Managing During a Natural Disaster
Like most Americans, I have been watching the coverage of the California wildfires, and I am horrified. California’s wildfires typically occur in the more rural parts of the state. These fires are especially deadly because they are raging through highly populated areas of Los Angeles. Powerful winds spread embers, resulting in more fires, and people have evacuated their homes. In California, workers are protected by SB 1044, which gives employees the right to refuse to go to work during emergency conditions. This law protects those who work in jobs that must report to a physical location but does not specify anything regarding white-collar workers who can work remotely.
While organizations can’t stop hurricanes, earthquakes, or wildfires from happening, what leaders can control is how they respond when their employees are affected. The key? Listening first, then taking swift, empathetic action. Personal safety should always be the key. This holds true for all kinds of dangerous circumstances, such as active attacks, fires, hazardous spills, pandemics, natural disasters, and any other eventuality. A company can’t afford to willfully endanger an employee outside reasonable circumstances.
If you are managing people impacted by a crisis such as this one, here are some guidelines that will help you do it with empathy:
Prioritize safety. Your employees should know that you are concerned for their physical safety and that they should put that first.
Be flexible. Offering flexible work hours is critical to balancing work and life responsibilities during tough times.
Provide paid leave. Do not require employees to use PTO or take unpaid leave during these times. Doing so is a horrible idea, and one that will surely come back to bite you.
Build a culture rooted in empathy. An organization’s natural disaster response is not just about HR policy. Ideally, employees are also supporting each other with the help of company resources. Unsurprisingly, fully engaged employees offer the most support to co-workers affected by recent natural disasters.
Help the community. What kind of outreach can you do on a corporate level to help the community that’s been affected? Procter & Gamble, for example, has mobile laundry facilities that are dispatched to disaster zones. Not only is that a boon for survivors, it is also great PR for Tide. Not all companies can do something on this scale, but consider monetary donations to the nonprofits that will be organizing in the community.
Facilitate recovery assistance. There’s no way to sugar-coat this: Employees recovering from a natural disaster or other crises will need support. Your company may have special funds earmarked for employee assistance. But even if it doesn’t, you can still make this difficult time a little easier for your employees by putting them in contact with organizations that can help them.
Expect and deal with the distraction of trauma. Natural disasters are traumatic events for people. Do not expect your employees to be back to 100% capacity immediately.
In times like this, you don’t want to act like it’s business as usual because it is not. Perhaps you were not affected, but your company has been. During the COVID lockdowns, I had a client whose (male) boss was bemoaning a drop in her productivity. She had two children under 5, and all childcare centers were closed. Another client told me that after his house was damaged and uninhabitable following a hurricane, the company only sent him a link to EAP services. Don’t make these same mistakes.
Unprecedented disasters mean you need to pivot your business and not expect your displaced employees to be able to be on every call and in every meeting. There will be some deadlines they miss and goals they don’t realize, and you need to be supportive of that. Remember, in any company, employees are the profit-makers. Without them, your company would be unable to make, sell, deliver, or ship anything. So ensure that your teams know that you value their safety first and will do your best to help them during these challenging times, regardless of the formal policies in place.