A. Employee wellbeing and agency
1. Check in on your colleagues: what do they think and how are they feeling?
2. Acknowledgement from the top (e.g. chief exec or directors) there is a crisis in Ukraine and we're all affected in different ways
3. Create psychological safety for employees to speak up and share their feelings, worries etc.
4. Create safe introductions in calls and meetings allowing the person you talk to to also express their concerns, fears, and emotions
5. Conduct regular team meetings with Ukraine as a permanent agenda point, whether the meetings are conducted virtually on in real life
6. Seek ideas and other inputs from employees to help shape the company response
7. Encourage discussion and invite employees to collaborate and engage
8. Appoint and task company administrators or contact persons or create employee committees to undertake and coordinate company actions
9. Offer expert counselling to employees and to the friends and families of employees, e.g.
Immediate Media commissioned a Managing Anxiety in Uncertain Times online workshop, facilitated by
Working Mindset
10. Encourage staff to wear blue and yellow to symbolise our shared support for the victims of the Ukraine invasion
11. Support team members taking supplies to Ukraine and bordering countries at the weekend
B. Donate money or other resources
1. Donate money or services to support those affected on the ground
2. Match fund employee donations
3. Match fund employee donations even if they have already donated elsewhere, as long as they can provide a receipt
4. Help your stakeholders direct their donations and support to existing initiatives
5. Allow employees to work on the company responses on company time
6. Support employees hosting refugee families via the UK government scheme
7. Offer free work space to Ukrainian refugees
8. Create workplace donation points to collect toiletries, medical items and other essentials to give to frontline charities
9. Sell product samples, unsold stock at large discounts, or any other items to staff and other stakeholders, directly or through the sales of raffle tickets with all proceeds going to appropriate charities
10. Provide your stakeholders with reading materials to help them better understand the roots of the crisis in Ukraine (e.g.
HistoryExtra published historical articles, written by leading authorities, available at the top of
this doc)
C. Use your business voice
1. Communicate your support and solidarity for those in peril
2. Communicate your commitment to playing whatever parts you can as an organisation
3. Change your business logo to add Ukraine colours, change or vary your websites and email signatures
4. Post on social media
5. Rally support through any channel
6. Support the call for the CEOs of the top global companies to publish open letters to Putin (or sign a collective letter) advising that they will withdraw from all activities in and in connection with Russian business within XX months unless Putin withdraws
7. Ask heads of state and national leaders to address citizens directly, celebrate what we are already doing, and say “We are all in this, and it could get harder — keep giving what you can, keep using less gas if you can, keep protesting where you can, keep doing what you can, and being together as much as you can — it all matters”
8. Promote the ideals of democracy
9. Demand action from your government or government representative(s)
10. Run participatory democracy processes to reduce energy consumption, perhaps using the software Taiwan uses to crowdsource policy
11. Call out the virtue signalling and commercial opportunism where the crisis in Ukraine is used to promote commercial interests or reputation
12. Challenge conversations about revisiting fracking and other attempts from the fossil fuel sector or those lobbying to revert to environmentally damaging energy sources because circumstances apparently demand it
13. Encourage conversations and be part of greater engagement between business, civil society organisations (and their most senior executives) and politicians.
D. Using your economic influence and adapting your organisation
1. Discontinue business in Russia
2. Terminate contracts to trade with the Russian state, Russian entities, to transport goods to or from Russia, to sell or operate there, or promote or sponsor
3. Squeeze the Russian economy to create internal pressure on Putin's regime through any other available means
4. Review your suppliers support for Russia and Russian businesses
5. Create new business with Ukrainians
6. Positively discriminate in favour of Ukrainians in your hiring and make that clear to all
7. Create or adopt codes to formulate company policy, guide future decisions and embed values
8. Support frameworks or multilateral efforts to deter other oppressive, coercive or oppressive regimes which disregard human rights and norms
9. Pivot your products and services in service of the crisis (e.g.
Yoti has rapidly translated its app into various languages, allowing people then to use it to back up their documents, and complete peer to peer checks)
11. Contemplate and discuss the size and scope of these challenges for boards and strategy (e.g. broach ideas such as a complete system rethink, and speak up to agree our system is broken - across economics, politics, the military, corporates, campaigning and more - and we have to rethink everything
12. Contemplate and discuss the rationale or imperative to be less reactive and much more more proactive as employers and employees
13. Think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective in the pursuit of fast, creative and useful solutions and ideas
14. Urgently review organisational risk and do so in reference to responsibility, accountability, fairness, transparency - and their interdependence
15. Address systems risk at the top of organisations and in strategy and leadership
16. Recognise the likely increase in cyber security threats and the need for hypervigilance
17. Update ransomware and other cyber attach defences are a top priority
18. Consider and discuss how to avoid lurching from one scary crisis to another in our hyper globalised world (NB climate change has no option for de-escalation)
19. Support the rapid decarbonisation of the energy supply to decrease dependence on Russian oil & gas, and fossil fuels more generally
20. Reduce energy use now and as part of your strategy
21. Undertake energy use audits (e.g. check that hot water tanks are not set higher than the optimal and safe 60-65C)
Action list versions and related material are available
here.
