties of incorporating totally new ideas during extreme duress.

• Paper-Drills : A paper drill is just that, a drill on paper. It is a combination of scenarios and written guidelines provided to leadership to pre-think their concerns. The data is collected and shared with all departments.

• Table-Talks : A table talk or tabletop drill is one that is held around a table. In other words it is all talk and no physical action. It is an opportunity for participants to share and talk through their concerns, ideas and expectations to become familiar with each other, emergency policies, procedures and exercise compliances.

• Dress Rehearsal or Walk-Through : A physical practice of the elements of the drill. One step away from the table-talk and two steps away from paper. More real, but very controlled.

• Job Function : This drill tests specific jobs, people, or departments.

• Evacuation Drill : Participants act out an evacuation with simulated hazards, like stairways with participants acting like dead bodies, m lange, smoke, debris, and loss of communications. Surprises are built into the drill and the plan will need to adapt to the situation.

• Full Simulation : A full simulation is a real-time action replication or mock-up of what a disaster might look like and feel like. Although it is artificial it is the closest proximity to real-time incidents. The most labor intensive type of drill, simulations may prepare employees more for a real disaster than any other form of drilling. An emergency situation is simulated as closely as possible. This exercise should include all company participants, emergency personnel, local emergency agencies, others.

How to Set up a Drill for Emotional Continuity Management

• Establish full buy-on administratively

• Determine leadership

• Prepare with paper drills and table-talks prior to simulation drills

• Define the goals of the drill

• Develop appropriate and safe logistical settings

• Develop appropriate scenarios

• Create scenario assignments

• Consider management of a real emergency or unexpected event during the simulation

• Review plans and gather feedback

• Conduct the drill

• Collect results

• Celebrate the closure of the drill formally

• Debrief participants and planners without critique

• Planners then can evaluate the success or failure of goal achievements

• Add or subtract necessary components and schedule next drill cycle

• Send thank-yous to all participants

• What questions will you need answered to make good decisions?

• What resources will you need in each case?

• What resources will you activate immediately?

• What resources will you put on stand-by?

• How will you approach administration, employees, vendors and ancillary participants?

• What plan will you write?

• What policies for emotions will you want in place?

• What people with what qualifications will serve you best?

• What level of emotional impact will this possibly have?

• What risks will there be for solo or group emotional spinning?

• What tools will you use to manage the emotions of employees?

• How will you take care of your self as you participated?

• What would be the estimated costs of this for your company

• What would be the estimated costs for your company if it was unprepared for a real emergency?

Tips for Success of Drills

• Clear Notifications ” Always state "THIS IS A DRILL" when making phone calls or contact calls during the drill. Remember when Orson Wells read the story War of the Worlds on radio and some people really thought the planet was being invaded by aliens . People are fun! And people are nervous. Our world is scarier than it was a few years ago. It is better to be cautious than to create more emotional impact. It is critical to inform and notify all players and anyone who might be concerned that this is not a drill.

• Identification Tags ” For the same reasons as above, and for ease in managing the Participants, all members should have visible and highly identifiable, temporary identification that is collected after the drill.

• Time them well ” A drill during a layoff phase is dangerous. A drill during an earthquake is pointless and dangerous. A discussion after an earthquake might be useful for planning the next drill.

• Evaluations should focus on positive points ” Negative critiques destroy buy-on. Attempt to phrase weaknesses and losses in positive " can-do -better-next-time" language.

• Have fun ” Simulations can be fun and exciting when people are motivated to do their best for the sake of everyone else.

• Add a surprise ” The unexpected is where drills show holes in preparation. Don't add anything extreme, but do include a small twist to make it interesting.

• Ask other experts to play with you ” Go to your local fire department, hospital or chapter of the American Red Cross and ask someone to help you plan your drill.

• Drill a full range of emotions ” Include all feelings from small to large, annoyances to catastrophic.

• Maintain the illusion ” Encourage participants to maintain their acting roles until excused from the drill.

• Explain exit strategies and ending calls ” Inform your participants how they can exit the drill if it becomes distressful. Also inform everyone when or how the drill will conclude.

