Workplace
Putting
Out Fires Do you know what to do when disaster strikes the office?
IT WAS A FRIDAY AFTERNOON in January 2014 when Pierre Samson and his colleagues at the Gatineau, Que., auditing firm Samson & Associates CPA/Consulting Inc. heard about an attack in a restaurant in Kabul. Two of the company’s staff members were in Afghanistan’s capital city at the time, doing audits on projects run by the Canadian government. The team suspected the worst. The office transformed into a war room: administrative staff started telephoning and emailing the men, their family members, the Canadian
16 | CPA MAGAZINE | APRIL 2015
government and local contacts in Kabul. Within hours, the manager at the hotel where the businessmen were staying confirmed it: Martin Glazer, who’d been at the firm for a decade, and Peter McSheffrey, who had two teenage daughters back home, had been killed by gunmen who rushed into the restaurant aſter a suicide bomber blew open its doors. For the rest of the weekend, Samson and his six partners lived out of their office, getting almost no sleep, as they informed their staff (the firm has a small administrative team and a group of 80 to 100 consultants, most of whom work off-site), got word to the families (two partners told McSheffrey’s wife personally) and started making arrangements to have the bodies shipped back to Canada with assis- tance from the government.
On Monday morning, the partners called a staff meeting, which most of their consultants were able to attend. The firm offers HR consulting services to clients, and members of that team helped guide the discussion, which encouraged everyone to talk. “These were not just employees — they were buddies,” says Samson. Looking back, he recalls operating on adrenalin for weeks and leading his team with a sense that the families had to be cared for and everyone needed to be heard. “There’s no training for such a thing. We’re trained to be accountants.” Not every workplace will have to ride out this kind of brutal tragedy. But office crises are surprisingly common. A death, of course, can radically upset everyone on the team, but so can a local natural disaster such as an ice storm or flood; a big layoff; a violent
Jeannie Phan
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