When this first started, a lot of us here in the Middle East were talking about it openly: checking the news together, checking on our people, asking each other how everyone was holding up. As the sounds of it faded from daily life, so did the conversation. But it hasn’t actually gone anywhere. It’s still going on very close to home, and the uncertainty of not knowing where it’s heading is, unfortunately, still there too.
This isn’t something happening somewhere else that we’re simply supporting our teams through from a safe distance. We are in the middle of it, living in the region while a conflict unfolds close to home, and that changes what this actually feels like day to day. Most of us are holding onto the hope that it settles soon, while still not knowing when or how that happens.
The quiet around it now doesn’t mean it stopped mattering. It often just means that once something isn’t loud or visible anymore, people assume it’s been resolved, even when it hasn’t.
As a nurse, I’ve spent my career watching for the small signs that someone isn’t okay before they say so out loud, and that instinct doesn’t switch off just because I moved from the bedside into corporate wellbeing, or because this time it’s closer to home than most things I’ve sat with before.
When conflict breaks out somewhere your employees call home, or where their families still are, it doesn’t stay a headline. It shows up as a missed deadline, a camera turned off in every meeting, or someone who’s usually chatty going quiet in a way that isn’t like them.
Even within one office here in the region, colleagues can be affected by the same event, on the same day, for very different reasons, depending on where their families are and what news they woke up to.
So what actually helps, versus what just looks like it helps?
How Companies Can Support Employees During Regional Conflicts
I’ve sat across from employees mid-crisis more times than I can count, sometimes as a nurse, sometimes just as the person in the room they felt safe enough to be honest with.
One thing holds up every time: it’s rarely the expensive, headline gestures people remember. It’s whether someone in leadership said something, and whether they said it early enough to matter, and whether it felt like it came from genuine care rather than a policy checklist.
The five approaches below aren’t a compliance checklist either. They’re what I’ve actually watched change how someone experiences an unbearable week, or months, at work.
Acknowledge What Is Happening and Communicate Early
Silence is a message too, and it’s usually the wrong one. When something serious is unfolding and a company says nothing, employees don’t read that as neutrality, they read it as “this isn’t important enough to us,” or worse, “they don’t know I’m affected.”
A short, honest acknowledgement costs very little and tells someone they haven’t been forgotten in the noise.
Encourage Meaningful Manager Check-ins
Most employees won’t go to HR first. They’ll go to, or avoid, their direct manager. That makes the manager conversation the actual front line of support, and it’s the one most companies train the least.
“How are you doing?” asked on autopilot in a standup gets an autopilot “fine” back. Asked with an actual pause afterwards, and a bit of genuine patience for silence, it gets something else.
This is exactly why proper training matters, not just goodwill. Managers shouldn’t be left to figure this out on instinct alone. The LightHouse Arabia runs an excellent Mental Health First Aid course here in the UAE, and it’s the kind of accredited, practical training that actually equips managers to recognise when someone is struggling and respond appropriately, rather than guessing or avoiding the conversation altogether.
I remember noticing one of our team members had gone unusually quiet on a group call after several days of hard news from this conflict. I didn’t address it publicly, which would have put him on the spot in front of everyone.
I messaged him privately after the call, just “saw you were quiet today, no pressure to talk, but I’m here if you want to.” He didn’t reply for a day. Then he did, and it turned into a conversation that let me flex his deadlines that week without him having to formally request anything.
That’s the whole model: notice gently, offer without pressure, don’t push, and be ready to actually act on what you hear.
The skill managers need most isn’t therapy, it’s restraint and a bit of heart. Not jumping to fix, not minimising with “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” and not making it about their own opinions on the conflict.
A short manager briefing on this, even 20 minutes, pays for itself the first time it’s used.
Make Existing Support Systems Visible and Easy to Access
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most companies already have an Employee Assistance Programme, counselling access, or a wellbeing partner, and most employees have completely forgotten it exists, if they ever knew.
Benefits packs get skimmed once during onboarding and never looked at again. In a crisis, nobody’s going to dig through an intranet page from eighteen months ago to find a phone number, and honestly, nobody should have to when they’re already struggling.
This is a visibility problem, not a resourcing problem. During a period like this, resurface what’s already there: a direct Slack or email reminder with the actual phone number or booking link, not “check your benefits portal.”
Put it on a physical poster near the kitchen if you have an office. Some of the wellbeing teams I’ve worked with and led have built a single page PDF, logo, three phone numbers, one QR code, and pinned it everywhere, digital and physical, during a tense fortnight.
It’s also worth including access to the UAE’s free mental health hotlines on that same page, so people have somewhere confidential to turn even outside of what your own company offers.
Usage of the EAP line more than doubled that month, not because more people needed it, but because more people could actually find it when they did.
If you don’t have something like that on hand, it’s worth putting together now, gently and without fanfare: a one page “who to contact” resource, plain language, no jargon, that you can send out in under a minute when the next hard week arrives.
The World Health Organization estimates that 12 billion working days are lost globally every year to depression and anxiety, costing the global economy around US$1 trillion in lost productivity, with an estimated 15% of working-age adults affected by a mental disorder at any point in time.
That’s not an abstract statistic when a region is genuinely on edge, it’s a reminder that the support already sitting quietly in a benefits pack only does any good if people actually know it’s there and feel safe enough to use it.
