Warning: This article contains content that may be distressing to some readers. For those who need immediate support, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Australians are reeling after two attacks in Sydney’s southern and eastern suburbs last week, which have claimed the lives of six people and injured several others.

“Our thoughts and condolences are with the families, friends and colleagues of the victims,” says AHRI’s CEO, Sarah McCann Bartlett. 

Dr Zena Burgess, CEO of the Australian Psychological Society (APS) and organisational psychologist says the effects of the attacks may be far-reaching.

“For the friends and families of the victims and those who bore witness to the attacks, the mental health impacts could stick with them for life.”

“We also need to consider the impacts these tragedies could have on the broader community. Many people will be distressed by these events and will talk about them in the workplace. They might speculate about motives or share concerns regarding further attacks,” says Dr Burgess.

“It’s possible we could see increases in emotional distress, such as anger, sorrow, fear and confusion. And, for some people, old trauma could possibly be reactivated.”

This is why, following any traumatic event, it’s important for employers to have robust processes in place to reduce distress and respond to those whose trauma may be triggered.

Supporting employees following traumatic events 

Most organisations will incorporate a response to a dangerous or traumatic event in the workplace into their crisis management or business continuity plan. This should guide them during and immediately after the event.

However, these plans sometimes omit support for employees who may be affected by an incident that occurred outside the workplace. In this instance, it’s advisable to assess who in your organisation might be impacted.

“It’s very important that the reality [of the situation] is acknowledged and the way people feel is heard,” says Dr Cathy Kezelman AM, medical practitioner and President and Executive Director at Blue Knot Foundation, an organisation that supports people to recover from complex trauma.

“Employees’ response to situations like this will also be dependent on their own lived experiences, including whether they have prior histories of trauma. So there’s a holistic response to consider as well as an individual response.”

This trauma can be cumulative, she adds, noting that the past few years have exposed people to an array of distressing situations.

“On top of [the recent attacks], we have a community that has been shaken by things like COVID and the current global [geopolitical] situation. There’s a sense of this pervasive threat throughout the entire community, so each thing that happens needs to be understood in that context.”

“When you’ve experienced repeated trauma, or repeated traumatic stress, that response is often heightened. So people will tend to be hyper vigilant, easily startled, anxious or sometimes they’ll shut down.” – Dr Cathy Kezelman AM, President and Executive Director, Blue Knot Foundation.

Following an organisation’s immediate response, the employer would then decide whether a company-wide message outlining where employees can go for support would be useful, including details such as how to contact their employee assistance provider (EAP). It’s also important to assess who may need more intensive mental health support and help connect them with a mental health expert.

When discussing at a team level, HR professionals should encourage managers to talk to their teams with empathy and factual information. 

“We don’t want to sugarcoat any of the details or minimise any of the distress people are experiencing, but we also don’t want to perpetuate any misinformation or stereotypes that might be circulating in the news or on social media,” says Dr Burgess.

When addressing your teams, consider the following:

• Create space for dialogue and grief – While some traumatic incidents might call for a company meeting or an all-company email, you may also need to allow for deeper discussions to take place.Employees may benefit from peer-to-peer debriefs or one-on-one conversations with their managers to unpack their fears, concerns and complex feelings.
• Don’t try and fix things – “Ask people: ‘What do you need right now’ and then just see what that reveals,” says Dr Kezelman. “Don’t jump in and say, ‘Do X,Y,Z’ or ‘That happened to me too,’ and take over the story. Just be there in an accepting, compassionate and empathetic way. Don’t try and solve it; don’t prod people. Just gently encourage people to get support and offer the support you have available in your organisation.”
• Promote self-care behaviours – In the aftermath of a traumatic event, it’s important to prioritise recuperating behaviours for any employees who are directly impacted. Create opportunities to bring teams together and create moments of authentic connection. Showing employees that they’re not alone and creating a sense of unity within your organisation can help to build resilience.
• Understand your limits – In the initial wake of a tragedy, ensuring employees have access to mental health resources and safe spaces to discuss their feelings is an important first step, but sometimes longer-term support is required.
  
