The Consequences of Unacknowledged Grief in the Workplace
Creating grief-informed workplaces is a needed response to the tolls of the pandemic — and an opportunity for cultural change.
Alan, an executive in his mid-50s, had been one of my therapy clients for nearly three years, but it was the first time I’d seen him cry. A respected champion of a high-performing team, Alan was an enthusiastic leader when his company took work online in 2020. By late 2022, all but one member of the team of specialists Alan had spent a decade cultivating had left his company.
During the Great Resignation of 2021, Alan and his fellow managers were instructed by higher-ups to stem the company’s dramatic employee turnover. Their bonuses were cut when their efforts weren’t successful. More recently, Alan had found himself raising his voice in a management meeting as he attempted to defend his remaining team members against accusations of “quiet quitting” and low motivation.
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Month after month, Alan reported feeling more broken down by his company’s insistence that he get his numbers back up to pre-pandemic levels. The breaking point came when the last remaining member of his original team resigned. “I just don’t think I can lose much more,” he wept.
Alan was surprised by his tears, but I wasn’t. Any significant change can bring with it a sense of loss. Grief is the natural emotional reaction to loss, and the pandemic is an ongoing story of compound loss. Over 9 million people in the U.S. are grieving COVID-19 deaths. Even those who have not lost loved ones have faced other daily losses, including some of the people, events, and structures that previously helped establish a sense of safety and resilience in coping with stress.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Collapse
The human body is wired to resist loss as it happens. When we sense a perceived threat, a built-in instinctive and progressive response system activates — fight, flight, or freeze — in an attempt to manage high levels of stress and return us to safety. It is only after we return to safety that we begin to take stock of what was lost, feel the effects, and start to grieve.
Alan and his team started the pandemic in fight response. Like soldiers in an invisible war, they gathered the materials needed to work from home, chose not to lower quarterly expectations, and attempted to battle their way to their goals.
When the fight response didn’t succeed in creating safety, they moved into flight. Instead of offering more flexibility in response to employee reports of increased stress, upper management at Alan’s company decided to more carefully track employee work hours. A third of the employees left.
Despite Alan’s attempts to advocate for his much-diminished team to stay virtual, they were called back into the office. Many of them subsequently entered a state of freeze, a form of survival that looks like defeat and often presents as low motivation. Left uninterrupted, the sensation of “stuckness” can transform from a feeling into a belief. What was once a thought of “I feel stuck, helpless, undervalued, and misunderstood” becomes “I am helpless, undervalued, and misunderstood.” Because grief is so often isolating, the sense of stuckness tends to multiply alongside the sense of feeling alone and misunderstood.
People typically return to higher levels of function when a precipitating traumatic event ends. If there is no end in sight, a person might find themselves in collapse, which is akin to curling into the fetal position to simply survive. At work, this looks like a disengaged employee who no longer meets deadlines or expectations and is no longer motivated by typical incentives like positive feedback, team cohesion, or even bonuses.
The structure of the brain is such that when the defense (limbic) system is active, the more critical, curious, and innovative parts of the brain shut down. Having spent so long in a state of distress, Alan’s team was less likely than ever to be able to generate new and creative ideas about how to unfreeze and move forward.
Acknowledging Loss
Employees need acknowledgment that there really is no going back to life as usual after a significant loss rather than leaders’ expressions of frustration with employees experiencing difficulty returning to work. If we don’t identify loss and acknowledge the grief, we will hinder our workforce in evolving practices for a world that is much changed. Grief can be likened to global warming — a mounting cultural problem that is on some level invisible but, left unaddressed, will do irreparable damage.
The news media and CEOs are quick to identify employee attendance and attitude as a work or motivation issue, but this misses the larger cultural truth: Work has become a life issue. The pandemic pushed many people to rethink the role and value of work in their lives, culminating in the Great Resignation, which has been studied by researchers at Gallup, the Society for Human Resource Management, the Pew Research Center, and many others. The limitations of the data collected reflect a larger problem: that the culture of the American workplace consistently ignores, minimizes, and dismisses the core emotional experience of grief that impacts a person’s desire and willingness to be at work.
Employees need acknowledgment that there really is no going back to life as usual after significant loss.
People may not know why they leave jobs, only that they are unhappy. Although they may acknowledge feeling frustrated or undervalued, they’re much less likely to identify the root cause of their discontent as workplace grief related to loss — of teammates, office spaces, happy hours, bonus structures, and other elements of their pre-pandemic work lives. Cultural conditioning equates grieving with failing, so even if employees could acknowledge or articulate grief-related unhappiness at work, they would still likely minimize it.
Companies’ inability to acknowledge that grief exists in the workplace means that they are unlikely to address its impact. It does no one any good to have unidentified grievers trying to white-knuckle their way through the workday. Many workplaces hold regular training on issues like sexual harassment, discrimination, and gender equity but invest next to nothing in grief education or support. While many organizations proudly promote positive mental health, grief is not considered a mental health issue. Profound loss is a developmental stage that everyone goes through at some point, but it has never before been so present in the workplace. The amount and variety of loss people are currently navigating without additional resources while at work is astounding.
