Characteristics of a Trauma Informed Workplace

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An estimated 70% of adults in the United States have experienced trauma. This means that traumatized individuals who are likely reenacting their own trauma dynamics are also the ones running the environments in which people are supposed to be recovering from trauma. Organizations are living adaptive systems which are vulnerable to stress, particularly chronic stress. And these organizations can be traumatized and the result of the traumatic experience can be devastating. So a lot of that is sort of meta concept E. Let's talk about what that really looks like. A trauma informed workplace recognizes that trauma can is any event that overwhelms our ability to cope as an individual, as an employee, as a staff member, as a colleague, as a client, or even as an organization. And I'm going to talk in a few minutes about what trauma to an organization looks like. Most people have experienced trauma, although most people don't have post Traumatic stress disorder. And it's important to recognize that just because somebody doesn't have PTSD doesn't mean that that trauma is not impacting them. Every experience we have impacts us. It shapes how we predict the future. Prior traumatic experiences influence how people perceive and react to events in the present. Clients, staff, and the organization itself all can experience trauma, have trauma triggered within them, and trigger trauma in the other two. So you've got to remember this is an interactive system. What one does is going to impact the other two. Think about what types of trauma you've experienced, your staff or your clients. And this isn't just behavioral health organizations or medical organizations. This also applies to other organizations and businesses like law firms and financial advisors and even, you know, car sales organizations. Think of problem behaviors from staff or clients in what ways might each of those behaviors be a response to triggered trauma? Remember, when we experience trauma, it promotes a feeling of disempowerment and unsafeness. Which means most people, when trauma is triggered, react with either anger, anxiety or withdrawal. They just give up. They feel hopeless and helpless. How many of the people who are reacting from a trauma place recognize that their reaction is a trauma response at all? Maybe they don't realize that their hair trigger anger is a response to prior experiences of trauma. How might it impact your organization if clients and staff are regularly being triggered? So I mentioned earlier, we were going to talk about how organizations can experience trauma. Organizations are living entities that are born, they're created, they develop, and they grow, or can be hurt or even killed. Organizations can be put out of business. The C suite executives, your CEO, coo, c whatevers are kind of like the brain. They're the ones that often create the policies and procedures. They're the ones that are often guiding the organization where it's supposed to go. Staff is kind of like the nervous system that sends messages to the C suite and responds to the environment created by other staffs and clients. And it's important to recognize that the brain, just like in humans, the brain does not always respond how we would expect to sensory input like individuals. When an organization experiences a trauma, that event alters the way all parts of the organization perceive and react to to future situations. A trauma for an organization is something that creates a situation where the organization itself feels unsafe and disempowered. It feels vulnerable to attack or to being put out of business, and it feels powerless to fight off those threats. You know, it may feel very threatened by the potential threats that are coming its way. The organization as a whole experiences harm or a threat of harm as a result of direct actions or triggered memories of prior traumas. Now, just like a human experiences something, and then in the future, if they experience something similar, it may trigger those memories. Same sort of thing for organizations. I remember working in nonprofit behavioral health for many, many years. And every year when it came around to budget time, stress levels went through the roof because we never knew what was going to get cut. You know, were we going to get more money this year or were we going to have our budget slashed? What was going to happen? And we remember times when our budgets got slashed and people got laid off and the organization was threatened by because it wasn't getting what it needed. Failed audits are another example that of situations that can promote trauma in the future. If you fail an audit once, it could Mean you get closed down. If you. In the future, when you experience audits, stress levels tend to go up. If you have that memory of the failed audit in the past, you know, you're kind of expecting bad moja supply chain disruptions. You know, I mentioned this is not just behavioral health. In car lots all over the nation right now, they are having to slash staff. They are having to do a lot of stuff just to try to keep their individual businesses afraid float because they can't get cars to sell. There are no cars because the supply chain disruption. So a lot of those businesses are in jeopardy of going under, of being killed. The same thing is true with lawsuits. When lawsuits are filed against organizations, it can be