  “The impacts of a traumatic event often don’t surface in people for weeks, months or sometimes even years,” says Dr Burgess. “If you discover this, consider [referring employees to] a mental health expert who can design a long-term support plan.”

Signs to look out for

Following a traumatic event, Dr Kezelman says employers should be on the lookout for out-of-character behaviour in employees which could signal that they are experiencing trauma or distress.

“People who’ve experienced trauma have a biological survival response – fight, flight and freeze. When you’ve experienced repeated trauma, or repeated traumatic stress, that response is often heightened. So people will tend to be hyper vigilant, easily startled, anxious or sometimes they’ll shut down.

“They might usually be a very conscientious worker who turns up on time and is reasonable in their interactions, but then they might become reactive or aggressive. It’s not that they’re behaving badly, it’s that their behaviour is telling us something.”

Dr Burgess says some changes to look out for include:

• A sudden drop in quality of work
• Becoming withdrawn from social situations 
• Sudden fatigue or low energy
• Difficulty making decisions
• Becoming uncharacteristically agitated or upset at work
• Changes to their appearance (e.g. looking dishevelled) 

“An increase in any of these behaviours could signal mental ill-health, so it’s important that managers are given the tools and resources they need to help identify risk areas.” 

Take a trauma-informed approach to HR

In the coming weeks and months, taking a trauma-informed approach to HR will be important, says Dr Burgess.

“A trauma-informed approach requires managers, leaders and HR professionals to remain aware of the many factors that could trigger an emotionally distressing situation for an employee, such as exposing them to distressing imagery or news, perpetuating stereotypes about mental ill-health or forcing them to come into the office if they’re feeling distressed about being out in public.

“It’s about doing everything within your control to minimise potential harm.”  

Dr Kezelman adds that employers need to understand that trauma will more than likely “overwhelm people’s capacity to cope”.

“Being trauma-informed also means being open, receptive and understanding that trauma is about feeling unsafe. So, [employers] can think about how to build a sense of psychical and emotional safety at work.

“Also, often people who’ve been traumatised have also been disempowered, so think about how  you work with people rather than impose things on them. How are people given choice in what happens to them?”

In a bigger-picture sense, it’s also important to make sure your culture is set up to enable a trauma-informed approach, she says.

“Is it a culture where people feel safe to say things like, ‘This is what I need’ or ‘I feel unsafe or scared?’ Or is it a culture where there might be fear of showing vulnerability or weakness?

“It’s all very good to sprout certain [values] and principles, but how do you marry that with the system of work? What is the culture of transparency? How well does the organisation communicate? How trustworthy is the organisation? Is feedback accepted well? And is it realised?'”

These are all important questions to consider because you can have all the right policies, but if what’s written in them isn’t lived out, you’re not operating in a trauma-informed way, she says.

AHRI members can log into AHRI:ASSIST to get a guideline on developing a trauma-informed HR Practice. You will find this resource in the health, safety and wellbeing resource page.

Ongoing mental health support

HR professionals can’t be expected to be mental health experts. It’s important to bring in the right expert support if employees are struggling in the wake of a traumatic event.

“Avoid putting pressure on leaders, HR and middle managers to ‘solve’ people’s distress around this tragedy,” says Dr Burgess. “For many, the impacts will be complex. As workplace leaders, your responsibility is to direct employees to adequate professional support.”

McCann Bartlett adds that it’s important for HR to take care of themselves.

“HR professionals are often lent on for support, but remember to take care of your own mental health too. Consider giving yourself a break from consuming distressing news content, for example, and lean on your HR community for support.”

AHRI has a range of free resources available to its members via AHRI:ASSIST. Log into your member portal for the following resources:

• Managing Grief and Loss in the workplace
• Having effective wellbeing conversations

The post How to support employees following a traumatic event appeared first on HRM online.

It’s estimated that between 57 and 75 per cent of Australians will experience a potentially traumatic experience in their lifetimes.

And while trauma often arises out of situations that occur outside of the workplace, such as instances of violence, neglect, loss or emotionally harmful experiences, work-related circumstances can also trigger residual or additional trauma. 

Sometimes it’s the nature of the work that can lead to a trauma response. Commonly cited examples of at-risk workers include frontline responders, such as emergency services, paramedics or defence force personnel. 

