Emotional Continuity Planning and Management

By

Amol pathak, Rahul purohit, MSCLIS, IIIT-ALLAHABAD

Emotional Continuity Management is a collection of ideas and skills supported by scientifically designed tools that help you manage, not control, human emotions. This branch is a brain child of Business Continuity Planning and Management.

Emotions directly affect the continuity of production and services, customer and vendor relations and essential infrastructure. Negative impact of a disaster or an event on an employee’s psyche can reduce employee’s productivity and efficiency in the organization. Unstable emotional infrastructure in the workplace disrupts business through such measurable costs as medical and mental health care, employee retention and retraining costs, time loss, or legal fees. To overcome this problem an efficient Emotional Continuity Planning is needed.

But the big questions are:

How can you measure emotion?

How do you quantify empathy?

How do you calculate the value of an apology?

It's the old and false notion that management is science. In fact, management is far more than science. There is an interesting methodology for calculating the cost of emotional distress and disturbance. There are lists and descriptions of all types of employees and managers, and how to recognize the destructive emotional dislocations that category can cause. A very efficient model has been given by Dr. Vali's Emotional Tornado Scale.

Reasonable variations of human emotions are expected at the workplace. People have feelings. Emotions that accumulate, collect force, expand in volume and begin to spin are another matter entirely. Spinning emotions can become as unmanageable as a tornado, and in the workplace they can cause just as much damage in terms of human distress and economic disruption.

All people have emotions. Emotions happen at home and at work. So, understanding how individuals or groups respond emotionally in a business situation is important in order to have a complete perspective of human beings in a business function. To build a strong, well-grounded, value-added set of references for professional discussions and planning for Emotional Continuity Management, a manager needs to know at least the basics about human emotion. Advanced knowledge is preferable. What if during a disaster your computer is working, but no one shows
up to use it? What if no one is working the computer because they are terrified to show up to a
worksite devastated by an earthquake or bombing and they stay home to care for their children? What if no one is coming or no one is producing even if they are at the site because they are grieving or anticipating the next wave of danger? What happens if employees are engaged in emotional combat with another employee through gossip, innuendo, or out-and-out verbal warfare? And what if the entire company is in turmoil because we have an Emotional Terrorist who is just driving everyone bonkers?

Companies that prepare for the full range of emotions and emotional risks, from annoyance to catastrophe, are better equipped to adjust to any emotionally charged event, small or large.
Times are changing. Now, cutting-edge companies are turning the corner. Even technology continuity managers are talking about human resources benefits and scrambling to find ways to evaluate feelings and risks.