From Fear to Acceptance: Creating Safe Emotional Spaces During Restructuring

Whether driven by macroeconomic shifts or the pursuit of increased efficiency, the reality is that businesses often find themselves in need of regular transformation. As a result, organisations become emotional minefields that require emotional maturity, skill and finesse to navigate successfully. Instead of shying away from these, as tricky as they might be, transparency and acceptance are the keys to creating safe emotional spaces during change.

Right now, the socio-economic climate in South Africa is fragile - driven by various factors such as high unemployment, lack of physical safety and an unbearable cost of living. Emotionally, over the past 10-15 years, the nation has shifted from a space dominated by the mood of ambition and possibility to high anxiety, anger, fear and hopelessness. These permeate into workplaces and get exacerbated during organisational change and restructuring, where the worst outcome for the workforce is job losses and the repercussions thereof.

Creating Emotionally Safe Spaces

Restructuring is difficult and taxing, technically and emotionally. Leaders and employees must navigate an emotionally charged landscape for themselves and others. Multiple identities such as villain, victim and hero are assumed, and these evoke a combination of complex emotions, especially for line managers who often play the role of both victim and villain, where they are the bearers of bad news, expected to continue business as usual, whereas they may be directly impacted. Emotions such as guilt, fear, anxiety, resentment, anger and resignation are rife in the environment, driving behaviours that include quiet quitting, disengagement and, at worst, sabotage.

Organisations need to empower all employees, especially leaders, to create emotionally safe spaces. These are micro and macro spaces where emotional expression and support are provided within the community with which one is impacted. Currently, some “progressive” organisations provide emotional resources for individuals externally, which puts the onus on employees to reach out when they need support. This proves to be insufficient and underutilised as the impact of restructuring is individual and communal, i.e. team, department, role and level-based. Organisations must create spaces where communities can openly express and access emotional resources collectively. In these spaces, employees often become the emotional support for each other, making the journey to acceptance easier and impactful - as it’s achieved en masse.