Grief In The Workplace Is Inevitable. Why Aren’t We Preparing For It?
Four years ago Karen Millsap’s husband was shot and killed in the gym they co-owned. There was no warning. There was no response manual. It was all there — their life, their business, their future — and then in a single irreversible moment, everything shattered.
If that seems unimaginable to you, you’re not alone. Not only do very few of us ever think about how to get through trauma like this, the businesses we work for, in some cases the businesses we own, are similarly unprepared to respond to grief.
You make a plan for the good moments in your employee’s life — retirement, pregnancy, promotion — but what’s your plan for the moments that are absolutely terrible?
For starters, let’s look at policy. Oregon is the only state in the U.S. that mandates a paid bereavement policy and globally, very few countries see leave policies offering any more than a week of recovery. There are three core problems with grief policies as they’re commonly found:
- While grief spans all sorts of relationships, policies are often narrowly defined, covering the loss of a spouse or dependent only.
- While grief can stem from a range of trauma, policies often only focus on death.
- And while grief is something we know every single one of us will go through, most companies wait until it happens to think through how the policy will affect the grief sufferers, their colleagues ,and their clients or customers. We don’t do dry runs for grief.
This vulnerability in how businesses operate is something that became clear to Karen Millsap as she worked through her own tragedy. It led her to start Egency — a consultancy focused on helping businesses develop their own plans for responding to grief.
I had the opportunity to speak with Millsap on The Growth Show, you can listen to our entire conversation here, and want to share a few highlights from her considerable wisdom on preparing for grief in the workplace.
Myths of Responding to Grief
Responding to grief in the workplace is policy question, and we’ll get to that, but it also involves confronting issues that our culture as a whole tends to handle clumsily. In particular, Millsap calls out a few cultural myths that we tend to believe about grief.
Myth #1: All the platitudes.
In the absence of plans, we fall back on believing the platitudes. The problem with platitudes is they fill the space of true work that needs to be done to navigate through grief.
Platitudes are often more useful in getting through the conversation about grief than they are at getting through the grief itself.
The worst offenders? Millsap points out phrases like “This too shall pass” or “Time heals all wounds.” These phrases paint a picture of a future, however far off, when the pain will go away on its own. But Millsap advises that while this is comforting, it’s just not true.
The reality: Grief is a physical experience as much as a mental one. You wouldn’t wait for time to heal a broken foot, Millsap explains, you’d get to the doctor. You’d address it. Good healing takes time, yes, but it takes other work as well.
Myth #2: We can escape it by throwing ourselves back into work.
There is something to be said for the return to routine that comes from throwing yourself into work. But expecting that work to be the same or that routine to absolve the pain is fallacious.
Millsap recounted the story of a NASA engineer whose team was responsible for cleaning up after a space shuttle explosion. It wasn’t until six months later, after the cleanup work was complete, that he felt the weight of his emotion. He had delayed his grief by staying busy.
The reality: You cannot delay grief permanently. Eventually, you will have to deal with it.
Myth #3: There’s nothing to say.
There was a time after her husband was murdered when Millsap’s brother-in-law avoided conversation with her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to her, he just didn’t know what to say. Finally, after fumbling for words he told her, “I don’t know how to address this with you, but I just want to be there for you.” Millsap says the comment was “imperfectly perfect” and it gave her the permission she needed to share her feelings.
Sheryl Sandberg echoed this in an interview with NPR upon the release of her book on grief.
“You want to silence a room? Get diagnosed with cancer. You know, have someone in your family go to prison. Lose a job. Sexual assault. These things are uncomfortable, and because they’re uncomfortable people are often afraid of saying the wrong thing and often say nothing at all, and then we have this huge elephant in a room following us around.”
The reality: You’ll never know the “right thing” to say to someone who has just suffered incredible loss, and that’s an ok thing to say.
Getting Your Plan in Place Ahead of the Grief
Now let’s talk policy.
