FIRST RESPONSE

BY POON KING WANG

There are many ways to do this. A good way is to borrow a pragmatic strategy that integrates research and empirical evidence from the fields of organizational studies, labor economics, occupational psychology, and technology, and across the public and private sectors. That strategy is to take the jobs crisis to task — figuratively, literally and practically.

We need to take it to task, figuratively, because people who lose jobs often end up losing a lot more: their pride, worth and dignity. As first responders, we must temper and tackle these risks.

We need to take the jobs crisis to task, literally, because tackling the risks at the level of tasks is the most effective way to temper them. For jobs that have been lost, we can look at other jobs that are still available and share similar tasks. These similar tasks become the pathways along which we can help people move more readily from a lost job to a new one. For jobs that have not disappeared, they are likely to have to be reconfigured and reduced in scale and scope. We can assess which employees will have the most tasks reduced and reconfigured in the days ahead, and prioritize supporting them.

Using tasks this way also makes the strategy practical. We are often told to use the crisis to focus on skills upgrading and training. This is important, but the struggle many of us have is we are unsure what skills we should invest in. Tasks help to make that clear and concrete.

For example, for those who have lost their jobs, we can design their training and transition such that they can use their existing skills in the shared similar — and hence familiar — tasks to learn the skills for the new tasks that they have to pick up. This familiarity will ease their transition. Building on the similar and familiar also minimizes further shock from the crisis.

Another example: Forced to work or learn remotely, many of us now realize which tasks we do well online and which tasks we do not. When the crisis is over and we return to offices and classrooms, we will likely be doing more working and learning online than before the crisis. The tasks we do and do not do well online make it clear and concrete what skills we now need to pick up to prepare for that future.

In various talks and articles, Professor Simon Wessely, a distinguished psychiatrist and former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has shared that in sudden “dramatic and dangerous incidents,” before trained responders arrive, the first responders are in fact bystanders who are usually untrained.

The ethos of first responders teaches us that it takes only a few to first choose fight over flight to make a difference. That these first responders can be anyone — trained professionals or untrained bystanders — shows us how profound this lesson is.

It does not take a lot or many, but it can mean a lot to many.