This Isn’t About Productivity. It’s About Survival.

By Jocelyne Norris, Founder of Intentional Culture Ops

From Process to People

I made the shift from business operations to people operations consulting in November of 2019. At the time, I was focused on building systems, driving outcomes, and staying productive. The work was structured and measurable. It felt controllable.

But I reached a point where it was clear that scaling processes without deeply investing in people was not enough. As a former athlete and coach, developing people has always been where my passion lives. I believed that focusing on humans would ultimately strengthen the systems I had spent years building.

What I could not have predicted was how much the world would change, and how much emotional weight people teams would be asked to carry as everything around us began to fracture.

While much of this conversation is often framed through a U.S. lens, uncertainty is not confined to one country. Across the globe, people are living through war, displacement, political unrest, and sustained protest, often while continuing to show up for work and support their teams. For global organizations, these realities are not abstract. They show up in emotional strain, safety concerns, and diminished capacity in real time. People Ops leaders supporting distributed teams are being asked to hold complexity, cultural nuance, and care simultaneously, often without a clear playbook. Acknowledging this broader context matters, because the systems we build must support people wherever they are, not just where leadership or headquarters sits.

The last several years have been marked by chaos, heartbreak, and fear. For those of us working in fractional HR and People Ops, it has often felt like being asked to hold organizations together while everything outside of them is unraveling. Productivity and performance are still the loudest metrics, but the human cost behind them remains largely unspoken.

What We’re Still Not Talking About

Across HR advisory firms and internal People Ops teams alike, we are expected to guide culture, maintain morale, and support teams as the world becomes harder to ignore. Employees are showing up with grief in their bodies, fear in their homes, and uncertainty about their futures.

At the same time, we continue to ask them to be efficient, focused, and resilient.

So the question becomes unavoidable. Are we giving people the support they actually need to keep going, or are we simply hoping they will push through quietly?

The Ongoing Emotional Toll on the Workforce

When COVID hit in March of 2020, many assumed the disruption would be temporary. It was not. The version of normal we knew never returned. Instead, we experienced wave after wave of collective trauma.

Early on, some organizations responded with empathy. Mental health programs expanded. Conversations opened. Leaders acknowledged strain. But as time passed, many of those efforts faded.

Now, as return-to-office mandates increase and budgets tighten, empathy is often replaced with pressure. The expectation is that people should have adapted by now. The reality is that many are simply exhausted.

The Reality for Marginalized Employees

Many business owners are feeling fear and uncertainty.

For people of color, immigrants, and nationalized citizens these feelings often run deeper.

For many in our communities, the current political climate represents more than a policy shift. It signals increased risk to safety, stability, and mental health. This is not about partisanship. It is about survival.

Some employees are waking up already anxious, managing panic attacks between meetings, and masking fear just to get through the day. They are doing everything asked of them while feeling unseen and unsupported.

Ignoring this reality does not make it disappear. It compounds the harm.

Hold Space. Lead Differently.

Hold space for that.

Make room for people who are living in fear.

Give voice to those who are afraid to speak.

Lead like it matters, because it does.

More disruption is coming. Political, legal, economic, and cultural shifts will continue to affect how people show up at work. The question is not whether change will happen, but whether your organization is prepared to support humans through it.

People are capable of adapting, but only when given psychological safety, empathy, and structure. Leadership responsibility is not to exploit adaptability. It is to design systems that make it possible.

What Leaders Must Do Now

Reframe the role of People Ops.

People Ops is not about perks or performance theater. It exists to identify risk, build trust, support humans, and design systems that endure.

Protect mental health as a sustainability issue.

This is not about benefits optics. Normalize rest. Provide real access to care. Stop penalizing people for being human.

Acknowledge that politics and culture impact your people.

Silence is not neutral. Ignoring what your team is living through causes harm.

Support those carrying the greatest emotional load.

The expectation to remain resilient through constant crisis is draining. Show up before people break.

Check on your People team.

They are often holding the most emotional weight with the least support. When People Ops burns out, culture collapses with it.

This Is the Work

We cannot return to the version of normal that existed before. That version never worked for everyone. But we can build something more intentional, more honest, and more humane if we are willing to confront reality instead of avoiding it.

This is the work we do at Intentional Culture Ops. We partner with scaling organizations to design people systems that support both execution and humanity. The goal is not productivity at any cost. The goal is resilience, clarity, and sustainability for the people doing the work.

Because this is not about squeezing more output from exhausted teams.

It is about survival.