However, ‘second line’ responders can also be at risk. Professions such as social work case managers, psychotherapists/psychologists, insurance workers and even some HR professionals can experience vicarious trauma after being exposed to distressing situations.

The legal profession too can be rife with instances of vicarious trauma. In 2022, a High Court decision found that the Victorian Department of Public Prosecutions was liable for $435,000 in damages following the psychological injuries and trauma experienced by a solicitor who worked in its Specialist Sexual Offences Unit.

Speaking to HRM at the time of the case, Will Snow, Partner at Finlayson, said: “Physical risk factors have been quite well understood to date, like working in confined spaces, lifting techniques and working from heights. An increasing trend now, from jurisdictions and also from guidance from safety regulators, is to manage psychosocial risks with the same rigour and process.”

Expectations around managing psychological injury at work have since been laid out for employers as part of the Code of Practice on managing psychosocial hazards, released earlier this year. However, HR leaders can go a step further in creating psychosocially safe workplaces by practising trauma-informed HR.

What is trauma-informed HR

A trauma-informed HR practice isn’t about putting the onus on HR professionals to manage or resolve trauma identified in employees – that’s the job of professionally trained mental health experts.

It’s about knowing how to identify behaviours that could indicate someone is experiencing an emotionally distressing situation and understanding how to put preventative measures in place to prevent the work environment from exacerbating or sparking trauma.

“What HR may see in [employees experiencing trauma] is changes in behaviour such as memory, attention and difficulty regulating emotions, which can lead to lost productivity and decreased team cohesion,” says Dr Phoebe Lau, clinical psychologist and Director of The Inner Collective.

Dr Lau refers the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) three E’s model to explain how trauma eventuates:

Event: These could be one-off or continual events that cause significant emotional, psychological or physical harm.

“It’s important to note that emotional and psychological harm may be perceived as life-threatening,” says Dr Lau.

Experience: An individual’s experience of the event plays an important role in determining whether the event was traumatic. For example, SAMHSA uses the example of children removed from an abusive household and two siblings having completely different emotional and psychological responses.

“This is dependent on a number of factors including past trauma, automatic physiological responses, and how meaning is made post event,” says Dr Lau.

Effects: The effects of trauma can be varied. Some may experience it instantly and others can have a delayed onset. And people’s trauma could potentially resurface multiple times throughout their lifetime.

“SAMHSA’s trauma-informed approach recognises the obvious, but easily forgotten, impact that personal and professional events and experiences can have on both individuals and groups. It also recognises the cumulative impact of these, sometimes over decades, dependent on the context,” says Deb Travers-Wolf, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Consultant at I LEAD Consulting.

Putting trauma-informed HR into practice

Katriina Tahka, CEO of A Human Agency, says a trauma-informed HR is particularly important when dealing with workplace grievances.

For example, your organisation’s sexual harassment procedures could potentially re-trigger those who’ve previously experienced sexual assault in the past, or you could inadvertently do more psychological damage to victims if your investigation processes require people to recount their experience to multiple people or make an official report before they’re ready, for example.

“I’ve been asked to investigate complaints of workplace sexual harassment where it is known that the complainant has a pre-existing trauma,” says Tahka. 

“In order to be able to conduct an appropriate investigation, it was imperative to consider how a typical best-practice process would need to be modified to create a safe, neutral space for the [employee] to discuss their complaint while minimising the potential to re-traumatise them in the retelling of the new events or in any perception that [their] version of events was being questioned.”

Travers-Wolf says workplace safety incidents like bullying, harassment and discrimination often require “rigorous and protracted investigations and remediations” which have significant potential to delay recovery and may continue the cycle of trauma.”

In this instance, a trauma-informed approach could look like working in collaboration with the victim to design an investigation that helps them to feel protected, believed and safe, she says.

For example, they might prefer to provide evidence or information from the safety of their home via a phone or video call, instead of in-person. Or perhaps they’ll want to work remotely while the investigation is taking place, to avoid coming into contact with the alleged offender.