Since the pandemic, the task of creating grief-informed companies has become imperative. Bereaved employees are often acknowledged for a period of days or weeks, despite the consistent feedback from grievers that they experience symptoms (that few know to identify as grief) for much longer periods.
Corporate America has an opportunity for cultural leadership by transforming the way grief is addressed, and it is fair to expect that many people will benefit from those efforts. It is not an exaggeration to say that if companies were to prioritize grief, the impact would be global.
Though organizations have typically relied on their HR departments to handle emotional issues, it is managers who have been held accountable for the burden of employee attrition and disengagement. Grief must be addressed as an issue of company culture rather than a training concern. All grieving employees deserve corporate understanding and support, and those who have yet to experience loss will benefit from knowing how to offer colleagues the same support they will rely on themselves when it comes their time to grieve.
Embracing Grief: Steps to Move Forward
After my meeting with Alan, I felt a little of his hopelessness. Later, I sat on my couch watching a crossover TV drama that blended the cast of a popular show about an emergency room with a show about a fire department on the same network. The firefighters and doctors worked together to save the lives threatened by the same fire. Alan has an MBA and knows boardrooms and business. I have a master’s degree in social work and know emotions and neuroscience. What if teams like Alan’s were to reach out to mine and we worked together to address loss?
A compassionate grief response includes preparing for the emotional variability of employees, offering grief education, and demonstrating emotional understanding in a wide variety of everyday ways. A company’s ability to provide compassionate, flexible responses across the board is in its own self-interests as well as those of its employees, because these adjustments address common problematic features of toxic work environments.
Here are some actions that companies can take to help employees experiencing workplace grief to move forward.
Provide support to leaders and teams. Companies don’t have to become mental health clinics to become grief informed. An outside team of grief experts can help create a new, better-informed workplace that names loss as part of the pandemic’s devastating emotional toll, creates time and space for healthy grieving, and acknowledges and promotes change and innovation in determining what work will look like going forward. Seeking the support of grief-informed coaches and clinicians is neither a failure nor an abdication of responsibility. It’s an opportunity to learn how the body and mind are affected by trauma, how that impact shows up in a workplace setting, and how to adjust accordingly.
Companies don’t have to become mental health clinics to become grief informed.
Offer education. Grief education is a powerful way to help a company lead with compassion in the face of loss. We grieve with our bodies and our minds, though few people are aware of how that process works or the symptoms it drives. The part of the brain (the amygdala) that activates the fight, flight, and freeze responses enlarges during trauma. This inhibits the messages that typically travel from the base of the brain to our prefrontal cortex, where we do our critical thinking.
Knowing this simple piece of neuroscience — that grief directly affects our mental functions — encourages a supportive work culture in which bereaved employees can anticipate returning to a grief-informed team that’s prepared for the normal fluctuations in energy and concentration that typically accompany fresh loss. Managers will feel immediate relief at defining the problem of grief as a biological reality rather than as a reflection on themselves.
Creative accommodations and policies. Team leadership that responds with flexibility regarding workload and scheduling to accommodate the common grief responses of brain fog and memory loss demonstrates compassion and respect to employees, whether or not they have experienced significant loss.
An organization that is better informed about grief can revisit bereavement policies and ensure that they align with what we know about loss. It can also avoid outreach efforts that will be seen as unsupportive — like in the case of a company that sent the same flower arrangement to an employee after the death of her child that they’d sent to celebrate her promotion.
Organizations can establish a grief-inclusive environment simply by putting some thought into what resources to offer. They should have supports in place — such as contracting a nationwide food delivery service to provide meals, extending existing hotel partnership discounts to family and friends traveling for funerals, and sending a leadership-level representative to wakes, funerals, and celebrations of life — long before they’re needed. They should also ensure that support is in place and readily available should a team experience the death of a colleague. They might consider augmenting existing employee assistance programs with a service like Help Texts, which sends grief-informed texts to both grievers and their identified support system for a year after a loss.
Because these changes represent a cultural shift, they need to be championed across departments, not simply handled by HR. Each organization will likely have individuals and departments with valuable ideas and abilities to help promote change, but the core message — that grief is significant — must come from the highest levels of leadership.
Provide ongoing support. More subtle ongoing grief-related support can be as simple as mentioning grief-related resources in employee communications or creating a library of readily available grief-related materials. All employees, grieving or not, can benefit from discounted gym memberships, organized walking groups to promote exercise, and meditation, art, or music experiences offered in and out of the office.
Alan was ultimately grateful to understand that his tears during our session were ones of loss, but he wondered how to grieve in a company that had not made any emotional room for it. Alan will likely return a recruiter’s phone call from last week. But if we work quickly and together, we may be able to identify supportive options that will enable Alan to stay at the company he once described as “family.”
We need to innovate quickly. Grief and loss are right there waiting for us. Let’s get to work.