devastating to the organization. And just like with supply chain disruptions, sometimes the organization might not be able to do much of anything to protect itself. It's a condition that it's got to learn to deal with. The organization as a whole experiences a sense of unsafeness. It could be shut down and disempowerment. Even though they're trying to do the right things or they think they are, they are experiencing problems. I mentioned behavioral health, funding, lawsuits, even a reduction in utilization. Think during the pandemic, a lot of businesses were traumatized because people were not going into restaurants, people were not going into theme parks, etc. And so the business was losing money. Money to a business is like heir to a human. We gotta have it in order to stay alive. So a reduction in utilization can be very traumatic. And the organization may start scrambling, figuring out, you know, what can I do to increase utilization? How can I address this so I can get enough air to keep breathing? And social media attacks by clients or staff can also be traumatic because once something's out there on the Internet, it's out there on the Internet. And sometimes people or organizations may feel like they didn't have a chance to respond to an issue before they got canceled, so to speak. Think about what causes your organization, whether you're a therapist, a doctor, working in a restaurant, or whatever, what causes your organization to go into fight or flight mode, or where it starts scrambling, trying to figure out how are we going to stay afloat when the organization is scrambling? How does that impact staff? How does that impact your clients? Organizational trauma is one of the three pillars of trauma that we're going to talk about. Staff trauma is the second. Staff members can experience harm or a threat of harm due to the direct action of clients. A client who is particularly aggressive, for example, due to direct actions of the organization, for example, Transfer or termination or from other staff. You know, other staff may behave in toxic or threatening ways or even due to triggered memories. Staff may have an experience in their past that gets triggered because hearing about an experience from clients or due to something that happens at work, it may remind them of something they went through in the past and that can trigger their traumatic memories. Staff members, again, just like the organization, will experience a sense of unsafeness. They could be hurt, they could be fired, laid off, disciplined, and disempowerment. Even though they're trying to do the right thing, they may feel helpless to keep themselves safe. Examples of how this might happen Constantly changing procedures and expectations. I see this a lot in organizations where the goal posts seem to constantly be moving. Every time somebody thinks they're doing it right, all of a sudden it changes. And that is very stressful, very traumatic for people because they feel disempowered. They don't feel like they've got the power, the ability to actually succeed. Top down management and top down management communicates to people. Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, just do what I say, shut up and do it. And that is a very similar message that people get if they grow up. For example, in households where somebody has an addiction or where one or more of the caregivers has a significant mental illness. Lack of commitment to employees by the organization can also cause staff members to feel unsafe and disempowered. If they're constantly being told, well, fine, quit, I can replace you next week, then the staff members are not going to feel connected, they're not going to feel safe. Lack of support and disenfranchised grief. When the organization does not provide staff what they need to succeed or tells them to get over it when they experience a loss, it can contribute to trauma triggering characteristics or behaviors of clients. Sometimes a client will come in and maybe they remind you of your Uncle Bob who was, you know, a very, very angry, violent alcoholic. I always use the term Uncle Bob. I don't have an Uncle Bob. I'm not trying to, you know, disparage any of you who are Uncle Bob's. It just happens to be the name I use. But you know, if you have an experience with someone in the past and then somebody walks into your, your showroom or your restaurant or your clinic and they remind you of that person, person, it can trigger that trauma in the staff member. Same thing is true if you're working with a colleague who reminds you of your Uncle Bob. So we do want to recognize that certain Behaviors and characteristics that we transfer onto clients can remind us of prior trauma. It's also important to remember that certain things clients do, for example, if they come in and they get particularly loud and belligerent, that can trigger trauma. And triggering policies or physical environments can also trigger staff trauma. If you are in an organization, for example, and this is one that I really don't like, where in a behavioral health setting, we ultimately got set up in this organization that I worked for, that to give back to the client, the staff offices, you had to go through three swipe, lock doors. So the person kind of felt like they were trapped and imprisoned by the time they got back to the staff office. And that wasn't the intent. The intent was to make them feel safer, but that's not how it ended up feeling to a lot of people and triggering