“If an individual does not find the workplace to be physically, psychologically or emotionally safe, a trauma-informed approach is not going to work.” – Dr Phoebe Lau, clinical psychologist and Director of The Inner Collective

When investigating a bullying or harassment claim, you need to consider both the practical and emotional preparation that’s needed, says Travers-Wolf.

“For example, explaining the process and, even more importantly, its intention will promote trust. Authentically offering some choice in where and when the discussion/s occur enhances both cooperation and engagement,” she says.

“Asking how you can support those involved and being aware of emotions, body language and tone of voice, can reduce the chance of moving from a conversation into an interrogation. It’s a good idea to acknowledge these can be uncomfortable conversations, so being comfortable with silence and [an expression of] emotion is important.

“We need to recognise the role of HR as a culture enabler and understand that organisations with a fundamentally human approach experience the highest wellbeing and belonging, and therefore higher performance.”

Other instances where a trauma-informed approach would be beneficial include:

Specific leave policies and processes: “For example, policies associated with applying for parental leave may be more complex in the event of prior early pregnancy loss or for those in the LGBTQIA+ community,” says Travers-Wolf.

What could HR do differently? She suggests expanding the language used in such policies (i.e. not referring to ‘primary and secondary’ carers). In the case of prior early-pregnancy loss, Travers-Wolf says you might offer additional EAP or wellbeing services for expecting parents, to help ease them into their leave and address any underlying anxiety.

Sudden performance issues: For example, a usually strong performer is consistently showing up late or not delivering their usual quality.

What could HR do differently? Instead of assuming the individual is lazy or incompetent, a trauma-informed leader or HR practitioner would be curious and ask sensitive questions that give the employee the opportunity to open up.

“Keeping safety, trust, choice, collaboration and empowerment at the forefront of the approach you take is the key to a respectful and inclusive process.”

Personal disclosures: If an employee tells you about a traumatic experience in their personal lives, what is your default way to respond?

What could HR do differently? Often a caring and supportive manager or HR professional might want to jump into fix-it mode in an effort to help.April Long, CEO of SMART Recovery Australia, says trauma-informed HR is about “meeting the person where they’re at”.

“It’s about making sure we’re not doing more harm,” says Long.

For example, assuming that people experiencing trauma will automatically need time off work could do further damage. As HRM has previously reported, work is often the safest and most stabilising space for people experiencing personally distressing situations.

In this instance, having a preventative measure in place, such as a ‘personal situation plan’, is a great way to better understand the individual needs of your employees ahead of a traumatic event and gives HR a clear blueprint to roll out.

Download AHRI’s personal situation plan template.

Intergenerational trauma

Long says it’s important for HR to remember that trauma can have a cumulative effect, especially for those in underrepresented groups who can face discriminatory behaviours on a regular basis that often reopen old trauma wounds.

“When we talk about trauma, we’re not really good at understanding that it can be collective and intergenerational,” says Long.

Having an entire nation weigh in and cast judgements upon whether or not you should be legally allowed to marry your partner, for example, is not only a deeply distressing circumstance in and of itself, but it could also dredge up prior experiences of homophobia or violence. 

The same thing is occurring now for many Indigenous employees in the lead up to the Voice referendum.

“As a Queer Aboriginal person, this is the second time the nation has voted on whether or not I have the right to do basic things like marry the person I love or have a voice around policies and programs that impact me.

“And for an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Elder in the Queer community, this is the third time they’ve experienced this, [when you consider the] 1967 referendum.”

Trauma isn’t just about things that are happening in the here and now, Long adds.

“People can be triggered by things that happened years ago. It can rise up when you least expect it. So how do we ensure that managers and HR specialists know what their role is and what their role isn’t?”

Conducting an audit

As a short-term priority, Travers-Wolf suggests assessing your organisation’s current risk factors that might inadvertently spark or trigger trauma by auditing your policies and processes.

The SAMHSA trauma-informed guide offers helpful questions to consider as you do this, and suggests assessing various areas of your organisation, including:

How do leadership and governance structures demonstrate support for the voice and participation of people using their services who have trauma histories?

See page 14 of this guide for the full list of examples.

Collaborate and communicate with employees

Importantly, this doesn’t all sit on HR’s shoulders. Part of being a trauma-informed leader is knowing when to call on external qualified experts for training or investigation purposes.

“It can involve additional financial cost for the company, but it minimises the risk of further harm and reduces the human-emotional cost of the process,” says Tahka. 

Travers-Wolf also suggests following the “platinum rule”: “Treat others not as you wish to be treated, but as they wish to be treated.”

Long agrees, emphasising the importance of consulting the community you’re aiming to support to ensure you’re not unintentionally doing more harm.

“You see this quite a lot in corporate Australia. An organisation wants to recognise Reconciliation week or Sorry Day, but they actually end up loading extra work on to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff who carry that extra responsibility on top of their workload. National Sorry Day in particular can be very triggering and emotional for mob impacted by Stolen Generations” 

Read HRM’s article on managing cultural load in the workplace.

“Even things like a Welcome to Country [can be triggering]. Depending on where that person is at in their cultural journey, they may just not have that information, which can make them feel worse.”

Lay the foundations of trust

Dr Lau says it’s important not to jump into trying to manage a traumatic situation at work without first laying the groundwork of trust.

“Sometimes the individual doesn’t think HR or leaders [are] safe [to share] such personal information with,” she says. “If an individual does not find the workplace to be physically, psychologically or emotionally safe, a trauma-informed approach is not going to work.”

Post-referendum, Long says line managers and HR will need to think about how to support their people – no matter the outcome – rather than brushing this off as a political matter that doesn’t belong in the workplace.

“If there’s no place for these conversations [at work], that can reinforce a lack of inclusion and create more stigma and shame.”

Travers-Wolf says trauma-informed HR should be practised year round, but notes that the referendum period could be a particularly challenging time for some people.

“It’s vital HR understand how to support [those experiencing trauma] and bring the workforce together. That requires a delicate dance between respecting everyone’s views and not exacerbating the trauma this social debate has brought on for some.

“We are all human, equally worthy of respect, connection, care and compassion. We need to balance respecting the view of others, while also being able to express/voice a version of our views in a way that’s [appropriate] for the workplace.”

Learn how to develop a practical, evidence-based action plan to address mental health challenges in the workplace by booking your place at AHRI’s mental health first aid course.

The post What is trauma-informed HR and why is it important? appeared first on HRM online.

Warning: this article discusses mental illness and suicide and may be distressing for some readers. If you or someone you know needs help, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636. 

On February 8 2021, Olivia Messer resigned from her position as a reporter at the US-based news organisation The Daily Beast, and posted the following message on Twitter:

“While I’m tempted to be vague about my departure, I also believe it’s important to acknowledge the profound exhaustion, loss, grief, burnout, and trauma of the past year covering – and living in – a mass casualty event that has changed all of our lives.”

Messer subsequently outlined, in harrowing detail, her experience of vicarious trauma and burnout in an emotionally wrought piece for Study Hall – a media newsletter and online support network for media workers. 

“In between meetings and interviews and filing stories, I was falling apart. I was writing poems about suicide. I went whole days without eating at all. At one point, I collapsed onto the floor from dehydration. I was vomiting from stress,” she wrote.

“My nightmares, in which I was shot or raped or watching coworkers burn alive in front of me, scared me so much that some nights I refused to sleep at all. When I was too afraid to sleep, I was still restless because I was too angry or too anxious or too sad or too filled with shame… There were times I took sick days because I couldn’t stop sobbing long enough to string even a few pitches together.”

Unfortunately, Messer isn’t alone in this ordeal.

Since her departure, numerous journalists have handed in their resignation, attributing their burnout to emotional distress caused by round the clock reporting on the rising COVID-19 case numbers and death toll.

While vicarious trauma is widely known to impact frontline responders – such as police officers, paramedics, firefighters and veterans – instances of vicarious trauma experienced by other working professionals like Messer tend to receive less attention in the public domain.

According to psychologist Adam Blanch, who provides organisational training in preventing, treating and responding to vicarious trauma, frontline responders “get a lot of attention in regard to vicarious trauma, and rightly so, because they have a direct exposure to trauma that is hard to avoid”.

But there are also ‘second line’ responders – such as lawyers, financial counsellors, case managers, psychotherapists and insurance workers – who are continually exposed to trauma through “hearing and reading the stories of what happened, and through witnessing the ongoing effects on the traumatised person”.

