When a crisis, trauma or tragedy occurs in a workplace, managers and supervisors should pay close attention to their employees for signs of stress or trauma and be ready to encourage employees to seek counseling.

Among the reactions to look for are physical and emotional symptoms that are often interrelated, predictable, and, fortunately, treatable.

Many physical symptoms are actually the result of the human body's innate and primal "flight or fight" response to crisis, explained Bob VandePol of Crisis Care Network, the nation's largest private sector provider of critical incident stress management services.

Among them are:

• Increased peripheral vision. A crisis will put workers on a hyper-alert state in which their peripheral vision is increased as they vigilantly watch everything going on around them. However, in the aftermath, they might not be able to focus on a customer who is right in front of them.
  
  
• Loss of appetite. People will often lose their appetite after an incident, again because the body is preparing to flee.
  
  
• Cold hands, chills and shaky fingers. VandePol attributes these common symptoms to the accelerating circulatory system, which helps the body breathe and prepares it to run and duck.
  
  
• Sleeplessness. Adrenaline coursing through the body will cause an employee to lose sleep in the aftermath of an incident.
  
  
• Confusion. The brain becomes re-circuited after a trauma, numbing the frontal lobe and causing behavioral confusion for hours or days afterward. People often describe being disoriented after a tragedy -- losing their sense of time, place or person.

There are other emotional reactions, too: guilt, anger, fear, sadness and hopelessness.

Crisis Care Network has an acronym, ACT, to outline the steps that a company's leadership or HR personnel should take to aid an employee's recovery:

• A - Acknowledge the trauma. Name it, don't minimize it.
• C - Communicate caring, compassion, and competence
• T - Transition toward good return-to-life and return-to-work decisions.

With quick intervention by clinicians, physical, emotional and behavioral symptoms can be explained to victims, mitigating some of the after-effects as victims realize their reactions are normal. Counseling can also help prevent the situation from worsening into full-scale Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a long-term disorder characterized by a continuation of these and other, more acute symptoms.

Leigh Dickinson got the shocking news from a co-worker. A technician she worked with, someone "who brought joy and kindness to the world," she said, had been in a terrible car accident that severed his spinal cord.

The 32-year-old died shortly afterwards, leaving behind a wife and an eight-year-old daughter as well as a lot of friends and co-workers who cared for him.

Dickinson's reactions to the young man's fate were strong, and, according to workplace crisis management experts, predictable.

"It was disbelief and shock," said Dickinson, the Creative Director for a Bay Area company. "I felt chills and sort of sick to my stomach. I cried. It was just that he was such a nice person and extremely good at what he did. I really respected and liked him."

In the weeks that followed, she felt "hopeless, and as if nothing else really mattered. I couldn't concentrate on work at all. I sort of walked around in a daze."

The death of a co-worker or other traumatic workplace events such as injuries, serious illnesses, robberies or violent acts can have acute consequences for employees and their companies.

As in Dickinson's case, cognitive behavior often diminishes. Employees can become depressed, irritable or angry. At work, they may not be able to concentrate on simple tasks. At home, they may suffer from a loss of sleep or appetite. Sometimes employees even decide to leave a job where a particularly disturbing or violent incident has occurred.

Few companies are immune to trauma. According to Department of Labor figures, some six million people are injured in the workplace every year at an annual cost to businesses of approximately $125 billion. Additionally, about 6,000 people die from workplace injuries annually. Robberies are also common, making up as much as a quarter of the critical incidents that counselors and clinicians respond to.

Not surprisingly, the impact of a crisis on a business can be enormous. Decreased worker morale, lower productivity and poor customer service can hurt a company's bottom line. So can higher absentee and job turnover rates, and more medical and disability claims.

Now, in the wake of the Columbine shootings, Sept. 11 and the anthrax deaths, which highlighted the need for stress management services in the workplace, employers are increasingly acknowledging those costs as well as the benefits of coming up with plans to deal with workplace crises.

Across the country, companies like Crisis Care Network of Michigan are offering counselors, clinicians and human resource professionals to help businesses develop such plans, commonly called "critical incident stress management systems" to help companies prepare for large scale as well as smaller traumatic workplace events.

The systems can include everything from telephone counseling services to the deployment of professional clinicians for on-site debriefings within 24 hours to 72 hours after a severe traumatic event, said Bob VandePol, the director of account relations for Crisis Care Network, the nation's largest private sector provider of critical incident stress management services.

VandePol's company, for example, deployed 200 clinicians to Ground Zero to debrief, counsel and assist at least 1,200 World Trade Center employees and other victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. They rotated through shifts for two weeks, providing counseling 20 hours a day.

Fortunately, VandePol said, most symptoms are normal, predictable and treatable.

"The point is to respond as quickly and as sensitively as possible to help people put together strategies so that they can resume a normal life and return to work," he said. "If you think about it, it also makes a whole lot of business sense to do the right thing."

Not only can having a concrete response plan hasten an employee's recovery time, it can also engender employee loyalty and be a factor in a company's long-term survival.

With trained clinicians, workers can go through the cathartic process of reliving an incident in a safe environment. With a counselor's help, they can also discuss their experiences with each other, gain support from peers, and successfully move forward from the event within a few days.

Stress management companies can also offer advice about what additional steps businesses should consider in the aftermath of a tragedy.

Those might include assigning someone to hold the hand of a traumatized worker who is taking his or her first few elevator rides after a high-rise emergency. For other employees, it might mean relocating their desks or workstations away from the scene of an incident.

The one silver lining after a tragedy is that the lines of communication that open up among employees can lead to teamwork, improved relationships and a unified workplace, said Tula LaCalle, Phd, a human resources consultant in Sacramento and Sonoma, California.

"Management should take advantage of the opportunity of increased levels of communication that develop immediately after a crisis," LaCalle said. "This period, if used productively to develop a unified team, will solidify relationships rather than rupture them."