physical environments. If you see, smell, hear things in the environment that trigger prior memories or make you feel unsafe in the present because they are unsafe, can also contribute to staff trauma. And finally client trauma. Clients experience harm or a threat of harm due to the direct actions of staff, the organization, other clients, or memories of theirs that get triggered. Clients, like the rest of us, experience a sense of unsafeness. They feel like they could be hurt, they can't trust the people in the organization. And disempowerment, this can happen when they encounter aggressive or unhappy staff, other clients or staff that trigger past trauma, memories, organizational policies, or environments that are disempowering. And I can't underscore this one enough, you know, really consider your environment and your policies, and from the perspective of in what ways might this make somebody feel disempowered, like they don't have a voice, like they don't have a choice. High turnover may also contribute to client trauma because they form a relationship with a particular staff member, and when that staff member is gone, then they experience a loss or grief. Or maybe they don't develop all that strong of a bond with a staff member, but seeing somebody different every single time, they're actually not really getting the services that they need. They're not making any progress toward their goal because they have to basically start from scratch every time they walk through your doors. And a lack of fidelity. And this means staff members or the organization not keeping their promises or manipulating clients, not being honest with clients about things, trying to convince them that they need to do one thing when you know that's not necessarily what they need to do, or promising them that you're going to do something and then not following through. I See this, I hear this a lot with clients who interact with medical professionals, who interact with lawyers, who interact with the justice system. Other types of trauma for the individual, this can include physical, emotional or sexual abuse, either as a direct victim or witnessing it, experiencing neglect, having a household member with an addiction, or significant mental illness. Now this should start sounding a lot like your adverse childhood experiences, because that's what they are. A lot of people who experience these things in childhood and adolescence, it's very traumatic for them. Gaslighting, accidents, illnesses, medical procedures or birth trauma, all of those can be very traumatic. If somebody has had a. Myself, for example, my first child was a micropremie and that was a terrifying experience. So going in to have my second child, you know, theoretically could have been an equally terrifying experience had my new obgyn not been, you know, right on top of everything and very comforting and made me feel safe, like he actually knew what was going on. Historical trauma, this is trauma that gets passed down from generation to generation one. One generation experiences it and then they teach what they learned from that experience to future generations. Natural and man made disasters, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires, bridge collapses. All of these things can be traumatic for people. And you know, if you are, for example, in a building, at a restaurant or wherever and there's a tornado coming and tornado protocols are put into place, and if somebody's experienced a tornado before, then this may trigger that prior memory and they may have a trauma reaction. They may feel very unsafe. And you know, obviously there may be a reason for them to feel somewhat unsafe, but you also need to recognize that that's going to affect how they react to everybody else in that environment at that point in time. Forced displacement. And this means being forced to move somewhere, being put in foster care, for example, that's traumatic. Or you know, after a divorce, being forced to move, military or community violence and traumatic grief or separation, and that can be due to death, jail, divorce, abandonment, there's a lot of things. So let's just kind of look at this chart for a second. And obviously this is just one example, but I want you to see how these things may interact with one another. If the client does not feel safe and respected in the environment, because there's a lot of turnover or because the environment is unsafe, or staff characteristics, then they may be on edge. So I want you to think about an organization that you've gone into in which you didn't feel confident that that organization had your best interest at heart and that they were going to do what they were supposed to be doing. Okay, I think all of us have experienced that. So going into that organization, if you have those expectations or if you start getting that sense as a client, it may cause trigger trauma in you, trigger a sense of unsafeness. It's like, ugh, I don't get the feeling that this is a really good place to be. And that can result in becoming aggressive or irritable or belligerent with staff. Or on the other hand, some people withdraw. They feel hopeless and helpless, and they're like, screw it, here we go again. When they act that way with staff, it often prompts staff, unfortunately, to react in the same way towards them. So when clients are belligerent, oftentimes staff becomes equally belligerent. They start mirroring each other and they feed on each other, so to