Watershed is defined as an event or a period marking a turning point in a situation. Covid-19 took all of us by surprise when it escalated into a pandemic and indeed is a watershed moment in history that challenged the way we defined reality and viewed life.

This document aims to introduce a study conducted on a segment of people in the corporate sector in Sri Lanka and their response to Covid-19, with an emphasis on internal and external coping resources impacting the mental health of the executive cadre. Insights from past recessions and pandemics are mentioned before introducing the findings of this qualitative study that employed a group of 151 executives, managers and corporate leaders from various industries in the form of interviews. The observations and interactions with over 1400 working persons through webinars are also analysed.

This was a study done on a select sample of the workforce, hence when generalizing these findings, one needs to remember the different socio-economic variables that apply to different segments of the workforce.

The research in this working paper comes from scientific publications and reports published by reputed humanitarian organizations with an integration of insightful statistics of the situation by local and international news.

The current study was conducted to inform individuals, organizational decision makers, mental health practitioners who provide support to organizations and working individuals, and to some extent the government and policy makers, of the adverse effects of the Covid-19 on work and family experiences. As it is a work-in-progress, only the preliminary findings of the study are presented. Scientific publication from the preliminary and the full data set will be forthcoming.

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Crisis to Character model (Cooray, 2014) focuses mostly on character building when navigating through crisis and how change itself provides new opportunities in life.

Forté team this year has decided to validate the ‘Crisis to Character’ (C2C) model and are happy to present you the research results from organizations and communities.

Our research team supervised by Dai Williams an Occupational Psychologist and Career Consultant from the UK, is currently in the initial step of data gathering. Forté team is working collaboratively with Foundation of Goodness to conduct a series of workshops around the country for community leaders for this purpose. They also actively work with their corporate and organizational clients who are interested in culture research.

The research team lead by Rozaine, has the vision to contribute the knowledge gathered back to the organizations and communities via a program called One Sri Lanka: Character building as a nation. Therefore this research is a partnership between Forté and our diverse community.

Forté is happy to offer the free C2C talk series at your organization following the validation of the model. We believe that the talk series will be a great value addition for your team as character building is in the heart of personal and professional growth.
We hope that our research will contribute in building a culture that is collaborative, dynamics and open to change, that with time help facilitate the right leadership in organizations and the country at large.

Contact us at [email protected] for further details.