Thinking About Employee Unease as a Legal Risk Factor

Unless things have already driven you into your underground fallout shelter, it can be hard not to feel uneasy right now. Have we failed to heed the (perhaps not so fiction) science-fiction prognostications of the Matrix? Is Jack Dorsey ahead of the curve in announcing major AI-related layoffs or simply making a big gamble at the expense of many peoples’ livelihood? We are at war with Iran, the predictions of recession continue unabated, and the increasing polarization of politics and communal mistrust marches ever forward.

It can be a lot. In the middle of it, we all have jobs to do. And so, we must do our best to manage our emotions so our thinking minds can solve the problems we’re tasked to solve, build the things we’re tasked to build, and serve the customers and clients we’re tasked to serve. 

For business leaders, these responsibilities often mean managing legal risks when there seemingly are many more questions than answers. And if you are reading this, there’s a good chance the risks on your radar arise from labor and employment considerations — in other words, from managing risk directly tied to human emotion and derivative behavior. Maybe the fear of losing a job to AI. Maybe the fear of a recession or market crash wiping out the life savings just before retirement. Maybe the fear of physical harm or loss of loved ones from war.

One way or another, though, if your role involves managing labor and employment-related risk and you are uneasy about the state of the world, the state of business, or the state of technology, then you can bet your organization’s employees are also experiencing their own brand of unease. Having strong policies, processes, and procedures — though critical to risk management — may not directly correlate to better risk management when emotions are heightened, particularly when those emotions fall on the spectrum between unease and fear.

If I had a magic strategy for putting employees’ minds at ease, I’d be even better at serving my clients and helping them solve problems. But after years doing this work, if there is a common theme I see across employers that more successfully manage heightened emotion as a source of risk, it’s the juxtaposition of perspective and communication. In other words, an organization that understands its valuable people are struggling with worry — and that invests resources into helping employees with that worry — buys a lot of capital with employees in the form of respect, trust, and increased acceptance that adversity happens to all of us.

Think about it: how many times have you heard a worker complain about how managers don’t understand, don’t care, just sit in their office and tell us what to do without understanding what we do? As a manager, how many times have you gotten frustrated with employees having unrealistic expectations of management because they neither see nor think about budgets, resource limitations, competing priorities, and the like? Environments where both employee and leader feel unseen and undervalued breed mistrust and misunderstanding within both populations. This may be purely anecdotal, but from my personal experience doing this job, organizations that struggle with an “us versus them” culture experience more litigation.

On the flip side, my anecdotal experience leads me to believe that, in organizations where employees feel a sense of belonging, understanding, and emotional connection to their value within the organization, their leaders also have strong relationships with their subordinates, value their team, and feel valued by the people they lead. For both populations, this requires a willingness to look at the perspective and experience of others and to communicate with that perspective in mind. And especially for business leaders, they are most responsible for creating a culture like this and for creating buy-in amongst employees with it. Organizational willingness to embrace humanity as part of the work experience engenders respect, creates greater opportunity for the sense of belonging, and a belief in transparency. Employees within organizations that succeed in this spirit, through good times and bad, are less likely to respond to adversity by jumping to unfounded conclusions of discriminatory or retaliatory conduct.

For many businesses, while the factors driving that unease are outside business control, how leaders decide to react to that unease is not. And as a strategy, an organization can lean into that. What that might look like should be different for every organization — not every business is set up for leadership town halls, for example. It may truly be that advancing technology will necessarily create human work-redundancy, and that the right business decision is to invest in that technology and the challenge is to be transparent with employees about it and to treat them with respect and understanding along the way. The context creating the concern matters, and so must the responsive strategy that accepts how much human experience and emotion is at play and why.

One way or another, every worker’s human experience has some connection to the larger organization’s legal risk. And — especially when things are uncertain and maybe even scary — embracing that shared humanity as an area of opportunity may also be one of the most effective risk managements strategies you have available when so many other things are happening beyond our control. If your job responsibilities have some connection to addressing and containing labor and employment-related risk for your business, consider this missive: to think carefully and humanely about how the uncertainty surrounding us all and the unease it creates is something you can proactively try to address. We are here to support your taking such a thought and converting it to actionable strategy.