Though we knew before COVID-19 that organisations have a duty of care to support their employees’ mental health, the pandemic has put this responsibility into even sharper view. And it’s made clear that no one is immune.

Vicarious trauma can strike anyone

Blanch defines vicarious trauma as “any event in which a person felt they lacked the agency to meet their needs and came away from it with a negative belief about themselves because of that”.

Professionals in helping careers, such as HR professionals, are particularly at risk of experiencing vicarious trauma because “they want to help, and sometimes they can’t, so they can come away from those interactions feeling that they failed the other person and themselves”.

Although Blanch outlines risk factors that render some people more vulnerable to experiencing vicarious trauma – for instance, carrying unresolved trauma, holding unrealistic expectations about one’s own role, or poorly defined boundaries around their compassion response – he also emphasises how vicarious trauma can “happen to just about anyone who has empathy for others and ends up feeling they couldn’t make a positive difference”.

The Lookout, an organisation for workers supporting women’s safety in Victoria, outlines the following symptoms for organisations to be aware of:

• Taking on too great a sense of personal responsibility
• Difficulty leaving work at the end of the day
• Disturbed sleep/nightmares/racing thoughts
• Loss of connection with self and others, or a weakened sense of one’s own identity 
• Increased need to control events, outcomes or others
• Withdrawing from others
• Problems managing personal boundaries, including invasive thoughts about a client’s situation

Insuring against psychological harm

Hearing instances of trauma on a daily basis is bound to weigh most people down.

Senior manager of health and safety for QBE Jay Epps has seen how employees manning the phones for insurance claims are impacted by regular exposure to confronting accounts. 

He says it’s typically factors beyond an employee’s control that make a call particularly traumatic. 

“For example, a claimant needs to quit smoking or lose weight before a surgery can occur and this causes delays in treatment and frustrates [them],” says Epps. “Claimants tell of the impact of their injury to their life. They might say, ‘I can’t drive now and see my elderly parents, things take a lot longer to do, I no longer enjoy life, this is causing difficulties in my relationship, my wages have reduced and I can’t afford to buy my children birthday/Christmas presents.’ 

“If you take calls like this, you have to tap into your tools to communicate effectively with claimants and manage your own emotions,” says Epps.

Learn more from Epps about creating psychologically safe workplaces during times of trauma at AHRI’s Diversity and Inclusion conference in Sydney on May 21.

With many employees now working remotely, Epps says QBE has implemented alternative procedures to support employees including:

• Running training on how to handle sensitive calls, navigate complex matters, contentious decisions and emotionally charged situations
• Training employees in Mental Health First Aid
• Developing a Psychosocial Risk Assessment tool to assist in the identification of psychological risks to employees

Epps also suggests organisations incorporate strategies to manage vicarious trauma into their KPIs, such as psychological incident reporting to enable early intervention, or mandatory training in workplace culture, WHS and concerning behaviours.

Blanch similarly expresses concern about the difficulties remote working presents for psychological debriefing.

“All the people I have trained in this space tell me that most of the time it is peers they are talking to, the person sitting beside them in the office doing the same work ,” says Blanch. 

“Formal supervision is great, but often people need a friendly ear in the moment and that’s when they turn to their colleagues… Being in separate spaces is a really big barrier to that.”

Acting proactively

Prevention is key – so much so, that Blanch says acting after the incident is usually too late. 

He advises organisations take the following proactive steps to create a trauma-informed workforce:

• Implement a vicarious trauma policy
• Foster an uplifting atmosphere that encourages humour, laughter and the sharing of positive experiences, as well as a culture that focuses on and celebrates success and contribution
• Encourage regular breaks
• Manage caseloads
• Train staff and managers in prevention strategies, peer debriefing, regular individual and group supervision, and how to recognise and respond to signs of trauma and compassion fatigue
• Train employees  to set professional boundaries with clients and colleagues
• Normalise trauma and encourage openness about it

“Afterwards it’s down to debriefing and recovery,” says Blanch. “But it’s what happens before the trauma gets there that will largely determine the impact it has.” 

If you or someone you know needs help, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.

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