BlogWhat will your people need, when Brexit REALLY kicks off?

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What will an unhappy Brexit do to teams and organisations?

I read Remainer vs Brexiteer threads on social media. This is not the healthiest, or the quickest of hobbies, and it’s certainly not much fun! But it does inform me about the ideological civil war that is part of the UK’s current discourse, and gives a sense of the chasm between the two camps that will define the social narrative of our country for years to come.

It also points to a huge, and I believe unaddressed need for organisations (the theatres in which we play out our dramas for most of our waking hours) to support their people. This is becoming a time of acute anxiety for many – an uncertain economic outlook, a potential investment freeze, a disruptive dynamic that may exacerbate what tensions already lie within the organisation.

Last autumn, the Guardian reported that “the productivity growth of British workers fell to a two-year low in the third quarter of last year, according to official figures released amid warnings that failures of government policy and Brexit are holding back efficiency gains.”
The evidence? According to the Office for National Statistics, annual growth in economic output per hour of work slumped to 0.2% in the three months to September 2018, down from 1.6% in the second quarter and marking the weakest period since the third quarter of 2016.

Is all this change, and this rupture in our social fabric causing large but unacknowledged anxiety? And is this an unappreciated human factor in low productivity?

And if it is, what can be done?

In my next post, I will offer some potential solutions to this potentially disabling problem.

David Chapman is the Faculty Director of Starfish L&D, running Vision and Change programmes for a global corporate client base, and open Coaching Skills programmes for individuals wanting to embed sustainable change in their organisation.

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