BEFORE WE LAUNCHED THE EAP, WE LISTENED

Kketan Amarnath Waghmare
Jan 27
2 min read

The decision to launch an Employee Assistance Program didn’t start in a meeting room.

It started with listening.

This was that strange phase when COVID was fading, but life hadn’t quite returned. Work was resuming because it had to. Humanity didn’t really have a choice.

Before deciding what to launch, I began sitting down with crew—one on one, unstructured, no checklist in hand. I wasn’t trying to diagnose learning gaps. I just wanted to hear them.

What I heard stayed with me.

Nobody spoke about reskilling.

Nobody asked for sharper competencies.

Nobody worried about forgetting SOPs.

What showed up instead was quieter. Heavier.

Fear of the unknown.

These were professionals trained in certainty. Their lives ran on standards, procedures, talk lines. Even pressure had predictability.

And suddenly, they were living inside something that had never been scripted.

No SOP for uncertainty.

No manual for prolonged loss.

No training for the question nobody wanted to say out loud: What if this happens again?

That’s when I realised what we, as training teams, needed to let go of.

We didn’t need to add more learning.

We needed to stop assuming what people needed to learn.

Skills weren’t broken.

Confidence was.

Structure wasn’t missing.

Psychological safety was.

Those conversations shaped the decision to launch the EAP. Not as a benefit. Not as a line item. But as a response to something shared—yet rarely articulated.

The program mattered, of course.

But the listening that led to it mattered more.

Crisis doesn’t demand louder training.

It demands quieter leadership.

Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do is pause, listen, and accept that not everything needs to be taught.

Some things need to be held.

That’s what this experience taught me.

#LearningAndDevelopment #LeadershipInPractice #CrisisLeadership #HumanCenteredLeadership #MentalWellbeingAtWork #OrganizationalLearning #Unlearning #LeadershipDevelopment #WorkplaceReality #kketanwaghmare