Construction leaders face not only the obvious human loss but also increased exposure to significant financial loss. Stemming from psychological damage to the organization’s human resource, cost drivers include:

• Increased exposure to Workers Compensation claims
• Litigation
• Pursuit of medical, psychiatric, and legal opinions
• Workforce turnover and recruiting challenges
• Increased absenteeism
• Protracted medical treatment for “unrelated” ailments
• Diminished concentration and accuracy
• Negative image within the construction community
• Increased conflict between employees and with customers
• Increased use of alcohol and drugs to self-medicate
• Inability to meet contracted deadlines

Trust of leadership and a desirable corporate culture are also at risk. In retrospect, construction leaders will often pinpoint a workplace tragedy as a pivot point for the ongoing productivity of their work teams. Some identify how the incident actually launched a new sense of loyalty, team cohesion, and commitment to safe work practices. Others bemoan the event as triggering a collective negative image, increased conflict, and distrust of leadership – “that’s when the wheels fell off”. A dynamic common to work groups following a traumatic incident is increased “we/they” thinking and blaming of “the boss” for problems related and unrelated to the incident. People impacted by trauma predictably tend to:

1) Regress to more basic, primitive impulses and defenses

• The brain is re-circuited toward use of functions focused upon creating an immediate sense of safety. These thought patterns are not necessarily logical as the portions of the brain dealing with advanced abstract thought are “put on hold”.
• Decisions tend to be impulsive, extreme, and based more on emotion than logic.
• Emotional responses are magnified and self-protective.

2) Immediately attempt to make sense of the incident in effort to gain a feeling of control over it

• The belief is that if one can understand the incident, s/he can be safer by preventing it next time.
• When the answer to “why” isn’t available, people will create one!
• The understanding is likely to be reactive and lack objectivity.

3) Isolate from others

• The lack of control experienced in the tragedy leads people to pull away from others in distrust.

Add these factors together and conditions are ripe for hostility and blame with the company’s leadership positioned as the most convenient target. Following tragedy, the allegations of blame need not be accurate to be powerfully destructive!

Leadership in Times of Crisis

Managers need to respond immediately and effectively because how they handle the first hour after a tragedy offers both tremendous opportunity and serious risk for their management relationships and outcomes. The incident and its aftermath will not go away if ignored. Work groups will go through a reactive process – with leadership or without it. Lead it! If ignored, the employees feel as though insult was just added to injury and feelings of betrayal further fuel the likelihood of blame. According to Gerry Spence, founder of the Trial Lawyers College, “The pure rage that stems from unredressed injury can be more fearsome than that produced by the original wrong.”

Your employees are watching you as they make decisions about their own reactions. To illustrate, when a high school football player is injured on the field, the student trainers sprint to his aid. Not the doctor. She or he confidently and purposefully strides onto the field in a way that communicates professionalism and control. Quick but not in a hurry. Sprinting with the trainers or remaining on the sidelines would trigger panic in every seat in the stadium.

Like the team physician, construction leaders must be prepared to present that rare combination of compassion and competence—not mutually exclusive terms. Individually and organizationally, recovery is facilitated when the leader can acknowledge the personal impact upon involved people while at the same time transitioning them to next steps. He must embody and communicate the transitions from chaos to structure and helplessness to effective action. Those watching must witness a confident, competent person who doesn’t minimize the effect of the incident but communicates an expectation of recovery.

The ACT model provides construction leaders with a structured process to facilitate both individual and organizational recovery.

Acknowledge and name the incident

• Have an accurate understanding of the facts and avoid conjecture.
• Demonstrate the courage to use real language that specifically names what occurred. When there has been a fatality it is important to use the word “death”.
• Acknowledge that the incident has an impact on team members and that individuals will be impacted differently.
• Personally acknowledging the trauma positions leadership as also impacted by the event and can align leaders with other employees.

Communicate pertinent information with both compassion and competence

• These characteristics are not mutually exclusive and must both be present to productively lead a traumatized group. In these situations leaders must “know their stuff” in a caring way.
• Leaders may benefit from the support of a colleague, attorney, or Critical Incident Response Specialist to help script a response and provide coaching/feedback.
• Have a crisis response plan that includes use of Critical Incident Response Specialists. These experts can help design the response plan and deliver structured clinical interventions to mitigate the effects of trauma. Simply exercising this plan automatically communicates compassion and competence.

Transition

• Communicate an expectation of recovery. Those impacted must gain a vision of “survivor” rather than “victim”.
• Communicate flexible and reasonable accommodations as people progress back to “return to work” and “return to life” normalcy. Employees should not all be expected to immediately function at full productivity (although some will) but will recover quicker if assigned to concrete tasks. Structure and focus are helpful. Extended time away from work often inhibits recovery. “If you fall off a horse…get back on a pony.”
• Lead visibly for several days and be especially accessible to employees for support and information.
• Destigmatize and encourage utilization of the Critical Incident Response Specialist.

Typically the operational flow begins with the company’s Safety, Human Resource, or Risk Management department making an immediate referral to a Critical Incident Response organization. Sometimes the property & casualty insurer may assume the role of referrer. The Critical Incident Response organization will already have in place protocols by which the referrals are received, responses are managed logistically, and Specialists are dispatched to meet with impacted employees on-site. These counselors should meet the following criteria:

• Masters or Doctoral education in a mental health field
• Certified or licensed to practice independently
• Crisis Response specialized training

The Critical Incident Response Specialist(s) arrive on-site and immediately establish communication with a designated on-site contact, typically from Human Resources, Safety, or other management position. Prior to meeting with employees, it is clinically important to draw circles of impact and arrange groups of similarly impacted individuals. For example, people who experienced risk to their own safety or witnessed horrific scenes will typically feel uncomfortable talking about it if co-workers are present who were not first-hand witnesses and, conversely, exposing non-witnesses to gruesome images can secondarily traumatize them. Another rule of thumb generally advises against mixing employees and those who supervise them in the same group.

Selecting from a continuum of structured group and individual interventions, the Specialist provides a safe, directed environment to 1) position the company’s leadership favorably, 2) let people talk if they wish to do so, 3) identify “normal reactions to an abnormal event” so that people don’t panic regarding their own reactions, 4) build group support, 5) outline self-help recovery strategies, 6) brain-storm solutions to overcome immediate return-to-work and return-to-life obstacles, and 7) triage movement toward either immediate business-as-usual functioning or additional care. Information is shared regarding access to other community resources. The Specialist also engages in immediate assessment for anyone presenting risk for suicide or violence. Following intervention completion, the Specialist provides the company’s management with recommendations for next steps.

When construction leaders manage the risk of a traumatic event via this process they speed individual and organizational recovery and gain greater likelihood employees will positively view their involvement. Tragedy needn’t lead to additional tragedy.