Hi, I’m Paul Darley and thanks for tuning into our August issue of Inside Darley. The headlines these days are all about economic conditions, with inflation being at 9.1% through June, a 40-year high in rising interest rates, talks of recession and all the rest. It’s putting a lot of pressure on companies, but also on our employees who work for those companies and just the American citizens in general. The first article that we’ve attached here for you is on CEO optimism, which talks of it being the lowest in six years. And in order to help you deal with that, we’ve attached a couple more articles. One is written by Jim Collins that just came out last week relative to dealing with these economic conditions. It’s titled, “Thriving on Chaos.”
The other one that we really enjoyed, and I’ve attached here for you is by Ram Charan, who’s one of my favorite business gurus. He just came out with an article called “Eight Ways Boards Can Combat Inflation.”
When we look at our individual average citizen in America, as well as our own employees, we really need to be mindful of the impact that the economy is having on them. And in fact, there’s a gauge out there called the misery index, and it looks at typical citizens in across America and in all economies across the world. It takes unemployment rate, inflation and really calculates to see what the impact is on the average citizen, if you will, and you can find that data at inflationdata.com.
The impact on individuals, our employees, or your employees, whether they’re fire departments or companies is really profound, and Harvard Business Review, during COVID, released a number of articles that they allowed us to share publicly. One of them is called “Eight Ways that Managers Can Support Employee Mental Health.” Personally, I feel mental health at this time is more important than usual because we’re having a lot of residual impacts from the offshoots of COVID and all the rest. This article talks about making sure that you’ve got regular check-ins with your employees. We implemented that at Darley two years ago, making sure that you’re communicating more than you think you need to.
Some other great tips here, FireRescue1 magazine just released a great article titled “The Most Influential Fire Service Leaders of All Time.” And most of these folks hail from the IAFC and the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation and some other folks. We’re really excited to have one of our board of directors, Garry Briese, be mentioned and be one of those most influential fire service leaders. We are very proud of him.
Speaking of the IAFC, if you’re going to be down at the Fire Rescue International conference in San Antonio, August 24th through the 26th, we hope you’ll stop by and visit us at booth 1538.
And in fact, if you’re going to be in Chicago in early September, or if you live in the Chicago area, we’d love to have you join us for the National Fallen Firefighter Chicago Stair Climb down at Soldier Field on September 10th. Reach out to joriwilmoth@darley.com and she can get you on our team.
Lastly, the number of heat waves taking place across America and the number of wildfires continue to grow exponentially each year. And if you’re looking to assist folks who are in dire need, we’d love to partner with you in providing safe water boxes. We’ve been providing those for disasters over the last five years very successfully. We’ll partner with local distributors or companies, manufacturers or other partners of ours. If you’re interested in taking advantage of that, reach out to kevinsofen@darley.com.
So thanks for tuning into this issue of Inside Darley there’s anything we can be doing to support you. We hope you’ll reach out to us.
