Sometimes it can feel like the world is on fire. Death and destruction has filled the news reports of 2024, accompanied by images of families and children surrounded by the ruins and dust of their homes, schools and hospitals. The number of conflicts internationally has doubled over the past five years.
Since the alarms of the Covid-19 crisis, there’s been a strong sense of the world having entered a cycle of problems and decline: in politics, economies and the environment. What happened to the bright optimism of post-war generations and their vision of an increasingly safe and prosperous world?
The ground has shifted under people’s feet in unnerving ways. In 2024, half of the world’s population going through elections, and those periods of debate also brought new angst around what had been established certainties, over democracy and capitalism, along with growing evidence of support for extreme political causes and characters.
History is made up of cycles of change, conflict and natural disasters, but our age is different in being saturated with new content and conversations. Not only is the latest tragedy with us, through as-it-happens updates, but comes with the inescapable accompaniment of social media posts and comments, where shock and outrage is rewarded with responses and shares. News media can have a bad reputation for feeding anxiety, but it’s now only one part of a much bigger hunger for new alerts and messages and knowledge. People are typically more socially aware and plugged into popular causes.
This is all important for employers and HR because of the impact on employees, whether directly in their job roles, or indirectly as a background noise and tension. Our culture of global crisis has to be taken into account when thinking about organisational health and the state of workplace wellbeing.
We’re seeing the accumulation of pressures on employees working in global media groups, in government departments, in blue light services and NGOs and charities who are exposed daily to the details and implications of wars and natural disasters. Even when the impact of a situation, like the conflicts in Ukraine or the Middle East and widespread geopolitical instability, doesn’t have a straightforward connection with employees and their network, there has been a build-up of feelings of uncertainty, worry, negativity and lack of control over what might be coming next.
The constant background noise leads to heightened stress and anxiety, and over time these kinds of feelings pile up alongside more everyday tensions around work and its demands, leading to the potential for burnout. Heart rates increase. There’s an effect on attention spans, focus and memory. More overspill of emotions and more chance of problems in relationships, grievances and conflict. What we also see in our work with employees exposed to the fall-out from crises is feelings of guilt. They have a comfortable life and situation themselves, in stark contrast to so many others. They want to do something but feel powerless. This can lead to what’s known as ‘moral injury’, sometimes seen among people working in the armed forces, in aid operations or the media. This is a powerful sense of hopelessness, of there being no point to what they do, because nothing gets better as a result, leading to symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
But again, employees don’t have to be directly involved to be negatively affected by feelings of a general malaise. In this context there’s an urgent need for pro-active promotion of the use of EAPs to open up conversations — to catch worries and doubts early and prevent them turning into negative circle of thinking and responses to events. It’s important to help people see the need to deal with those background feelings, and not feel guilty about asking for support — as if they’re not deserving of it — and provide an independent, listening ear. Rather than waiting for the clear signs of mental illness to appear, EAPs are a space to express feelings, to identify what those emotions are and where they’re coming from.
In 2025, there’s going to be a need to keep on building resilience, getting used to dealing with an uncertain world. EAPs can play an important role in that. Helping to create a foundation of perspective and hope, a new balance rather than ever shutting out or ignoring the truth, a basis for processing the global crises and its effects.
