Leading a team through a bad day

Part of Trust & Safety work is reviewing what users report, and some days that stream brings something far worse than usual. Footage of an attack with many victims spreading faster than the rules can keep up. A surge in child abuse material. A user's death the team feels they should have caught. Threats aimed at the reviewers themselves.

The wellbeing guide is for the person doing the reviewing. This one is for their manager. On a day like that, how your team comes through it depends mostly on what you do in the first few hours and the week after.

The first few hours

• Say it out loud. "Today's work includes footage of X, it's heavier than normal, and here's how we're handling it" beats letting everyone find out on their own.
• Limit who sees it. Ask for volunteers to review the worst of it and send everyone else's work elsewhere. A few people choosing to see it is better than everyone stumbling into some of it.
• Shorten shifts for the people on it, and count their breaks as work. Today isn't the day speed matters.
• Let anyone step away with no penalty. No reason needed, and nothing said about it later. Mean every word.
• Check on whoever found it first, by name and in private. They're carrying the day differently.

What not to do

Don't make everyone sit in a group meeting and describe what they saw. Reliving it in a room, on the same day, because you told them to, can make things worse. That habit sticks around mostly because it looks like leadership.

Instead, offer support in every form you have: quiet time, a conversation, counseling, a colleague who gets it. Force none of it. Your job is to make every door clearly open and to walk through one yourself. Which door each person takes is up to them.

On a day like this, the team is watching one thing: whether the support is real. They find out from what happens to the first person who uses it.

The week after

Over the next week, here's what to watch for and what to do about each:

• Someone unusually quiet, or unusually dark in their jokes. Check in privately, not in front of the team.
• Several sick days in the days after. Believe them, and actually lighten the workload.
• Any warning sign from the wellbeing guide, in anyone. Talk to them directly, by name and kindly, and point them to real help.
• Someone insisting they're fine and working twice as hard. Keep an eye on them the longest. Overworking is a common way to avoid thinking about it.
• The team joking about it within a week. Usually that's nothing to worry about. Dark humor is how people in this work process things.

Write it down and look for patterns

Record the day as an event: the date, what kind of content, who worked on it, and what support was offered. It's a note about the incident, and it isn't spying on people. It lets you notice when one person has been hit by three of these in a year. It's evidence the next time you ask for more staff or a wellbeing budget. And it's the difference between a team that learns from its bad days and one that keeps repeating them.

Look after yourself too

You saw it too, and you carried everyone else through it, which takes its own toll. When a manager openly uses counseling after a bad day, it tells every quietly worried person on the team that the support is safe to use.

The rule in the wellbeing guide applies to managers as well. If that week sounds like you, tell a person today.