There are a lot of lessons coming out of the weekend meltdown on Wall Street that shook the financial markets around the world, but one that jumped out at me was this: When a company is struggling for its very survival, no one worries much about what happens to the workforce.

Lehman Brothers, which started melting down last week, is a good case in point. As the company’s fate teetered over the weekend, Lehman workers were at their desks waiting to hear what was going to happen. There was a lot going on, but unfortunately, no one bothered to tell—or even think about—the workforce. When the decision came, Lehman workers heard about their fate the way everyone else did: from the media.

“About 12:30 Monday morning, Lehman sent out a press release announcing its intention to seek bankruptcy protection,” The New York Times reported.  “Lehman’s 25,000 employees learned of the filing through the media, with no direct communication coming from (CEO Richard) Fuld or other Lehman executives.”

It’s easy to say that the fate of Lehman’s workforce should be secondary to the fate of the company itself, and although that may be true in a narrow sense, how does it square with the typical pronouncements that most companies (including Lehman) love to mouth about people being their most important asset?

It doesn’t square, of course, but that’s partly because most companies just don’t have systems in place to deal with  catastrophic issues like 9/11 or what happened on Wall Street this weekend. Not only do they never consider the possibility, they just don’t ever do much “what if?” planning on how to quickly communicate news of this sort to the company’s workforce.

And that lack of basic HR crisis planning can have all sorts of ripple effects, as the Times story noted when Lehman finally woke up and figured out that it would need some of its people aboard.

“Lehman executives scrambled on Monday to offer incentives to keep employees the bank needs to help wind down trades and sell assets,” the Times reported. “(And) Lehman is already battling to avoid ‘job abandonment,’ in which workers simply stop showing up, even though they have not been formally laid off.  Some of that was clearly happening on Monday as some of Lehman’s trading floors were only about two-thirds full. A rush of résumé writing signaled the melancholy of an institution in its final days.”

In contrast to the scene in New York, Lehman’s London staff seemed to roll with things somewhat better Monday, even though workers across the pond didn’t receive any more information from top management than their American counterparts did.

“The Lehman offices in the U.K. were essentially cut adrift and put into administration [the British term for protection against creditors as a company tries to reorganize in a bankruptcy]. There was an immediate ban on trading and staff were told to clear their desks,” according to The Guardian newspaper. “It was surprisingly calm—there was a kind of blitz spirit in the sense that we were all in it together,” one banker told the newspaper. “It was made clear that there was no desire to have us hanging around.”

How does a company like Lehman get caught so far off guard? And how does a 150 year-old institution stay in business so long without any sort of structure to get information into the hands of its people clearly and quickly, especially in times of crisis?

These are all great questions that will surely be sorted out in the days to come, but one thing is clear from Wall Street’s weekend meltdown: When the worst comes, workers need to have their own crisis plans in place. No matter what business you may be in, your managers and executives are probably going to be too preoccupied to worry much about the fate of those who toil around them.