Offer Flexibility Based on Individual Circumstances
There’s no single right response to a crisis, because there’s no single experience of one. Some employees need time off to actually reach family members and confirm they’re safe. Others find that staying busy at work is the one part of their day that still feels normal, and being sent home to “process” feels like punishment, not care.
A blanket policy, everyone gets the same day off, or everyone’s expected to carry on as usual, will genuinely help one group and genuinely miss another.
What works better is giving managers real discretion, backed by clear boundaries from HR: flexible hours around news updates or family calls, the option to work from home for a stretch without justifying it repeatedly, or compassionate leave handled quickly rather than through the standard multi-step approval chain.
The employees I’ve spoken with afterwards rarely remember the specific policy. They remember whether someone asked what they needed, instead of deciding for them.
Prevent Workplace Tensions and Maintain Psychological Safety
This is the part companies most often miss, and it’s a real risk during regional conflicts specifically: colleagues from different backgrounds, nationalities or personal views can end up in genuine tension with each other, sometimes without anyone intending harm.
A comment meant as small talk can land very differently for someone with family in the affected region. Left unaddressed, this quietly erodes trust across a whole team, not just for the people directly affected.
The fix isn’t banning conversation. That usually backfires and just pushes it into private group chats where there’s no moderation at all.
It’s setting a visible, simple expectation: this is a workplace, opinions on the politics of the conflict aren’t up for office debate, and nobody should be made to represent or defend their entire background because of where a conflict is happening.
Managers need to be alert to comments that single someone out, even casually, and address them privately, promptly and kindly rather than letting them slide because it feels awkward to intervene.
Psychological safety isn’t a poster on the wall. It’s whether someone believes they can have a hard week without becoming the subject of office speculation.
How Corporate Wellbeing Programs Help
A corporate wellbeing programme, done properly, isn’t a yoga session once a quarter. It’s the ongoing clinical and emotional support infrastructure a company keeps in place before anything goes wrong, so it’s actually there, ready and human, when something does.
That typically includes access to mental health professionals or counselling, regular health screenings, education sessions on things like stress and burnout, and a clear, known pathway for employees to ask for help without it becoming a whole process.
The value of this becomes obvious in exactly the situation we’re discussing. A company with an existing wellbeing programme isn’t starting from zero when a crisis hits.
The EAP number already exists, the counsellors already have context on the workforce, and HR already has a communication template they’ve used before.
A company without one is trying to build all of that from scratch in the same week its employees actually need it, which is precisely the wrong week to be improvising, and the wrong week for someone to feel like an afterthought.
Well-run programmes are usually delivered by clinically trained staff, often nurses or people with a mental health background, in my experience, rather than generic third-party hotlines nobody has heard of, or an initiative that exists mainly because a marketing team wanted a few photos for social media.
That matters because the person answering the phone actually understands the workplace context, not just a script, and can speak to someone with the same care they’d want for their own family.
It’s the difference between a benefit that exists on paper and one people genuinely reach for.
There’s also something to be said for having a real, familiar person attached to the programme, someone employees have actually seen running health screenings, wellbeing events or educational webinars before, rather than a name giving them advice that they’ve never heard of or come across before.
That person doesn’t need to be on site every day, and doesn’t even need to be on the company’s own payroll, to become genuinely part of the culture and part of the team.
When people already know who that person is and trust that they have the clinical knowledge to answer questions properly, they’re far more likely to reach out when it actually matters, rather than staying quiet because the support feels anonymous or unfamiliar.
Quick Reference: A “Who To Contact” Template You Can Use This Week
If you don’t already have one of these ready to go, here’s a simple version you can adapt and send out today.
Checklist for HR and managers:
Sample internal email template:
Subject: Support available if you need it
Hi team,
With everything happening in the region right now, we want to make sure everyone knows what support is available, and that nobody has to go through this alone.
- Confidential counselling: [phone number / booking link]
- Flexible hours or leave: speak to your manager directly, no need to explain further than you’re comfortable with
- Questions or unsure who to ask: reach out to [named HR or wellbeing contact]
Take the time you need. We’re here, and we mean that.
Turning Support Into Action
None of this requires a large budget or a crisis-management consultant flown in overnight.
It requires communicating early rather than perfectly, training managers to ask and actually listen, making the support you already pay for visible enough that people remember it exists, trusting individual judgement over blanket policy, and protecting the psychological safety of the whole team, not just the people most visibly affected.
If your organisation doesn’t currently have a wellbeing programme that could respond to a moment like this, or if you’re not actually sure whether the one you have still works the way it’s supposed to, now is the time to check, before the next difficult week arrives rather than during it, whatever that difficult week might look like for your team.
It doesn’t have to be conflict related. It could just as easily be a bereavement, a redundancy round, or any other moment where people need real support quickly.
This situation isn’t behind us yet, and none of us know exactly when it will be, so the support you put in place now isn’t a one-off gesture, it’s something your team may need to lean on for a while longer.
At Thrive at Seven Insurance Brokers, this is exactly what we build for corporate clients across the UAE: clinically led, insurance-backed wellbeing support that’s already in place, already known to your staff, and ready the day it’s actually needed, because when someone’s world is unsteady, the least we can do is make sure the support around them isn’t.
Get in touch with our team to talk through what that could look like for your organisation.
