Last week Linkedin “asked” me to write about this topic to get me certified as a top voice about it.
I hardly consider myself as a top voice about anything, specially this topic, and also Linkedin limited the text to a couple hundred words, which I think is far from enough. This caught my attention because my wife is a Neurologist and we talk about this sometimes, so I put it to rest and decided to make it a special post here, and I’ll share my humble opinion hoping that this is somewhat helpfull to the community.
This is a very important topic, which I don’t think it receives the deserved attention, and it shouldn’t be overlooked by the team leaders involved in the import/export operations, as well as all the people in the supply chain and logistics departments.
Working with import/export operations in the Oil and Gas and Energy Industry on the side of the Custom Broker, I can say for sure that the amount of responsability on the shoulders of those who operate are almost unbearable.
Consider for instance, the import/export of an vessel with values that can reach millions or billions depending on the specifity of it, or any cargo project, offshore and onshore rigs, and so on. Any kind of mistake can lead to hundreads of thousand or even millions in fines, delays in the project, contract fines and more and more disgraces.
As if this was not pressure enough, another problem is (and let’s all face it) we made <urgent> the norm, and the reality in our day to day basis is that almost everything is urgent, which puts another layer of pressure over the ticking timming bomb which is our colleagues and ourselves mental health.
The Foreign Trade and SCM world is, and will always be, super dynamic, fast, demanding and lots of times stressfull, and that’s a part of the job that we all love.
But, seeing that we are all different, we all have some threshold of stress before we get sick.
Is good to remember, here and there, that we are all humans, and empathy towards our colleagues is never enough. Much of the time we don’t know what’s going on in our team member heads or in their lives, so it’s always good to take a break, have a talk, laugh, a hug, maybe to take a day off, maybe arrange some kind of special day off a month for each teammate, find some kind of solutions to make it work with pressure, but without jeoperdizing their mental health.
Our operations will only work properly and produce the expect results, if our teammates, the members of our working family, are healthy, and for that, our thoughts must be in the right place and we must be sufficiently rested (with proper sleep), do some kind of sports or work out, and enjoy outdoor activites, these are all things (according to my dear wife) that reduces stress and can help prevent burnout!