Employees do not leave their humanity at the door when they enter the workplace. Every day, they arrive carrying experiences their organizations may never see: fear, grief, caregiving responsibilities, serious illness, financial hardship, or intimate partner violence. They navigate these forms of profound personal adversity while fulfilling their roles as employees, colleagues, leaders, and community members. Although these experiences occur outside the workplace, they inevitably affect what happens inside it.
Research has significantly advanced our understanding of what helps individuals and organizations thrive, focusing largely on positive leadership, organizational development and change, and psychological capital. More recently, this work has expanded to include compassion and resilience as additional pathways for promoting individual and organizational well-being. Less attention has been paid to studying what happens when organizations make meaningful efforts to help employees through periods of profound adversity.
We know that organizational responses designed to support individuals experiencing adversity also have implications for employees beyond the immediate recipient. Research on third-party reactions has found that people who witness or learn about another employee’s mistreatment form their own perceptions of organizational justice and may respond to the organization based on those perceptions. While this research has largely examined employees’ reactions to the mistreatment of others, it raises an important question about whether the opposite could also be true: that witnessing an organization respond with care and compassion may also have an effect on employees’ perceptions of the organization.
This idea becomes particularly meaningful when considered alongside research on perceived organizational support. Greater perceived organizational support has been associated with higher organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and performance, as well as lower absenteeism, lateness, turnover, and other forms of employee withdrawal.
Organizational Responses as Strategic Investments
Intimate partner violence (IPV) offers one example of profound personal adversity with tangible implications for organizations and their bottom line. Early research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that IPV resulted in nearly 8 million paid workdays lost annually and $727.8 million in annual lost productivity.
The workplace itself may also become a site of abuse. Research reported by the Family Violence Prevention Fund found that 74% of employed women experiencing abuse were harassed by their partners while at work and perpetrators committed approximately 13,000 violent acts against their partners in the workplace each year.
Nearly two decades later, the effects on employees at work persist. In a 2025 national survey of more than 2,000 survivors conducted by the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Futures Without Violence, 79% of respondents who experienced domestic violence reported that it made working more difficult. These difficulties can include absenteeism, reduced work hours and productivity, reduced income, difficulty concentrating, and interference by an abusive partner with an employee’s ability to get to or remain at work.
These findings demonstrate that an experience commonly understood as belonging to an employee’s personal life can have substantial consequences for attendance, productivity, safety, costs, and the workplace itself.
My own experience developing an IPV workplace initiative at Orange & Rockland Utilities reinforced this for me. The initiative originated from recognizing both the need for a meaningful workplace response to IPV and the opportunity for the organization to take a leadership role on an issue with significant implications for its employees.
Employee responses to the initiative suggested that it communicated something about the organization itself and the kind of workplace it sought to create. The program supported employees experiencing IPV while also confronting harmful behavior, creating opportunities for employees to recognize and reconsider behaviors in their own relationships, and establishing clear expectations for how the organization would respond when an employee perpetrated abuse.
If employees form judgments about organizations based on how people are treated, then an organization’s visible commitment to supporting employees experiencing profound adversity may have implications well beyond those who directly use the program.
The potential implications of organizational responses are not limited to intimate partner violence.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I developed an initiative called Churchill Cares at The Churchill School and Center, a New York City independent school for students with language-based learning disabilities. Churchill Cares provided direct financial assistance to families and school professionals experiencing significant financial hardship.
The initiative was carefully designed not only to provide tangible support but also to reduce the shame that can accompany asking for financial help and to put the school’s stated commitment to community into practice. Through the initiative, $80,314 was raised and distributed. The initiative also served an important organizational purpose. At a time when fundraising for the school’s own priorities risked appearing disconnected from the hardships community members were experiencing, Churchill Cares provided a way to keep donors engaged by directing philanthropy toward immediate community needs.
Perhaps more significant was how the initiative was experienced within the organization. Community responses suggested that Churchill Cares left people feeling supported and gave employees and community members tangible evidence that the organization was willing to act on the values it espoused.
As with the Orange & Rockland initiative, these responses seem to reinforce the idea that an organization’s response to profound personal adversity can become more than assistance to those directly affected and function as a lens through which employees and other stakeholders understand the organization, its values, and the support they can expect from it.
Organizations communicate something through how they respond when employees experience serious adversity, whether through meaningful support, inaction, or responses that create additional hardship. Examining these moments may reveal more about how trust, commitment, psychological resources, and organizational relationships are built or eroded and whether supportive responses ultimately contribute to stronger organizations.
If organizations aspire to be places where people flourish, then we must also understand how they can become places where people are supported when flourishing feels out of reach.
little moments of alchemy 