There is an old Nordic saying that ‘trust arrives on foot and departs on horseback’. It may seem a long process to get back to a ‘new comfortable’, but trust can grow and strengthen at the pace of a brisk walk if we hold true to our promise to look after the mental and physical health of our staff and listen to and act upon their concerns.
One of the greatest challenges that
Any significant and rapid change presents to organisations is trying to avoid the ‘us and them’ mindset that can so easily set in. For example, there may be one group of staff on furlough and another still working; there may be some bahrain phone number library working from home and others working in the office or on the factory floor. And if you dig deeper, into the extremely wide array of individual circumstances people are facing, then you will have some who are highly vulnerable to COVID-19 and those who are not; those who are shielding vulnerable relatives at high risk, and those who are home-educating children for how personalized digital marketing improves customer support first time; and so on. And so, the lines that potentially divide multiply.
There are also deeper societal concerns about the impact of the pandemic. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out that “groups that are vulnerable to poor health are likely to be hit hardest … and evidence is emerging that the economic repercussions of the crisis are falling be numbers on young workers, low-income families and women.”
The gist of what many charities
Stakeholders are saying, notably in the recent report from the Mental Health Foundation that makes the link between financial inequality and mental wellbeing, is that although we may be in the same storm, we are not all in the same boat.
Understanding and accommodating as far as possible these individual and group needs and priorities will be the basis for building trust, as more of us return to the workplace over the coming weeks and months.