A critical workplace incident can be a devastating experience. Such incidents impact productivity, teamwork, morale, as well as the personal lives of employees. While it is the hope that no such incident occurs in your work environment, it’s an unfortunate rare reality in just about every industry. When these incidents do occur, the employer, manager and employee response can be irregular and adverse. This program aims to teach workers on all levels how to effectively respond, recover and restore after a critical incident.

Participants will first learn what constitutes a “critical workplace incident.” Models for understanding how incidents are evaluated and addressed, including how they are similar and differ across sample industries are explored. Critical incidents are broken into three categories of severity to help participants better understand the human response, restorative planning, workplace change, and healing.   

Behavioral, emotional, cognitive and social consequences of critical incidents are introduced. Stressors and other triggers are identified as well as possible outcomes, which can occur during, shortly after, and in the long term after a critical incident.  

The program introduces methods for intervention that can help workers, teams, and overall companies/organizations cope with adversity and move toward a restorative change following critical incidents. Included in this segment are tools and strategies that can be built into company policy in the form of debriefing protocols, as well individualized outsourcing ideas crucial to getting employees and/or workgroups past the incident, back to work, and on par with productivity standards.  

Psychological models for healing after an incident in the form of stepwise and sensible methods are outlined in a manner that can be aligned with organizational values and goals. Finally, potential outsourced resources are identified so that companies can ask for help when needed.  

Conclusions, discussion, and question period will conclude the program.

For most, a critical workplace incident is an event that will not be experienced during one’s career. However, workplace adversities previously not deemed critical are becoming more widely defined in terms of traumatic incidents. Additionally, as workplace safety regulations increase, businesses and industry struggle to keep safety measures at or above standard. All the while workers are overstressed, working more hours, often with fewer resources. As such, risk factors for trauma in the workplace are higher, and there is an increase in the probability that some type of traumatic event looms in the workplace. 

While any worker from the employee to their manager, to top-level executives, can be impacted by a traumatic workplace incident, managers, and higher-level employees are often burdened with providing a professional response to help their employees become resilient in the wake of workplace adversity. Many in such positions of prestige and power know it’s their role to provide a process that properly addresses the issue (s) in a respectful manner, and is one that allows for the employees to move forward, working together, and being productive. Few, however, have ever had to provide such response, and many have not experienced any or enough training in such matters. 

This program aims to educate, train, and arm professionals that are in the role of providing both prevention and response to critical workplace incidents with increased understanding, more strategies, and tools helping employees move from adversity into resilience, and ultimately back into healthy productivity and agency teamwork and morale.