Treating Uncertainty: How Successful Pharma Leaders Can Protect Employee Wellbeing and the Bottom Line

Employees and leaders across the pharmaceutical industry are dealing with a heightened state of uncertainty and anxiety. Recent events are not helping. Politics are getting more polarized, financial markets are buckling under the weight of unpredictability, and the labor market is being shaken by everything from AI to new return-to-office policies. Pharmaceutical companies are setting up war rooms to navigate rapid fire regulatory changes and pricing pressures. Uncertainty is not uncommon, but this moment feels different.

Adding to the present urgency is the potential impact of anxiety on mental health and productivity. The United Nations Development Programme’s most recent Human Development Report noted that the number of people expressing stress, sadness, anxiety, anger, or worry is at a ten-year high. In addition to the obvious impact on wellbeing, this stress and anxiety has a direct impact on employee output — with Gallup estimating that stressed and disengaged employees cost $8.9 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP, each year.

This is hardly surprising. Threats in the environment can narrow out focus and tamp down innovation and collaboration. Being overwhelmed by repeated, unresolved threats leads to paralysis. If employees are already feeling threats in their personal lives, it does not take much for workplace events to overwhelm them. The pharmaceutical industry has seen this overwhelming anxiety and the corresponding drop in productivity during disruptive or destabilizing events like mergers or reorganizations. The industry has also seen how leaders can follow some very specific strategies to dramatically reduce anxiety and boost productivity and innovation. These lessons from the research on effective change can provide pharmaceutical leaders with strategies to help their employees in the current uncertain and anxious times.

Operate within a common language

In emotionally complex conversations, a common language allows for alignment on the issue at hand can be immensely helpful. As a species, humans are driven by survival and curiosity — by nature seeking out both threats and novelty. This dual motivation has resulted in us evolving a two-channel system, which governs our response in times of uncertainty. The Survive Channel is activated by threats and leads to feelings of fear, anxiety, and stress, triggering the sympathetic nervous system to direct all attention toward removing or eliminating the threat. By contrast, the Thrive Channel is activated by opportunities and is associated with feelings of excitement, passion, joy, and enthusiasm. These triggers activate the parasympathetic nervous system, allowing our mind to broaden its perspective and collaborate in new ways. Understanding these human responses and using the language of threats and opportunities can help leaders frame challenges more accurately and help call out what’s needed to move from anxiety to action.

Transparently address both threats and opportunities

With a common language in place, pharmaceutical leaders can start to work with their teams to identify the key threats and opportunities that are creating anxiety or excitement. Whether they originate from changing FDA regulations, drug pricing legislation, patent cliffs, or other shift that can disrupt the status-quo, an open discussion about what may or may not change will help keep the focus on real threats — not perceived ones. 

Leaders are often hesitant to address uncertainty head on, fearing they may create more anxiety in the process. But this only leads to employees feeling unsupported and psychologically unsafe. Mental Health America research indicates that less than 50% of employers encourage transparent communication. In a highly connected world with almost infinite sources of information, protecting employees from uncertain news often backfires, as rumor mills overtake reality.

AI adoption is a perfect example of an uncertain threat and opportunity. As more and more pharmaceutical organizations start to experiment with AI, the threat of job losses or job redefinition is ever-present in the media. While changes to certain jobs will accompany certain AI applications, this impact is certainly not universal and will be felt in different ways across functions. Leaders should be having this conversation. They should address the possible impacts of AI in specific contexts even if it is still speculative to ensure both employees and the patients they support can also see the opportunities that AI presents. Leaders doing this well are focusing on use cases that add value quickly and clearly. For example, some pharmaceutical companies have started using generative AI to accelerate drug discovery and predict clinical trial outcomes. Companies like Novartis have also done a good job of articulating for their employees where and how AI can be useful and what the current limits are to its use.

Embrace diverse experiences and diverse responses

Brain science teaches us that we don’t all have the same response to the same stimuli. An experienced clinical researcher at the start of a challenging new drug trial might have their Thrive Channel highly activated by the work they are pursuing, but a novice researcher might instead find themself in Survive Mode, intimidated by the complexity of the task and the possibility of failure. Our experiences, personalities, and goals all have a role to play in how we perceive a certain event. 

Looking again to the example of AI, some pharmaceutical employees might be excited by the prospect of using cutting edge technology to discover new therapies faster, while others might be fearful of the learning curve to adopt new tools. In another context, with return-to-office mandates, some employees will see an opportunity in learning from their peers and others may struggle with the loss of flexibility.

Pharmaceutical leaders must recognize these disparate reactions and acknowledge the legitimacy of employees’ differing responses. Messaging about changes should reflect these diverse viewpoints and aim to mitigate the anxiety through clear, consistent, empathetic communication. Amplify the excitement by focusing on the benefits of a change but be careful not to overstate or overgeneralize.

Reframe threats as opportunities

Uncertainty isn’t necessarily bad — times of change and disruption are filled with opportunities to find new and better ways of working. Leaders can help their teams acknowledge the threats they face but also focus on finding the opportunities. If new regulatory requirements are disrupting the way a pharmaceutical business has operated, they will do so for the whole industry, potentially creating an opportunity to shift the landscape and come out on top. 

For instance, consider pricing reform mandates. Pharmaceutical leaders can empathize and acknowledge the challenges mandates present, while also discussing the opportunities they present for greater innovation and patient access. But a word of caution: Leaders can easily sound disconnected from reality if their attempt to reframe a threat comes across as disingenuous or overly optimistic. The goal is not to convince employees that there are no threats but to put those threats in context and amplify the opportunities within them. We can see an example of this reframe in how effective leaders deal with “failures” — they don’t minimize the cost or impact of a failed clinical trial, but they also focus on the opportunity to learn from it to make future drug development efforts more successful.

Reduce system noise

Anxiety and fear can have a strong compounding effect. If an environment contains more Survive than Thrive triggers, a new event or change is more likely to be seen as a significant threat. And because our human hardwiring cannot always easily distinguish small threats like an “urgent” information request from big ones like a significant drug safety issue, we are often overwhelmed by the sheer quantity. 

Modern work has a lot of noise. Meetings, emails, metrics, and compliance requirements can all activate a Survive response. Leaders can help their teams by reducing this noise. Distinguishing between the important and the urgent, removing unnecessary metrics and memos, clarifying the principles behind regulatory policies, and setting clear expectations are all ways to do so.

With employee anxiety at an all-time high, reducing fear and stress is increasingly important to organizational performance. While leaders cannot control external events, they can help mitigate their impacts on their organizations and people. Over the last few years, we have seen companies across the pharmaceutical industry use these strategies to improve employee engagement. From a health tech company that improved employee engagement scores by 24% and revenue by 26% in three years, to a pharmaceutical company seeing 50% participation rates on improvement initiatives leading to millions of dollars of savings and fewer quality defects.

Uncertainty is a constant, but anxiety and unproductivity don’t have to be. For the sake of our global health and general wellbeing, finding ways to thrive will be critical. Pharmaceutical leaders who want to succeed in this era of uncertainty must also find a way to lower levels of stress while raising levels of innovation to meet ever-changing patient needs.

Photo: SIphotography, Getty Images

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