People First Leadership in Disaster Recovery.

"Rebuild your people and they will rebuild your organization." – Bill Tobbi

Special Note: I attached several "grab & go" documents for leaders & educators regarding this topic. They are located on my profile page in the bio. I wasn't able to upload attachments to the article. If you know the secret please InMail me.

The world watched the power of Florence and the disruption brought to almost 10 million lives. Regardless if this is or isn’t your first “rodeo” please know you are not alone. Millions of Gulf Coast leaders unfortunately and fortunately can empathize and support you.

A decade of Hurricane disasters provides clarity. The top leadership priority during a crisis is taking care of the organization’s people. Ensuring your brand delivers the promise to customers during a crisis depends on the health of the culture which is dependent on employee wellbeing.

How employees experience leadership values in action impacts how customers experience the brand. Placing people first, to unite with courage, and strength allows the organization to recover with a force greater than any category storm ever imagined.  

It may seem at times the world thinks Florence has left the building, however leaders that can empathize understand the journey to recovery is long, difficult and remarkably memorable.

What is said is important. What is done is defining. The decisions you make and the one’s you don’t will define your leadership, shape the brand and culture and you need to remember, you are not alone. 

The hearts and minds of Gulf Coast leaders including Houston Harvey survivors are heavy for each of you. Every storm is unique; however, some leadership practices are universal and can be shaped for relevancy. The next few articles are dedicated to you with the hope it may help.

What to Expect: Insights from Gulf Coast leaders with a decade of experience in leading during and after hurricane disasters. Personal leadership experiences, insights from Leadership in the Eye of the Storm: Putting Your People First in a Crisis by Bill Tobbi and the integration of science as it relates to human-centered leadership behaviors that predict employee and customer engagement.

Foundational Overview of People First Leadership in Disasters: The Four Stages of People First Leadership as it relates to Hurricanes include:  

Stage One: Before the Storm: Ensuring people safely evacuate or shelter in place, while ensuring safe physical closures and reduction of non-critical operations.  

Stage Two: During the Storm: Accounting for 100% of your workforce, supporting needs while stabilizing operations, delivering services to the community & customers. The calmest part of the hurricane, the eye, is when organizational values in action must be the loudest.

Stage Three: After the Storm: Leading an organization to recovery starts with safe and sound people & business operations. Empowering stability by helping people cope with devastation. Compassionately supporting recovery & career (aka work) reintegration.       

Stage Four: The Quiet that Comes from a New Normal. What you need to know about the new normal including: organizational trauma, healing and the incredible opportunity and legacy that comes from the experience that both employees and customers will remember.  

The primary focus will be on stage three and four. However, it is important to practice agile learning in real time throughout all four stages.

Identify best practices, lessons and don’t just document, act. Simple actions such as committing the item to the 2019 plan or immediately addressing what I have always referred to as a “say do gap”. An example of this would be a vendor falling short. Provide coaching & shared commitments. If it doesn’t work, you have a draft RFP.

Acting swiftly while minimizing risks is important. It reinforces values in action and is an opportunity to practice key behaviors that many organizations have committed to in cultural growth such as innovation, accountability and agile planning.

Finally, communicate, communicate and communicate with a goal of achieving top down, bottom up, inside and outside focused dialogues. 

First Things First: Put Your Oxygen Mask on First 

Regardless of stage, effectively putting people first starts with caring for yourself. As they say when you fly, in times of disaster start your start with your own health and safety before you can begin to support others. The same is true for leading in disasters. Here are a few lessons learned and practices: 

1.)   Ensure personal and family safety. Establish a plan, including roles and responsibilities.

2.)   Understand the Family Plate: Disasters take a toll on families, especially if two partners and / or parents play a role in leading people. Schedule regular a “what’s on our plate plan” to clarify & DOCUMENT shared expectations. Make it a habit as it puts the people most important in your life first. It also determines when you need to owe a big one to your sister for watching the kids, dogs and the rabbit??. Communicate to your work back-up critical times that you need to be released to support family priorities for example filing with FEMA. Alternatively, communicate to your family times that you must be 100% on deck to release others and support the organization. If you are the CEO you certainly want to ensure everyday presence, but it is critical to rotate leadership, think of it as a simulated succession planning development. This will reduce stress, convey a sense of relatedness to those you serve in leadership and build unity on the home and team front. 