• Debrief even when it is a drill ” Make certain any individual who exits a drill have a mandatory debriefing to deter people who simply want to exit the process so they can go home early, and protect participants who may really have difficulty. This also gets people into the good habit of debriefing.

• Pleases and Thank-yous ” Courtesy goes a long way to create closure and future buy-on. Write a formal thank you letter to all participants.

Viola, the full-time private administrative assistant to a school administrator, answered the phone as usual. A voice on the other end was screaming about "the explosion." Viola realized it was a parent trying to find out if his child was safe. Viola quickly learned that many people were dead in the same neighborhood where her children were in school. Because she had exercised for emergencies, she was able to stay on the phone to support other parents who were calling the office in a panic although she was near panic herself. The other parents were calling because they were trapped away from the school by emergency road closures. Viola answered so many calls and had such terror for her own children that she could barely breathe. She remembered her training and knew she could get through and get help later. Her new boss, who had not received Emotional Continuity Management training yet, came into the office and demanded why she had not done her regular tasks . Although her first reaction was an emotion bordering on hysteria, she took a deep breath and calmly explained the situation to her boss.

Learning Byte

What could Viola have done differently? What could her manager have done differently? What emotions were at play here by all the individuals in this situation?

The office manager Denise opened the doors early in the morning to find a huge lizard in the center of the office. It was a large harmless lizard, but a reptile nonetheless. She screamed and when the next person came in to work right behind her they took action to remove it. Yes, they called 911. Emergency responders came, called animal control, and removed the creature. A week later there was another lizard. One afternoon a client came through the door screaming that there was a lizard hanging down from the gutters outside near the entrance to the store. Everyone was now in a panic. Animal control, emergency responders and company leadership were called in and the lizard problem was addressed.

There were no more lizards. Three years later Denise was still nervous about lizards under her desk and co-workers , vendors, and customers frequently teased her.

Learning Byte

Although no one could have predicted the lizard problem in this company, they did not take the time to consider the potential of such unexpected events and plan ahead. The interesting thing about this company is that its work was associated with responding to the emergencies of others and spent significant money in trainings to deal with the emotional needs of their clients . One of the weakest spots in care models is the lack of attention many emergency responders have to their own care needs. Business leaders need to plan for the unexpected. Even drilling for something that will never happen puts employees at ease when in an unknown situation because they have created a space in their thinking for "emergency emotions."

Creating a Space for Emergency Emotions

Drilling and exercising for emotions events allows the brain to make a space for the experience. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is an extreme consequence of seeing or experiencing something extreme that is unexpected and potentially life threatening or in the presence of a real death. The mind says, "Some perception in my inner worldview has been shattered forever." The difference between trauma and difficulty lies in the perceptual distortion presented by the incident. For example, a firefighter will generally not become traumatized by fire. On the other hand, someone who has never seen a large fire can become traumatized when they see flames roll across a floor like an ocean wave. That same firefighter, who is seasoned to fire, may develop PTSD the first time he sees an eyeball rolling across the floor. That is not something the mind is prepared to see the first time. Some firefighters would say, "oh, gee, there goes another darn eyeball. That's the third one this week." Another firefighter might find this was their emotional last straw.

To manage severe emotions well includes creating a place in the brain for the possibility of new and challenging information. It is as though you see an Unidentified Flying Object land in your patio. Even if you are a believer, your brain will now have to accommodate the image in real-time. If you believe in UFOs, your worldview includes UFOs. If you do not believe in UFOs, your world may be temporarily or permanently shattered. If your company has UFO drills, even if you don't believe in them, and a UFO lands in your lunchroom at work, your brain will have already begun the initial process of accommodating to the concept of how your team will help each other respond in unexpected events, and will be less likely to shatter into emotional pieces. Of course, it is not really necessary to drill specifically for unexpected UFO invasions in the lunchroom, or for the possibility or horrors like rolling eyeballs. What is helpful is to create an emotional climate where your employees can begin to develop a repertoire of thoughts, ideas, words, and images to manage emotions that may surface during an incident. So many people with PTSD report that no one would talk to them about their feelings, especially at work.