Creating a Trauma Informed Culture — Where to Start

Creating a trauma informed culture at your organization is not an easy, check-the-box task. It requires ongoing commitment and buy-in. Consider it as more of a journey to maximizing a trauma informed culture than a destination. This will always require work and commitment, but that’s true of any culture worth building and maintaining- they never just ‘happen’.

So, if you want to begin the journey of creating a trauma informed culture in your organization, where should you start? I’m going to give the favorite answer of HR professionals, lawyers, and parents everywhere — it depends.

Your organization’s existing culture will be the biggest determining factor when looking at how to approach shifting to a trauma informed culture or any kind of culture change.

Find a piece or pieces of your culture and values that align with one or more of the principles of trauma informed cultures, this will be a wonderful place to focus. Expand from this versus starting from nothing.

Because each organization is unique and has unique considerations and business needs, the plan to launch and maintain a trauma informed initiative and culture will look a little different in each organization. Nevertheless, I’ll outline some considerations and themes to help you brainstorm places to start or work from in your organization.

The most straightforward place to start is by driving awareness and providing education around the concepts of both trauma and trauma informed workplaces.

It’s hard to make any kind of meaningful progress without a base of understanding among your leaders, managers, and team members. They should have understanding and awareness around trauma, how it can show up at work, its prevalence and how trauma informed workplaces can mitigate the negative impacts of trauma on the workplace.

These trainings and awareness campaigns should cover at a minimum,

• Definition of Trauma

• What Can Cause Trauma

• Individual Nature of Trauma

• Secondary/Vicarious Trauma

• Common Trauma Responses

• How Trauma May Show Up at Work

• How to Offer Support to Someone with Traumatic Experiences

• Avoiding Labeling, Stereotyping and ‘Diagnosing”

Depending on your organization, there may be varying degrees of readiness for these types of awareness campaigns or training. It is important to be honest with yourself and your team about readiness and avoid launching widespread training or awareness before your organization is ready.

In these scenarios, you may want to work with smaller groups whose buy-in will be important and perhaps easier. It could be working to train your HR or People/Talent teams or leadership first and then working to other groups.

Waiting to target widespread awareness and training until there is a strong probability of buy-in will be helpful so your efforts are most impactful. We will cover how to approach implementation later in the article if your organization is less ready for training and awareness initiatives.

Along with awareness and training, I would encourage transparency about the desire to work towards a trauma informed workplace culture and the steps leadership, managers, and all employees can take to help create this culture. How the organization will measure progress in this area and why it is important.

Think of it like the mission, vision, and values of the organization. Trauma informed cultures should become ingrained in everything you do as an organization and every member of the team should feel and know these parts of the culture.

Once you work through initial training and awareness, work through leveraging the lens of trauma informed as part of all organizational decisions. As well as thoughtful understanding around integrating each of the seven principles (Safety, Trust & Transparency, Community, Collaboration, Empowerment, Humility & Responsiveness, and Cultural, Historical, & Gender issues) into your culture. You may very well be doing trauma informed work already, so make sure to acknowledge and leverage this as part of your work.

Focus as much as possible on changes to processes and programs from a trauma informed lens to incorporate the principles. And call out how these changes support the trauma informed culture efforts to reinforce the objectives. Also, keep the journey in mind- don’t try and tackle everything at once! Focus on making meaningful progress for your team and when things go wrong- that humility & responsiveness principle comes in handy for adjusting as needed.

What if you are concerned about your organization’s ability to accept the concept of trauma informed culture? That’s okay! Lots of folks have a visceral reaction to the word ‘trauma’ and that is likely to show up in this work.

As someone who spent years working in more stereotypically ‘conservative’ industries, I understand wanting to infuse trauma informed processes and principles into the workplace even before you work through the training and awareness.

The great news, you can. The less great news, you will eventually need to get to that training and awareness, but you can with patience! Again- it’s a journey.

The best way to infuse trauma informed principles in this way is to zero in on which principle is either already important or ingrained in the organization’s values or operations. It’s easiest to work through it with an example.

For our purposes, we will imagine a manufacturing organization where safety is a priority in the culture because of the sometimes dangerous nature of the work and the compliance requirements of the industry.

The team is used to talking about safety and building culture and processes around safety. So, let’s build from that focus to incorporate a holistic, trauma informed view of safety for the organization, going beyond occupational safety and including all of physical, psychological, and financial safety.

By building on what already exists, you will have less work to do in terms of change management and you can use existing behaviors and values to bolster new, trauma informed initiatives.

This is one example; you can work from any of the seven principles, and you don’t even need to call it ‘trauma informed’ if that verbiage doesn’t work for your organization. The key is making it work for your teams and creating workplaces that are safe, trauma informed, and where everyone has an opportunity to be successful.

If you are interested in discussing how you can implement this in your organization or would be interested in exploring a customized change management plan to build a trauma informed culture, reach out at stephanie@stephanielemek.com.