How to Deal with Grief, Your Company’s Elephant in the Room

As they say, death is part of life. Be fortunate to live long enough and you are guaranteed to experience one or more personal losses, be it the loss of a friend, a parent, a spouse or, most tragic of all, the loss of a child. The death of one close to us is a traumatic event, one mental health experts say can haunt us for the rest of our lives. Worse, trauma can make us susceptible to negative health conditions, including risk of heart attack, stroke, and cancer.

Yet, as universal and profound an event as death can be, most companies are flummoxed when it comes to dealing with a suffering employee. Many businesses have no trouble staging parties to celebrate someone’s birthday, granting time off for weddings, even offering paid parental leave to help employees care for newborn children. But when it comes to dealing with death, many companies offer little besides a few “bereavement days” off to attend a funeral and hurriedly tie up legal loose ends — then it’s “back to work” as if nothing happened.

Unfortunately, the human mind doesn’t work this way. And when businesses fail to deal compassionately with employees suffering a major loss, the company culture can suffer along with the bereaved.

How People Deal with Loss

In Western culture, and in America in particular, we are trained almost from birth to embrace a “work ethic,” putting our professional commitments and responsibilities ahead of everything else, including our own families and mental health. “We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, author of the book The Once and Future Worker featured in Atlantic. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion.”

This is why so many of us go into the office even when sick. It’s also why most of us don’t take all the vacation days we’ve earned, if we take any at all. And why so many of us feel compelled to “shake it off” and return to work as quickly as possible after suffering even a major loss. Why? We feel guilty and unprofessional if we can’t “get over it” and dive back into the swing of things after the allotted three- or five-day respite.

But more members of the mental health community are beginning to see the symptoms of grieving have strong parallels to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the “shell shock” many military personnel suffer after experiencing the horrors of war.

Common symptoms of both conditions include restlessness, depression, sleep disorders, loss of appetite, and bouts of extreme emotionalism. Like PTSD, the grieving process can lay dormant for months, even years, only to suddenly flare up without warning.

Many people are familiar with the Five Stages of Grief, established by Elisabeth Ross and David Kessler. These include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As a society, we have come to expect others to pass through these stages in a systematic, chronological order. But it doesn’t always work that way. For many, the steps occur in random sequence and can even repeat. For instance, one can reach acceptance, only to fall back into anger and/or depression months later. After all, people aren’t machines.

How Companies Deal with Grieving Employees

The policy most companies hold when dealing with grieving employees is no policy at all. Aside from granting a handful of bereavement days, many organizations prefer to ignore the problem and carry on as if nothing more were required. Unfortunately, this response has the effect of denying emotions the bereaved is experiencing during this difficult period.

Even worse, people have a natural tendency to avoid those who have just suffered a major personal loss. Some just feel awkward around such individuals, fearing they’ll say something inappropriate or insensitive. Others are just uncomfortable with the subject of death and steer clear of grieving individuals as if afraid that death is “contagious.” As a result, the bereaved ends up feeling even more isolated from their company culture than ever. This often leads to a breakdown in communication, individual productivity, and poor morale. (Bad news for any organization.)

Guidelines for Dealing with Grieving Employees

To avoid this trap, forward-thinking companies must begin to recognize employees are apt to experience one or more significant losses during their tenure and establish clear policies and procedures. “Strong time-off policies, sensitive managers, and open conversations also make a big difference for employees in times of mourning,” writes Gianpiero Petriglieri and Sally Maitlis for Harvard Business Review. These policies need to be universal and not limited to top executives and managers or to employees who have passed some arbitrary longevity threshold. Elements of such a policy should include the following:

1. Employees who have just experienced a loss should be given sufficient time to deal with their new life situation, both in terms of time off immediately following the loss and then for an extended period following their return. Likewise, people returning from leave may need less demanding projects or flexibility to work more from home.

2. Managers should make themselves available to grieving employees, not necessarily to offer condolences, but just to listen. Managers should encourage grieving employees to talk about their lost loved ones, and even share their own experiences with loss. Such openness has been shown to be of great help in the emotional healing process.

3. Other employees should be advised as to their co-worker’s situation and be encouraged to offer support as well.

4. If possible, companies may offer professional grief counseling to help employees dealing with the powerful, complex emotions they are struggling to process.

The Office as Family

Much has been written over the last half-century about how workspaces have come to replace traditional families, houses of worship, and service groups as the primary source of friendship and emotional support for many individuals. Millennials, in particular, expect the companies they work for to show them compassion and comfort during times of need.

When businesses come to view their organization in this light, they will develop a better understanding of what employees expect during periods of crisis and how to best serve their needs and those of the business as a whole. Recently, Forbes interviewed me to discuss the importance of building and maintaining strong office cultures leading to greater success.

For more information on how my team and I can help your business build a company culture that supports employees through all phases of life, feel to contact me @ laura@conoverconsulting.com.