As the global economy heads further into turmoil and jobs become less secure, human service organizations are feeling the crunch. Not only are our organizations asked to do more with fewer resources, we are also operating under the heavy weight of fear.
During economic difficulty, it is more important than ever to acknowledge the systemic trauma caused by layoffs and downsizing and the ripple effect of these decisions on the staff who remain and the people who are served.
If we recognize that systems operate as human beings do, we can draw a direct parallel to the response an organization experiences as similar to that of a traumatized individual. Therefore, we can identify more effective ways to negotiate through these troubling times.
We can expect our organizations to respond similarly to individuals facing adversity—with symptoms of traumatic stress. Just as individuals tend to become mistrustful, disconnected from others, withdrawn, and less communicative under stress, we can expect to see the same from our leaders and those who are working in an organization burdened by the chronic stress of financial strain. We can expect to see a lack of dialogue, which increases rigidity and contributes to short-sighted and hierarchical decision making.
This rigidity often leads to decreased creativity, conversation, and collaboration among managers and employees. When this occurs, organizational research and the experience of nonprofit human service leaders suggest that it is the children and families we serve who ultimately suffer.
Understanding that systems respond to chronic stress in similar ways as individuals, we can use what we know about creating trauma-informed care to address the stress of economically frightening times by using the S.E.L.F. (safety, emotional management, loss, and future) framework. The S.E.L.F. framework is a core component of Sandra Bloom’s Sanctuary Model, a treatment and organizational model of change which incorporates the models of therapeutic communities and trauma theory to create a system-wide, trauma-sensitive culture.
The S.E.L.F. model can serve as a framework and organizing structure for making decisions and communicating these decisions to the wider community. Its four components—safety, emotional management, loss, and future—provide areas of focus for addressing the effects of trauma and chronic stress on individuals and systems.
By organizing interventions and framing conversations with staff with these four elements in mind, leaders will be taking steps to disrupt the spiraling effect of reactivity to fear and uncertainty that may be knocking their organizations off course.
The Multiple Meanings of Safety
When we propose to share information about economic challenges with the staff in our organizations, it is of paramount importance to focus on safety. The Sanctuary Model identifies four types of safety: physical, emotional, social, and moral, each of which has implications for communication and decision making.
Physical Safety. Issues of safety in the context of fiscal challenges are complex; they may include the very existence of the program and the jobs of the employees.
It is likely that in fiscally uncertain times, the employees’ primary safety concern will be their own economic position. Economic security provides basic physical safety: housing, food, and medical care. As this basic safety is threatened by the looming possibility of layoffs, open communication about circumstances can be a significant protective factor in helping staff and the organization negotiate information that can be unsettling and uncomfortable.
The reality is that the system may be forced to do the same work with fewer people and less money. In addition to the risks that job losses create for those who experience them, there are also risks to programs when they are forced to cut back on resources.
Conversations about safety in tight budget times generally include concerns about physical safety if cutbacks result in lower staff ratios, or if resources are going to be spread more thinly. Often, conversations about safety end here, but there are many other layers of safety that should be acknowledged in order to mitigate against the chronic stress of fiscal challenges.
Psychological Safety. Psychological safety refers to the internal emotional experience of safety.
It is likely that with the threat of job loss, many staff, including leaders, will struggle with feelings of anxiety and distress. Feeling psychologically unsafe can lead to distorted thinking, and distorted thinking can quickly lead to poor decision making.
In fiscally challenging times, it is more important than ever to remember that many brains working on a problem are more likely to come up with a good solution than one brain working to solve a problem. Leaders may be lulled into the risky mindset of thinking that they must make difficult decisions alone—after all, they are leaders, and part of a leader’s job is to make hard decisions.
Several organizations trained by the Sanctuary Institute and currently in the process of implementing the Sanctuary Model have shared that, faced with budget cuts, they have used the concepts of open communication and social safety to invite teams to decide democratically how they will reduce expenditures.
One of these organizations was considering layoffs and brought the budget dilemma to its staff to ask for input. Staff members suggested that they would rather all take a small reduction in their pay than eliminate a position. Because this decision was made collaboratively by the staff themselves, their sense of investment in the organization was stronger, and their feelings of disempowerment in the face of fiscal hardship were reduced. Their participation in shared governance allowed an increased sense of psychological safety.
Social Safety. Social safety refers to the experience of feeling safe within the group or community, having a sense of belonging, and generally relates to how people treat each other.
Under stress, communities are likely to respond in the same way individuals do—they tend to shut down, become more isolated, and communicate poorly. In the absence of accurate information, people also fill in information gaps with information that is pulled from previous experiences to help them feel more in control. Often, this information is not accurate or helpful and gives rise to a rumor mill that spreads poisonous information and fuels fear and resentment.
Leaders may hope to stem the tide of fear and quell the anxiety of staff by holding on to information that may be troubling to employees, hoping that a turn in luck will allow them to avoid having to deliver bad news. Leaders may feel compelled to delay giving information to staff if plans for layoffs or budget cuts have not been finalized.
Unfortunately, this well-intentioned choice can fuel feelings of mistrust on the part of staff. Sometimes the best information is just the acknowledgement that leaders don’t know the answers yet. At a recent Sanctuary Institute workshop, a leader of one organization said, “Unless you tell them that you don’t know, they will think that you do—and worse, that you are withholding what you know from them.”
Another way to create social safety is to celebrate the organization’s accomplishments. In times of fiscal worry, it is more important than ever to reinforce the value of the work that people are doing by recognizing what they have been able to do rather than to only focus on what is being taken away.