speak. And that's not a good situation to be in. In a trauma informed workplace, the staff would recognize, hey, this person is reacting with anger, which tells me that they feel threatened or unsafe in some way. How can I help them feel safer? The client, you know, experiencing this unsafe environment may decide once they leave, they're like, oh, that was the worst experience ever. So they decide to tell all their friends about it, go on social media, go on Yelp, go on wherever, and work as hard as they can to tweet and cancel this organization to make sure to warn other people. Now you may think, well, that's a mean thing to do, but other people may be saying, oh, I see, they're trying to protect other people, they're trying to get their power back, and they're trying to protect other people from experiencing the same disrespect or unsafeness that they did. So the organization again has the option of either not responding at all, responding belligerently like, you know, well, if you would have, then we would have been able to and start blaming the client and the client blames them and it becomes this big blame game. Or the organization can step up and say, let me take a look at exactly what happened and why did this person feel unsafe, disrespected and not their needs weren't met as they expected in this organization. So the organization can either learn and step up to prevent these things from happening and potentially address. I've seen some organizations online address bad reviews or, you know, they can put their head in the sand and just chalk it up to whatever. But in a trauma informed workplace, the organization and the staff are always curious. If somebody responds with anger, anxiety, or withdrawal, they just quit coming. They don't come to your establishment anymore. Why? In what way did we not help them feel safe? In what way did we not help them feel accepted and respected? Now, it doesn't end there. If the client comes in, has a bad experience and goes out and begins trolling and, and trying to get their power back and warn everybody else, then the organization is going to often experience a reduction in their reputation, which may result in knee jerk policy changes, layoffs, or staff blaming. It's your fault this happened. It may not be the staff's fault. The client may have been triggered just by the fact that they walked into the organization and something reminded them of an experience from their past. It could be the client came in and was already angry and it didn't take anything to trigger them to feel completely unsafe. There's a lot of reasons, which is why it's important to get curious and not immediately blame staff or their own policies for what happened. You know, get curious. Sometimes it's organizational policies, not the staff, that contributed to the client feeling unsafe. And then high turnover and disloyalty can also occur when the organization starts blaming the staff for what happens. Won't look at its own responsibility as far as policies and procedures and, and won't look at, okay, what part of this did the client bring? Then a lot of times staff will start looking for jobs elsewhere because they don't feel like the organization has their back. Then you have staff turnover, then the clients feel abandoned and the cycle keeps going. What do we need in a trauma informed workplace? We've talked about what it looks like, what do we need? And you know, I'm a fan of mnemonics and for this one it's bears. And if you've seen the Jungle Book, you know the bear necessities. Well, this is the bears necessities in a trauma informed workplace. B stands for build resilience in staff, clients and the organization. Create safety nets and skills and tools to help people feel like they've got an outlet, like they're empowered for staff. Help them see how they can address issues. Provide training when it's available, make sure that counseling EAPs are available for staff. For clients, you know, obviously get curious when they have a bad experience and solicit feedback so they feel like they're being heard. Provide opportunities for them to provide written feedback or grievances that can be examined and looked into. Build resilience in clients by asking them, you know, if this environment is triggering to you or whatever happened is triggering to you, how can we, what can we do to make this environment more comfortable? Be proactive by Saying, how can we make this environment more proactive and welcoming to you, the client, and do the same with staff and as an organization, build resilience. So there are redundancies. For example, if your funding gets cut in one area, you've got other sources of funding that can balance it out. If your supply of one particular product all of a sudden takes a nosedive for some reason, you, you've got other redundancies. So your organization is not, its livelihood, is not hung on one particular thing. During the pandemic, a lot of restaurants that typically were eat in, dine in restaurants, you know, became resilient and they said, okay, well we'll do delivery, we'll do drive through, we will do all these other things. They got creative and got resilient and they said, how can we adjust in order to keep going? A stands for awareness of the impact of trauma on development, perception, coping strategies and behaviors in staff, clients and the organization. So what do I mean? When trauma occurs when people are young, it has a much more significant impact on their brain, on the