3.)   Turn off the News: Storm updates can be constant via command center meetings, the news and text messages etc. Storm news in the background can easily become a new normal and be harmful. During Hurricane Harvey my step mother, “aka Mimi” told me our 7-year-old became teary eyed and asked if they could watch something else, it was scaring him. We turned off the TV and played a 2 hour game of Uno. Regardless if you have kids or not, circumstances are not normal. Take a break to do something normal and fun. 

4.)   Rest, Walks and Mozzarella Sticks: One unspoken power of hurricanes is the destruction of daily rituals and adjusting to the loss of the “little big” things in life. Focus on necessary essentials. Peacefully let go of the things you can’t control.

a.      Sleep is necessary. Make it a requirement to rest. Regardless of when or how, aim daily for 8 hours of sleep. When our body is sleep deprived our brains can’t process information. We become reactive, and inattentive which can directly or indirectly lead to fear-based leadership and safety risks.

b.      Exercise is necessary. During Hurricane Harvey we were displaced from our home for over 4 months. Excuses to not exercise were plentiful. I focused on not having my elliptical versus exploring what I did have. Extended hotels were not available, so like many we were placed on the coast in a beach house. Sounds great, but if you are a Hurricane evacuee, the last thing you want to see is the ocean, especially when storms are brewing following Harvey’s exit. Initially we ignored the beach. One morning, stressed about the “to do list” and the dog’s search for the ideal grass blade, Scarlett, our Irish Water Spaniel, seized the day. Breaking loose she charged toward the beach. I followed in a 30-minute chase of her unrelenting pursuit of seagull after seagull. Finally, I fell in defeat and looked up to the most amazing sunrise. Scarlett calmly returned to my side and sat down as if she was watching it with me. Sweaty, with a racing heart I felt so good. Every day we took a walk and watched the sunrise or set. 

c. Non-Perishables Redefine Healthy Eating: It would be great to eat healthy, but the reality of Hurricanes is that in some cases we are left with making the most of the non-perishables we were lucky to find or exhaustion trumps cooking. During Hurricane Rita, my husband and I lived for a few days eating by candlelight mozzarella sticks, peanut butter, pop tarts, and apple sauce. Seriously this is a no judgement time to redefine what counts as a fruit, calcium and protein. Certainly, if you can eat healthy great however make the most of what you have. Ironically, we both recall how incredible those cheese sticks were especially by candlelight!     

5.)    #1 Tip for Leaders: Practice Mindfulness Daily: This isn’t about Buddha it is about decreasing cortisol aka stress and calming the mind. A team at Harvard led by Sara Lazar found that “eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) increased cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which controls memory and increases our prefrontal cortex which affects vision, planning, emotional regulation and more. Additionally, decreases in cell volume in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress.”

Too much stress causes us to be mindless. If you are a people coach (i.e. CEO, executive, leader, manager, parent, teacher, EAP counselor) than your role is to serve other by empowering them to move from surviving to thriving. You must be present and connected to do this.

The circuits demanded of executives in terms of strategic thinking, typical crisis and response plan compete with the circuits required to connect with people including ourselves.

As a result, executives often make the mistake with good intention to focus the organization on getting back to normal operational routines and a futuristic external business-oriented focus. 

They need support and inspiration for better days ahead, but you can only do that if they feel your empathy and presence by leading by their side, not ahead. 

Make it simple. Integrate into daily habits such as a morning walk, shower or prior to bedtime. One time we started our HR team meeting with a 5-minute meditation. Not sure how the team would take it, I broke my meditation by opening one eye. The entire team had closed eyes, relaxed posture and they were breathing so deep you could hear it through the phone from those not able to be physically present. It set the tone for dialogue versus a meeting.

Another unplanned benefit? The surprising ability to calm kids and anxious dogs. Asking Alexa to play meditation music prior to bedtime still puts our dogs in an immediate state of deep doggy snores. Nothing is more relaxing then watching furry friends run, grunt and bark in their sleep.     

Give yourself time every day to breathe in, listen and REBUILD (Reintegration, Expectations, Belonging, Unity, Individualized Support, and Dialogue) yourself so you can empower others in their journey to REBUILD themselves and the organization.

Gain a sense of calmness with this leadership mantra: 

Things will never be the same.

Our leadership priority?

REBUILD employees and they will REBUILD customers.

Chaos Can Evolve to Opportunity.

Things will get to a new better.

