LAGOS — The call cut out exactly when it mattered most.
A colleague, dialing in from Lagos last week, was describing rain that had not let up since morning. Mid-sentence, his picture froze, then vanished. A spinning wheel. Silence where a voice had been. By the time he reconnected, the meeting had moved on without him.
It was a small thing. It was also, in miniature, the story of the season ahead — and of what that season will quietly ask of the people who lead through it.
The Nigerian Meteorological Agency’s 2026 forecast calls for an early-to-normal start to the rains, a late finish, and normal-to-above-normal totals across most of the country. Behind the technical language sit two harder facts. Severe dry spells, some lasting three weeks, are expected between June and August, concentrated in the north and centre. More than 14,000 communities across 33 states and the federal capital are considered vulnerable to flooding.
Read as weather, this is a forecast. Read as a workplace document, it is closer to a mental health briefing.
The weather is now a workforce issue
Climate volatility does not stay outside the office. It follows people inside through the screen. A flooded road delays the commute. A dead network tower cancels the client’s call. A humid, sleepless night follows a day that was already too hot. None of this, on its own, looks like a crisis. Repeated across a season, it becomes something psychologists know too well: a slow accumulation of stress that erodes concentration and patience long before anyone names it.
There is a quieter cost, too. Researchers use the term solastalgia for the distress of watching a familiar environment turn unpredictable — not a single disaster, but the steady loss of a climate one could once take for granted. For employees in flood-prone or drought-stricken regions, this is not an abstract worry about the planet. It is a daily, practical question: whether today is a day the road will hold, the power will stay on, or the connection will survive the call.
Executives tend to file this under HR, or under corporate social responsibility. It belongs, instead, next to supply-chain risk and cybersecurity — on the list of things that can quietly stop an organisation from functioning. A single flooded warehouse access road or a week of intermittent power does not appear as a line item on most risk registers. It should. The organisations that treat climate disruption as an operational variable, rather than an occasional headline, are the ones whose people show up steadier when the season turns difficult.
A story does what a statistic cannot
There is a reason the anecdote above stayed with you longer than the statistic did. Behavioural scientists call it narrative transportation: a specific, sensory scene pulls a reader in and lowers their guard in a way that aggregate numbers rarely manage. A frozen face on a video call reaches the brain’s empathy circuitry faster than a figure like “14,000 vulnerable communities” ever will — even though the figure is the larger truth. This is the identifiable victim effect, and it is also, not incidentally, how effective leaders sell change. They open with the moment the data explains. The data then earns belief; the moment earns attention.
This matters for how organisations talk to their people about climate risk. A memo full of rainfall percentages will be filed and forgotten. A leader who says, plainly, “some of you will lose power or connectivity this season, and here is what we’re doing about it,” will be remembered — and believed.
FOUR moves for leaders, public and private
- Write a weather policy before the storm arrives. Flexible-work protocols for flood alerts and outages should exist with the same clarity as holiday or security policies. Predictability, even inside disruption, protects mental health.
- Fund the redundancy people actually feel.
Backup power, alternative connectivity, flood-resilient offices — these are wellbeing investments as much as operational ones. A single dropped call is an inconvenience. A pattern of them is a stress multiplier.
- Get the forecast to the people who need to act on it. NiMet’s warnings protect no one sitting on a government database. Public agencies should prioritize last-mile delivery of seasonal alerts; private employers can carry those warnings the rest of the way, through the channels their people already trust.
- Teach managers to recognise climate stress, and respond with flexibility rather than pressure.
Fatigue, distraction and anxiety tied to weather events are not performance problems. A single honest conversation about this, at the leadership level, can shift a culture from silent endurance to open support.
My colleague’s call reconnected within minutes. Not every disruption this season will resolve so quickly, and not everyone carrying its weight will say so out loud. The forecast is public. What organisations build in response to it is still, for now, a choice.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
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