way they think, on their stress response. So when people experience trauma in childhood or adolescence, then they may not have the same coping skills and strategies and they may perceive the world itself as more nefarious and dangerous than people who didn't experience trauma. When an organization is young, you know, in its first five years, for example, it doesn't have a great rep. It's not a bad reputation, it just doesn't have much of a reputation at all at that point. It's still growing. It doesn't take much for it to be harmed. So anytime something happens, it's a major deal. And even once the organization grows to be much bigger, they may still react as if any change in supply or any change in patronage is going to be a catastrophe. R recognize and mitigate trauma triggers in the environment for both staff and clients. Make it an environment that feels welcoming, that feels safe, that's not overwhelming, that's not overpowering. And how do you do that? You ask. You don't assume that everybody wants to hear X kind of music or everybody likes the smell of lavender. You want to ask people, you want to be aware of the fact that there are people in every community who are neuro atypical and bright light, loud sounds and strong smells can be super overpowering. You are not going to be able to eliminate all of the triggers for every person in the world. That's not your job. The purpose of this recognizing and mitigating traumas or trauma triggers and is to Help people, the staff and the clients know that you're trying. You're trying to create an environment that feels as safe as possible for them because trying goes a long way. Empower staff and clients through voice, choice and craves. And we've talked about craves in other videos. It stands for consistency, responsiveness, attention, validation, encouragement and support. When clients or staff come to you with an issue, consistently respond. You know, don't listen to them one week and the next week they say, oh, I don't have time for that. You know, be consistent in your willingness to hear them out, respond to what they have to say. And this is a big complaint I hear from staff members about organizations and from clients about staff. Sometimes that while the organization or the staff member may hear them out, they don't ever respond. It's like it goes in one ear and out the other. Well, that's not respectful and that's not empowering. So make sure to respond, even if it's to say we can't do that because at least you are hearing them and responding. Ideally, try to create a win win. Try to figure out how you can help. Try to meet that person's needs. Attention. You know, giving people positive attention. Don't just show up in their office when they've done something wrong. Show up in their office when they've done something right or just because. Say, hey, glad to see you today. How's it going in your life? It goes a long way for people to feel like they are more than just a number, whether it's a client or a staff member. Validation. Acknowledging people's feelings and responses are based in their prior experiences. So even though you may not feel or think about something the same way, the way they feel or think is real for them based on their experiences. Then encouraging them to do what they need to do to improve the next moment and supporting them in being a part of the organization, in participating with the staff, supporting them in achieving their goals. If it's a car lot, somebody is going there because they want to buy a car. So you're going to encourage them to buy it with you and you're going to support them through the process. You're going to validate their perceptions about this model versus that model, even if you don't agree and you know, so you're going to do those things. The same thing in, you know, health, behavioral health, law, all kinds of organizations craves is the foundation. Consistency, responsiveness, attention, validation, encouragement and support. These are the core characteristics of a secure relationship. And whether you want your employees to feel secure in the organization or your staff and clients to have a secure attachment so you know they can develop and keep that client coming back. Whatever it is craves is important. And finally, S stands for safety and respect of staff and clients through nonviolent communication and cultural competence. It is really important in the workplace that organizations hear, supervisors hear, staff hears, and models for clients. You know, a lot of times we're not, except for in behavioral health, a lot of times you're not in a place to teach clients different ways of responding. But when you model nonviolent communication, when somebody comes up and they've got a problem, they're upset about something, and you model empathy and compassion and you hear them out and you validate what they're saying. It goes a long way to helping people feel safe because they feel like, oh, if I've got a problem and I say something, then it'll get addressed. I can feel safe. When one department at a factory goes offline or experiences a shutdown, it impacts all of the other departments, the staff in those departments, and likely the customers seeking goods and services. In a trauma informed workplace, people seek not only to reduce re victimization and triggering past traumas, but also to create an environment that is safe, empowering, and inspires loyalty and connection between clients, staff, and the organization.