Practice Now Resources:

Hurricane Family, Business and School Planning Resources

Meditation During Crisis

The Neuroscience of Mindfulness

Read Now Resources:

Critical Read: Start A Book Club with this incredible book for any leader and a must read during any disaster stage. You can also download on iTunes. Leadership in the Eye of the Storm: Putting Your People First in a Crisis by Bill Tobbi

HR Leaders Guide to Hurricane Recovery & Supporting the Workforce

Watch Now:

TedTalk Power of 10 Minute Meditation

How to Ensure 5-minute Meditation at Work

Legal Corner: David’s Dose of Legal Tid-Bits. Interview with David Barron, an amazing employment attorney at Cozen O'Conner. David has been by myside for over 10 years navigating legal compliance and supporting employee recovery.

Aside from a business decision to close operations, what legal considerations should be understood?

First, an employer should have a plan in place for either maintaining operations during a storm, or safely shutting down and reopening afterwards.  This plan will likely require critical employees to remain on the job during the hurricane or be immediately available thereafter. In some states, employers may not be able to compel employees to work during an evacuation order or discriminate against employees who are absent during a disaster, which creates a friction between the needs of the business and the needs of employees to keep their families safe. Employers should get legal advice on the laws in their state before taking disciplinary action against any employee who is absent because of a natural disaster like a hurricane.

Employers should be prepared for potential impacts in operations, as a result of a storm, will have on payroll policies and procedures. For example, employees may be sequestered in work facilities during a storm, which raises questions as to whether this is compensable "on-call" time. 

Following a storm, employees may be involved in clean-up activities or other projects that are outside normal work duties, but nonetheless compensable. Lastly, an employer may be forced to increase options for remote working in the aftermath of a storm, which may create questions on policies and procedures for accurately tracking work time. 

Can you explain what it means for an employer that is considered an emergency or critical service during hurricane disruption?

Some states, like Texas, allow employers to require employees to work during a disaster if the employee performs services that are necessary for the safety of the public. For example, first responders like police officers and emergency services personal would qualify.  Public utility linemen and jobs related to the restoration of essential services like water and electricity are also typically included. Notably, some states may require the employer to provide shelter for any employees who are required to work during a disaster. 

What should an employer consider in determining if they are a true first responder? The law differs from state to state but the touchstone is whether the company serves the public as opposed to a private interest. Typically, the jobs are obvious, like police officers and utility linemen. Even in private industries like chemical plants and refineries, however, there may be public safety reasons that would justify the need to compel a skeleton crew remain on duty to avoid an explosion or other disaster associated with a hurricane.

What are the legal considerations when establishing required regular conference calls versus a required regular emergency text or call? The latter check-ins have the intent to confirm the safety of the workforce and operational capacity, requiring employees less than a few minutes but daily. 

One consideration is that such calls could affect legal obligations under wage and hour laws. A short “check in” call is likely a de minimus amount of time and not compensable for a non-exempt employee. A lengthier conference call could create an obligation to track the time and pay for the time spent on the call for non-exempt employees. Generally, an employer is not required to pay an exempt employee who is absent because of an evacuation (as long as the business is open), but if the employer requires the exempt employee to participate in conference calls, such a requirement could trigger an obligation to pay the employee for the entire day.

As it relates to the return from evacuation what are the safety precautions an employer should consider? For example, if water has been standing in a building.

Obviously, safety should be the primary focus both during and after a disaster. OSHA requires that an employer provide a safe workplace free of hazards, and injuries which occur in the scope of employment could give rise to workers compensation claims. Employers should take every precaution to identify potential hazards and not place employees in an unsafe position during or after a storm. This might include obvious hazards, like working during high winds, but also less obvious hazards like working in a previously flooded office without proper mold remediation or putting employees to work without air conditioning.

What types of return to work injuries or illnesses are OSHA reportable? 

Generally, if the injury or illness is work related and requires treatment beyond first aid, or results in death, loss of consciousness, time off from work, or restricted work, it should be reported.

David, based on your deep expertise in this area what is the biggest mistake employers make when it comes to employment law and hurricane disasters?

The biggest failure is typically a lack of preparation and waiting until the last minute to put together a plan. A thorough disaster plan includes the operational and safety needs of the business, but also the labor and employment issues that are critical to ensuring that the operational needs are met. For example, employees are much more likely to be willing to work during a disaster if they know these pectations in advance and are allowed time to plan arrangements with their family. 

Here is to moving from surviving to thriving. You are in our thoughts. - Vandi