Trauma in the workplace

The decisions you make following a critical incident can seriously affect your workforce. Taking the proper action can reduce the chance of your employees suffering from post-traumatic stress. If you are well prepared, your company has emergency procedures and annually reviews them. But even well-prepared managers sometimes forget the necessity of taking care of their employees' emotional well-being - and their own, as well - following a workplace trauma.

Days, weeks, or months after a trauma or tragedy takes place at work, you and your employees can suffer from the emotional aftermath of that incident. Health and attendance can be gravely affected. Morale can plummet. Accidents can increase. Productivity and performance can decline. With this in mind, be sure that your emergency procedures also include post-trauma emotional support for employees.

read Trula LaCalle's full article here:

Companies in the crisis spotlight - the 3 big questions

When a company gets into trouble, the armchair observers to the crisis (likely to include their customers) will typcially ask 3 questions. So says Jack Flack, a US media consultant.

1. How could they be so stupid/evil to do that?

2. Why are they handling the situation like such morons?

3. They'll never be able to recover,right?

For his views on how companies manage these challenges to their credibility and reputation, read here:

A media crisis from out of the blue

A crisis that arrives without warning presents many challenges, but too many organisations fail to take action soon enough to protect themselves from events they could have prevented, says crisis management expert Sue Stapely, lawyer and consultant at Quiller Consultants. ‘On the whole, organisations in difficulties prefer not to recognise that they’re in difficulties until it is too late,’ she says. ‘Often I am invited in to help after an organisation has been the subject of a story in the papers, and you find that people knew this would happen weeks, months or even years earlier, but just hoped it would go away.’. Read more here:

Crisis Briefs

No stranger to creating crises, George W has struck again. Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by the U.S. President, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq. "It's out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive," Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush's comments received worldwide coverage.

In a speech defending his administration's Iraq policy, Bush said former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's brutality had made it impossible for a unifying leader to emerge and stop the sectarian violence that has engulfed the Middle Eastern nation. "I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday. (Reuters)

And finally.. A court in Nebraska is being asked to cast judgement on the ultimate judge and alleged crisis maker - God.

State lawmaker Ernie Chambers filed a lawsuit Friday against the Almighty -- acknowledging he/she goes by numerous aliases -- for causing "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues" and other alliterative catastrophes. The suit, Chambers vs God, asks the court for a "permanent injunction ordering defendant (God) to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terrorist threats" which affect innumerable persons, including Chambers's constituents.

It asserts that God is "the admitted perpetrator" of such acts and said that God's omnipresence gives the local Douglas County District Court jurisdiction in the suit, adding that God's omniscience eliminates the need to issue a formal notice of the lawsuit. Chambers told local media he filed the suit to make a point about frivolous lawsuits frequently seen in US courts, citing a recent one against a judge. He asked the court to award him an unspecified summary judgment against God, or, in the alternative, issue a permanent injunction against God engaging in the damaging acts cited in the filing.

Neither God nor his/her spokespersons could be contacted for comment. (AFP)