One strategy the Sanctuary Institute has implemented is to end staff meetings with a five minute group discussion of staff’s accomplishments for the month, what one of our faculty members calls the “slam dunk list.” Posting these in a newsletter, by e-mail, or on a flip chart can be a boost to a team’s sense of cohesion and a motivator to focus on the future.
Moral Safety. Perhaps the most overlooked and most important type of safety is moral or ethical safety—the experience of feeling safe to do the right thing. Moral safety is really about adhering to the organizational values, a challenging goal in even the best of fiscal circumstances.
In relaying information about the state of the organization or about decisions that are being made, leaders are wise to acknowledge that safety of clients and the organization are the basis for all decisions. Leaders are also wise to express that, at times, difficult decisions must be made when there are conflicting priorities among stakeholders.
In the face of layoffs, falling back on the agency’s values can be a way to frame and contextualize decisions to eliminate jobs. Despite the fact that layoffs generally affect a limited number of people, almost all employees have a fear response which impacts their work.
Although leaders cannot reassure people that their jobs are safe if they are not, they can and should be open about the organization’s commitment to its own financial safety. In challenging fiscal times, it is important to be transparent about the choices the organization is facing, as well as the values that drive the decisions that are made.
Another issue of moral safety is timing of announcements and dissemination of information. Staff members are likely to feel safer and more secure in their beliefs that the organization seriously considers their interests if they are given ample time to understand and question decisions before they are implemented.
Leaders should consider how they might create opportunities for anonymous questions, as the anxiety of looming layoffs and the risk of being labeled a trouble maker may stifle questions, concerns, or genuinely good ideas, and drive conversation underground.
The Importance of Emotion Management
Because organizations are as susceptible to the impact of trauma as individuals are, organizations are also susceptible to the contagion of emotions. Just as the clients in care at a school or residential program take their emotional cues from the adults around them, there is a parallel process of emotional containment and regulation that flows from leaders to the staff they supervise.
It is imperative that leaders practice emotion management skills and model them for the community. In times of financial stress, all eyes will be closely watching those who have access to resources and decision making for cues about how to feel and behave. For this reason, leaders need to be acutely aware of how their own emotions are influencing their behaviors.
During a Sanctuary Institute training, one director of operations shared, “I’m not going to tell people not to be scared that they may lose their jobs. I’m scared that I might lose my job. Healthy fear makes sense right now, but I can’t let that fear stop me from making this program better and delivering quality services to children.”
Leaders who acknowledge their own fear and, more importantly, manage that fear and the myriad of other emotions that they are experiencing, model the kind of containment and titration of emotion that helps to keep an organization healthy.
Loss: The Risk of Staying Stuck in the Past
Fiscal challenges are likely to trigger losses for an organization: loss of jobs through layoffs, loss of programs or resources that people have relied on, loss of a sense of security, and perhaps a loss of hope or enthusiasm for the work.
When loss is not acknowledged and worked through, we see symptoms of arrested grief in individuals. So too can organizations experience this arrested grief in symptoms like communication lapses, fragmentation of departments, territorialism, and general low morale.
Just as we would treat an individual who suffers from arrested grief with interventions that allow for working through loss, we can intervene on the organizational level to help keep the community from becoming trapped in a grief response. In working with grief and loss, compassion and empathy are important assets that leaders can bring to their conversations.
It is likely that job losses through closures or layoffs are most triggering for staff. Finding ways to manage staffing changes through open communication, goodbye rituals, and planning for reallocation of workload and assignments will be crucial to keeping loss from becoming arrested grief, going underground, and resurfacing in work with clients.
It is also important to respect the varying reactions to loss by both clients and staff, as well as to understand the risks of survivor guilt for those who have maintained their jobs while colleagues have lost theirs.
Imagining a Different Future
In trauma work with individuals, part of what limits clients’ progress is an inability to imagine that things can be different. This can also be the case for organizations feeling the crunch of financial pressure. For this reason, leaders have a special responsibility for taking the time and energy to push themselves and their staff toward envisioning the possibility that things will be better and to share that vision with each other.
Imagining a different future also means honoring the past and recognizing that the organization may look very different when it comes out of the economic morass.
Just as trauma survivors are encouraged to integrate their experiences and recognize the strength that comes from surviving adversity, organizations must acknowledge their own resiliency, honor the past, move away from the nostalgia of what once was, and focus on creating success from what exists today.
The Sanctuary Institute of the Andrus Center for Learning and Innovation, the teaching and training arm of Alliance for Children and Families member Andrus Children’s Center, Yonkers, N.Y., is an ECSG special partner.
Sarah M. Yanosy, LCSW, is director of the Sanctuary Institute of the Andrus Center for Learning and Innovation at Andrus Children’s Center, Yonkers, N.Y. She has been a clinical social worker for more than 10 years and has used the Sanctuary Model with her treatment team in that capacity.
She has collaborated with Sandra Bloom, founder of the Sanctuary Model, and other colleagues to develop the curriculum for the Sanctuary Leadership Development Institute, a five-day training and consultation function of the Sanctuary Institute of the Andrus Center for Learning and Innovation. She has overseen Sanctuary Model implementation at 90 U.S. organizations and four international organizations.
Her most recent publications include a chapter she co-authored with David McCorkle, LCSW, in Loss, Hurt and Hope and an article on trauma-informed care in Reclaiming Youth.
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