Watching how people respond to crisis tells you a lot about human nature.
Watching how organisations respond tells you even more.
On Tuesday, the UAE leadership quietly walked through Dubai Mall, stopping for coffee and greeting families without the ceremony many might expect. For many people, it felt like a simple but powerful signal of calm, stability, and confidence in the middle of uncertainty. That is tone setting. That is leadership.
How strain shows up in individuals
Over the past week I have been speaking with friends across the Middle East, and hearing their stories has been both sobering and fascinating from a human perspective.
An Indian friend living in Dubai responded within hours of the first strikes by stockpiling supplies. At one point he even sent me a message that began with, “If something happens to me, can you please…”.
Another friend, a Jordanian also living in Duabi sent a video of a missile that had landed in a garden in Jordan. People were gathered around calmly discussing where it had come from. Later she explained that “missile watching” from the roof with tea and shisha had almost become a neighbourhood pastime in the country.
And then there were the Brits. Doing what we often do best. Organising.
Brits in apartments buildings were collecting contact details, creating WhatsApp groups, and building spreadsheets so everyone knew who was where and how to reach each other.
Three responses. Three cultures. Three very different ways of processing uncertainty and threat.
None of them were wrong.
But it is a powerful reminder that human beings do not respond to risk, stress, or crisis in the same way. It is something I see repeatedly when examining workplace wellbeing, culture, and psychosocial risk inside organisations.
And this is exactly why so many one-size-fits-all wellbeing strategies, culture initiatives, and employee experience designs quietly fail to land.
People bring different histories, cultures, coping styles, and risk perceptions to work. If organisations design support systems and crisis responses as though everyone reacts the same way, large parts of the workforce will be unseen, unheard, and unsupported even with the best of intentions.
How strain shows up in organisations
The second observation this week has been watching how organisations and HR teams have responded.
Again, the spectrum has been wide. In some cases, extreme.
Some organisations have acted decisively. They have taken calm, context-specific decisions in partnership with their clients and in consultation with employees and local leaders. Clear communication, practical support, and sensible flexibility.
Others have been far more rigid or far less certain.
The first ‘mandated RTO’ emerged on Tuesday. Decisive, yes. Context-aware, definitely not.
I have also onserved a lot of variations of the same question circulating across HR networks:
“What is everyone else doing?”
Sometimes it goes a step further.
“What is the news telling us?”
This is understandable. Crises create ambiguity. Nobody wants to make the wrong call.
But when HR becomes hesitant to offer confident, context-based advice to their own organisation, something deeper may be going on.
Often it reflects a lack of psychological safety around decision-making. Or a culture where HR has not historically been empowered to act as a true strategic advisor. When moments like this arrive, hesitation is almost inevitable.
And that creates a risk many organisations won’t even be recognising as it unravels right in front of them.
When a crisis hits, HR is often the function leaders turn to for guidance on people, safety, communication, and stability.
If HR does not feel able to lead in those moments, the organisation may be more exposed than it realises.
The reality is that crises rarely create weaknesses. They reveal the ones that were already there.
Which raises an important question for organisations.
What would your response look like if a crisis landed in your location tomorrow with no confident end in sight?
Not just operationally, but culturally.
- Would leaders understand how different groups of employees are likely to react?
- Would HR feel confident advising the organisation?
- Would the organisation be able to respond in ways that are both human and practical simultaneously?
These are not questions to ask in the middle of the storm.
They are questions worth exploring long before one arrives.
An overlooked dimension under strain
There is also a longer-term dimension that organisations sometimes overlook in moments like this.
The decisions leaders make during a crisis are not only about managing the immediate situation. They shape how people feel about the organisation long after the headlines fade.
Moments like these quietly influence who stays, who leaves, and how people show up at work in the months and years that follow.
The most resilient organisations are not the ones that scramble best in a crisis. They are the ones that already understand their people, their pressures, and their hidden fault lines before the pressure hits.
And increasingly, organisations that take human sustainability seriously are beginning to treat these dynamics as operational, financial, and people risks. Risks that can be identified, understood, and managed through better diagnostics and insight long before they become visible during a crisis. And that is a good everyday leadership decision, that sets you up to be a great leader on the day the wheels come off!