It’s easy to assume that when tragedy strikes, your company will do the right thing. Yet this very open-endness becomes one more piece of uncertainty in the life of someone whose life has just been upended. Jennifer Moss, writing in the Harvard Business Review, says:
“In the workplace, the unstructured, “whatever you need” approach [to bereavement] can leave an uncomfortable void. The grieving person isn’t sure how much time they really can take, and may push themselves back to work too soon. Colleagues, without guidelines or support, may fumble to figure out how to behave sensitively around their grieving workmate.”
Here’s Millsap’s advice on how to plan for the unplannable:
1. Focus on the Individual. The challenge with creating a standard policy for grief in your company is grief by its very nature is not the same for everyone. It needs to be adaptable to the circumstance and the individual. Some things you’ll want to keep in mind are:
- Personal support: Does everyone in your company know their options for getting connected to a counselor or therapist in times of trauma? Is it clear whether health insurance covers it? Having to figure out the logistics of seeking help when you’re already living through trauma just adds to the uphill battle. Does your company have a culture where seeing a therapist is as clearly understood and as unstigmatized as seeing a dentist?
- Financial support: Think about this for a moment. When Millsap lost her husband, she faced not only the enormity of living without her partner and the father to her two children, she faced the urgent challenge of having to shut down her business, losing a second income, and finding thousands for the medical and funeral expenses. Three to five days away from work isn’t going to solve those problems. The financial challenges that come with illness, death or other loss of stability can sink a family. What additional support can employees in your company rely on when facing major financial crises stemmed from trauma?
- Workload support: In Plan B, Sandberg describes her first day back in the office after losing her husband. She remembered being a mess, falling asleep in a meeting, calling a colleague by the wrong name, rambling. Distraught about not performing well, she later called her boss, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, to ask if she should even be there. Zuckerberg told her to take the time she needed but also recounted all the things Sandberg had done that day that pushed the company forward.
Work is different in the shadow of grief; and yes, it suffers. But approached right, the company and survivor can come out of it stronger. Have the discussion now:
- What is your triage plan if a key team member needs to adjust their workload or focus after a loss?
- Who picks up that work and for how long?
- What options do you have for remote work, cutting hours, redistributing responsibilities?
- What’s the plan to ramp that individual back up when they’re ready?
- And how do you do all of the above sustainably?
Again, all of this is going to vary by individual, but talking through your options now will save a lot of confusion and tension later.
2. Take stake of all those affected. It can be easy to forget amid caring for the most acutely affected that tragedies have a ripple effect across your company. Grief often comes without warning. For every one person in an office, there are colleagues and direct reports, customers and partners, all left in the lurch trying to process, help, and continue their work simultaneously.
Strong grief policies will have a communication plan for each of these populations. It will provide guidance for peers, adjust expectations for customers, and provide answers wherever possible about what comes next.
3. Address all the contingencies. Grief, in any form, is a time of crisis in an individual’s life. And so what we’re really talking about here is a crisis communications plan. When you sit down to develop yours you want to think through all the contingencies.
- What if it’s the CEO?
- What if trauma strikes the whole office?
- What if it strikes a customer or client?
The Best Plan is Empathy
These things are awful to think about. They’re painful and worrisome, and you hope you’ll never have to use it. But having a contingency plan for all of your “what-if” possibilities puts the company as a whole in a more stable place and enables you to focus wholly on the individual who needs support if that time comes.
Finally, Millsap says the #1 thing companies can do to prepare for crisis is to nurture a more empathic culture. When Millsap started her consultancy she initially called it, “The Grief Counselor”. But that put the focus in the wrong place, she says. Focusing on grief the moment it hits you is short-sighted.
Companies that do the best job adapting to traumatic experiences are those that build empathy into their workplace culture long before trauma strikes.
Her focus now is on helping companies make that shift.
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Listen to my full conversation with Karen Millsap here:
