Grief: The Emotion Human Resources Must Address

There is an unspoken rule that we can speak about the meaning that work provides but we do not know how to discuss the loss of meaning.

Grief - What We Experience After a Loss

Grief can come in many forms. While the triggers may differ, it is an emotion, we have never brought into the workplace. There is limited dialog and even sparser action because of the many myths this emotion is associated with. In this chapter, we confront the complex and often overlooked issue of grief among employees, an emotion that came to our consciousness during the Covid-19 pandemic. Job loss, the death of a loved one, a colleague and more became part of eight billion people as they dealt with the devastation. While pandemic has subsided, grief continues to remain a part of our life.

As we look back at the pandemic, I wonder if we have missed the most important lesson. We have not yet learned to talk about loss in the workplace, even though there are so many processes in the world of work, that trigger a sense of loss.

There is an unspoken rule that we can speak about the meaning that work provides but we do not know how to discuss the loss of meaning.

Hiring and onboarding are celebrated in the workplace but we rarely see organisations being sensitive to employees who have experienced the loss of identity or control or structure because of a reorganization.

The company’s Human Resources (HR) department that can play a vital role in addressing grief. To do that they need to recognise the various kinds of laws that trigger grief.

This chapter explores the various sources that can trigger grief and dispels common myths that often prevent employers from adequately supporting their grieving employees.

I have worked with many organizations as an HR leader and as a consultant. I have practical suggestions for HR departments that are easy to implement. I hope this compassionate analysis provides a much-needed framework for understanding andaddressing grief in the workplace. The time for action is now - we must respond to this urgent issue with compassion and understanding.

Key Discussion Areas

● An insight into the minds of someone grieving and their need for acknowledgment

● Types of grief experienced in personal as well as professional lives and the approaches to deal with them

● Myths accepted as a norm by organizations and HR professionals in relation to an employees' grief

● Recommendations for HR professionals to help their employees through their grief

The Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle

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The New Normal: Grief in the Workplaces

“This pandemic has embarrassed every futurist. Just ask the next one, how many of their predictions about 2020 have come true. I have never seen so much uncertainty about the future. This uncertainty impacts business and jobs. ‘When will things go back to ‘normal’—by that I mean how life was in December 2019’, said “NS”., the head of the largest executive search firm in India. He spoketo me in a personal interview and said that he was worried that mental health issues arising from this pandemic would outweigh anyskill-related challenge leaders have ever faced before.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, decisions that would have taken days and weeks were all taken in minutes and hours. Every decision had the risk of becoming a precedent that leaders could possibly regret in the future. No one had the luxury of time to deliberate. Leaders around the world had to choose between reducing salaries and laying off employees. Over two years later, the situation has not changed. Everyone is experiencing moments for which there is no road map. There are missed moments that will never come back. When people say that this is the “new normal,” they are reassuring themselves that the churn and destruction is behind us. In our hearts we know that the familiar world we once knew is no more. The coronavirus pandemic has led to a collective loss of normalcy. That discomfort we are feeling is grief (Berinato 2020).

Independent of the pandemic, individual sources of grief take no reprieve when we go about our jobs. A surgeon lost his wife in afreak accident. He survived and was torn apart by survivor’s guilt. What bruised him was the behavior of the colleagues as he returned to work. A fellow surgeon said:

Back at work, a shock of a different kind awaits. Expecting to be greeted by an outpouring of sympathy at his loss, he walks into silence. People go past him and look sideways. They make an off-color joke. Or they work with him and say nothing. His raw grief craves acknowledgment. He knows that nothing will bring her back, but a simple recognition of his loss might just pull him through the day. After all, a sorrow shared is a sorrow divided.

Grief is an invisible emotion in the workplace because we have long been told that emotions are to be left behind at home when we step into the office. The pandemic toppled that assumption. For many of us, we know longer had to step into an office to be able to go to work. We lived in a bubble that is a curious mix of home and workplace. It was precisely this setting that let me study the same emotion at close quarters.