Stress Mgt. Program Supports Employee Mental Health Since Sept. 11, 2001, our definition of "crisis" has changed quite drastically. While most companies are diligently working to preserve the security of their fiscal preparedness, some are overlooking the needs of their human capital by not anticipating the mental health issues brought on by a crisis.
Critical incident stress management is an integrated and extensive multi-component crisis response program. It serves not only as an effective crisis intervention tool, but also provides a long-term preventive function.
As corporate perspectives and realities have evolved, so must planning for the needs of people responsible for holding up the bridge between crisis and continuity.
There are several questions that a business may need to ask itself. For one, if you run a business or serve in a key area, how would a new disaster of large magnitude affect your fiscal continuity in terms of the physical and psychological effects on your employees, whether they are local to the event or not?
The term CISM, or Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, was coined more than a decade ago. In practice, its fundamental interventions span the entire crisis phase spectrumfrom pre-crisis preparation, through the acute crisis phase (a "triage", if you will), and on to the post-crisis phase and follow-up.
The components of CISM are:
One-on-one psychological support: Some of the greatest damage done by crises or terrorist activity is on the hearts and minds of victims, their families, and rescue workers.
Demobilization: Counselors are dispatched and debriefed on the current state of the crisis and condition of employees. Counselors are again debriefed after their interaction with employees so the counselors themselves do not become traumatized by the situation.
Group Informational Briefings: As the term implies, this is group dissemination of information pertaining to the crisis. It is also used to quell rumors and misinformation that usually accompany troubling circumstances, and gives individuals information on how to access resources following the event.
Critical Incident Stress Debriefing: In short, CISD is used to bring a psychological closure to the crisis event. It is essentially the "surgery" phase of critical incident counseling.
Defusing: This is group and one-on-one intervention focused on mitigating the impact of the traumatic event. Help is provided on site at the affected location to employees and their family members.
Family Support: Debriefings as well as defusings are available to family members as well as employees, mainly so that those affected do not take their problems into their homes.
Referral Mechanisms: These are the processes of locating, bridging and making referrals to provider organizations or other help who will allow for ongoing therapeutic services needed by attendees of debriefings and defusings. Whereas CISD is "surgery," referral mechanisms are the rehabilitative phases of the post-crisis period.
Companies that provide CISM services have documented the implications of having a response action like this in place closely following the results of catastrophic events. Call volumes for Employee Assistance Programs, which typically provide these CISM services, increase 300%.
EAPs with Web sites typically receive more than 500 e-mails per day requesting emergency counseling assistance in a post-crisis phase.
Several groups employing EAP-CISM services have reported sharp reductions of hard-dollar expenditures in sick leave, medical claims, absenteeism and turnover.
The resulting sustained productivity has taken a large monkey off of the backs of human resource departments, managers and supervisors who otherwise would have been forced to deal with these employee and work-related issues themselves.
Rescue workers from the Oklahoma City bombing reported they did not begin dealing with the effects of the trauma until a year after the fact.
When April 19, 1996, came around, so did the memories of finding the bodies of children trapped underneath the rubble, without even the smallest opportunity to escape. The grief and anger are, in most cases, too overwhelming for them to deal with individually.
Victims of earthquakes or other natural disasters typically experience the same type of delayed effects.
Those individuals who could not cope at the time or who seemingly blazed through the event with Herculean efforts at some point are forced to deal with the experience on an emotional level. Unfortunately, many of those people are left in a personal hell with no outlet or referral system to mitigate the effects of major mental malfunction.
Organizations that do not investigate the practicality of CISM, whether they have been directly affected by a crisis or not, stand to realize the adverse long-term effects of not having a plan in place to deal with such events.
Drew Edwards is the marketing manager and a partner at The Leadership Alliance of Tennessee L.L.C., Lawrenceburg, Tenn.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, April 7, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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