Psychological safety is no longer a luxury in today’s workplaces. It’s the bedrock required for a thriving workforce—not just about fostering open dialogue and eliminating fear from a culture, but also about preparing for the moments when the organization’s and employees’ mental health can be compromised due to the crises employees face.
The crises employees face can range from minor (e.g., schedule change) to major (e.g., mental health crisis), which can overwhelm their resources to cope or know what to do. An employee crisis is personal and brings strong emotions that can influence thinking and behavior. Employers who understand psychological safety acknowledge that they have roles in preventing mental harm, promoting mental health, and supporting employees experiencing crises, regardless of their level or root cause.
Employers who want to create a psychologically safe workplace must consider crisis management and intervention readiness, which provides the rationale for why many invest in employee and family assistance programs and benefits that support employees’ mental health.
These support programs are beneficial. However, one gap in many workplaces is the lack of trained resources to support employees experiencing crises. These individuals require skills to de-escalate crises and help employees get any needed professional support. There is great value in having team members who know how to de-escalate a situation, such as an act of incivility, before it spirals into violence.
That’s where the concept of a Crisis-Ready Workplace comes in and why it’s beneficial to identify at least 10 percent of the workforce to support employees. These include HR, OHS, JOSH committee members, and frontline leaders as part of the Psychological Health and Safety (PHS) program.
The level of training to be crisis-ready involves ensuring that all trainees have basic crisis intervention knowledge, skills, and a toolkit to help them navigate and de-escalate a variety of employee crises that can occur at work.
Many employers provide crisis readiness training like Mental Health First Aid, Suicide Intervention, Nonviolent Crisis Intervention, Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, and Anger De-escalation. Most of these courses are beneficial, but they are specific and not generalized to deal with different crises.
What appears to be missing from the menu of available crisis readiness training in today’s PHS training market is accredited crisis intervention training that takes an integrated approach by preparing learners to operate through an inclusive and trauma-informed lens. Training should include basic crisis intervention capability for mini to major employee crises, anger, mental health crises, suicide, verbal abuse, and intimate partner violence.
I have created crisis-ready training accredited by CPD Standards in the UK (www.crisisready.ca), which is conducted over 12 hours, both online and in person, to support employees in crisis. It draws on my 30-plus years of applied crisis intervention experience, including 10 years of teaching crisis management at the post-secondary level and supporting and training HR professionals and leaders in psychological health and safety. Crisis-ready professionals need not be experts in crisis intervention; they need tools to help them de-escalate employees in crisis.
What is a crisis-ready workplace?
A Crisis-Ready Workplace is one where assigned HR, OHS, JOSH committee members, and frontline leaders are equipped to respond to employee crises, prevent them from escalating, and serve as a conduit to stabilize situations until professional support can be accessed if needed. Crisis-ready professionals are not experts. Their role is to help employees in need get support and mitigate further risk and harm.
Considering the extent of interpersonal, mental health, and personal crises, it is prudent for employers to set a target of at least 10 percent of the workforce being trained in basic crisis intervention skills. Crisis-ready workplaces have assigned team members capable of supporting employees when things go wrong, recognizing that a crisis is a personal experience and that two people in the same situation may have different interpretations. Not every crisis may be obvious, and sometimes a minor crisis, such as a change in work location, can have a profound impact on an employee’s emotional well-being, which can result in spiraling thinking and behaviors that can affect their mental health.
The world is becoming increasingly unstable, unpredictable, and uncertain, which is increasing employees’ adversity loads at home. A financial health crisis can impact their mental state and how they cope with stressors in the workplace. Crisis-ready professionals possess basic crisis intervention tools they can apply to de-escalate situations, regardless of the root cause.
A crisis-ready workplace demonstrates to the workforce that the employer cares about psychological safety. Crisis-ready professionals can provide employees in crises with:
- Credibility and compassion: Employees feel safer knowing that they will be seen, heard, and protected in the event of a crisis.
- Faster response times: Training key individuals ensures issues are addressed promptly, with fewer escalations and less long-term damage.
- Legal and ethical alignment: Readiness to support and protect employees in mental health risk meets human rights Duty to Inquire provisions.
- Trust amplification: Employees are more likely to report issues when they know their workplace has crisis-ready professionals trained to support them.
The tangible benefits of crisis readiness
Integrating crisis readiness into a PHS strategy is more than a safeguard. It’s a good business decision to protect employees from the impacts of crises.
- Reduce mental health risks: Crises can emotionally drain individuals and teams. Trained responders know how to intervene early and effectively. They are more likely to engage and be confident in their roles, enabling them to support individuals in mental health crises immediately.
- Boost retention and morale: Employees who know their employer cares about their well-being and is becoming crisis-ready are more likely to feel comfortable in their roles.
- De-escalation of employee crisis risk: In moments of crisis, clear protocols lead to fewer rash decisions and more thoughtful, confident action, resulting in a lower risk of mental harm, injury, and illness, including loss of life.
How to create a crisis-ready workplace:
Train 10 percent of your workforce in crisis intervention basics. It signals a desire to create a psychologically safe workplace and acknowledges that employees could experience a variety of crises. Training one in 10 employees in basic crisis intervention readiness such as crisisready.ca is less costly than sending team members to multi-crisis readiness training and ensures agile crisis intervention capacity to respond to crises.
Educate the workforce on crisis readiness. Provide employees with a foundation in understanding employee crises, including how they can occur and the link between crises and mental health risks, to help remove stigma and encourage employees to approach crisis-ready team members in times of need. Make it clear who on the team has crisis-ready training, so employees know whom to contact. This can be reinforced through effective communication and regular team meetings. The mantra is that the wrong time to prepare for a crisis is when in one, which is why the organization is committing to becoming a crisis-ready workplace.
Psychological Health and Safety Workplace Assessment and Audit. Collect data on OHS risk regarding bullying, harassment, violence, PHS hazards, and employees’ stress levels to keep a pulse on the risk of increased employee crises as part of the PHS program. Conduct a program evaluation to ensure safe and respectful workplace policies and training are mitigating risk. Psychological safety encompasses feeling secure when discussing challenging topics. Also, collect data on how employees who have been in a crisis felt supported.
Measure, monitor, repeat. Take a Plan-Do-Check-Act approach to becoming a crisis-ready workplace by allowing the crisis-ready team to practice, share experiences, and re-learn, ensuring they are clear on the support resources and how to access them. Crisis readiness training such as www.crisisready.ca cannot be thought of as a one-and-done solution. There is a need to ensure that team members are encouraged to review, re-learn, and have access to tools that help them navigate employees in crisis.
Crisis-ready workplaces ensure that team members are trained in basic crisis intervention and that crisis readiness is an integral part of the organization’s PHS program. This may include crisis management policies, a crisis management protocol, and disaster management. At a minimum, a crisis-ready workplace has team members with basic skills to intervene with employees who may be experiencing an interpersonal, emotional, or psychological crisis.
