Managing grief in the workplace, employee bereavement support, workplace mental health, and creating psychologically safe work environments
Picture this: It’s March 2020, the first day of your state’s COVID-19 response, and you’re in the State Emergency Operations Center trying to figure out how to keep children fed during a global pandemic. Then your phone rings, and in one devastating moment, your world collapses. Literally. You fall to the floor of a government building, surrounded by your boss, your boss’s boss, and a room full of colleagues who are about to witness the rawest moment of your life.
Your father has died. The father you just chatted with on your way to work. The father who raised you alone after the death of your mother.
This is exactly what happened to Rebecca Feinglos, MPP, a policy expert who has turned one of the worst days of her life into a mission to change how we handle grief in the workplace. Her story reveals critical insights about employee mental health, workplace culture, and the hidden costs of pretending emotions don’t exist in professional settings.
Employee Mental Health: The Mythology We’ve Built Around Work
We’ve constructed an elaborate fiction about American workplaces: that they’re emotion-free zones where we can compartmentalize our humanity and focus purely on productivity. This mythology suggests that if something devastating happens in your personal life, you should be able to neatly separate it from your professional responsibilities, like switching between browser tabs.
But here’s what Rebecca discovered in the most visceral way possible: grief is already at work. We’re just pretending it’s not.
The pretending is what makes everything so awkward. When we act like grief doesn’t exist in professional spaces, we create an atmosphere where everyone – both the grieving person and their colleagues – feels completely unprepared to navigate these intensely human moments.
How to Support Grieving Employees: A Global Reality Check
During her talks at international companies, Rebecca encountered something illuminating. When speaking to employees from FHI 360’s offices in Kenya, several participants pushed back on her premise entirely.
“This actually isn’t our experience at all,” they said. “Of course we’re going to make time to support someone. Of course we’re going to the funeral. Everyone knows when someone has died – it’s not a secret.”
This response reveals something crucial: our American approach to grief at work isn’t universal or inevitable. It’s cultural. Other societies have figured out how to integrate human experiences like loss into their professional environments without the world ending.
Workplace Stress Management: The Urgency Reset
One of the most striking changes Rebecca experienced after her father’s death was how it completely recalibrated her sense of workplace urgency. Suddenly, emails marked “urgent” felt not just misplaced, but almost offensive.
But here’s where it gets interesting: at the same time she was dismissing routine “urgent” requests, she was fielding actual urgent calls from the Secretary of Health, asking “A teacher just died. What is our response going to be?”
This contrast highlights something profound about how grief changes our relationship to work. It’s not that grieving people become less capable or less committed – it’s that they develop a more acute understanding of what actually matters.
Manager Training: Understanding the Fear Factor
Much of our discomfort with grief at work stems from fear – but not necessarily the fear you’d expect. Tracy Wheeler, one of Rebecca’s advisors, identified a key insight: we’re not just afraid that grief will make us less productive. We’re afraid that we won’t know how to respond appropriately when we encounter someone else’s grief.
“It’s not like it might not necessarily be that your boss is afraid you’ll be less productive. It’s more like, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know how to… we just culturally don’t know what to do.'”
This fear of making a mistake when the stakes feel high creates a workplace culture where everyone tiptooes around human experiences, making them more awkward and isolating than they need to be.
Building Psychological Safety: When Crisis Happens at Work
Rebecca’s experience offers a surprising counternarrative to our fears about vulnerability in professional settings. When she literally collapsed in front of her colleagues after learning of her father’s death, she discovered something unexpected: her workplace became one of the safest places for her to be.
Her colleagues didn’t run away or treat her differently (well, not in the ways she feared). Instead, they helped her up. The Secretary of Health and Human Services talked to her father’s wife on the phone because Rebecca couldn’t speak. People showed up in the most human way possible.
“I just wanted… I think I just had no fucks to give anymore, because it was like, ‘Oh, everyone has seen me at my absolute worst. There is no more bottoming out – this is the worst thing.’ So I guess I’m gonna go do my best at work every day.”
Paradoxically, having her vulnerability completely exposed made her more willing to take creative risks and speak up with new ideas. When everyone’s already seen you crying on the floor, a typo in a PowerPoint presentation suddenly seems pretty manageable.
Bereavement Policies: Beyond Traditional Leave Programs
While bereavement leave policies are important, Rebecca argues they’re not the complete solution. “Cool, if you give people 2 months off at work, that would be awesome… but they’re still gonna come back. And we still need to know how to talk to each other at work when we come back.”
Real support for grief in the workplace requires:
- Policy changes that provide ongoing grief support, not just time off
- Cultural shifts that normalize talking about loss and human experiences
- Training for managers and colleagues on how to respond to grief
- Recognition that grief doesn’t follow neat timelines or professional boundaries
The Productivity Paradox
Here’s something that might surprise productivity-obsessed managers: grief doesn’t necessarily make people worse employees. Rebecca found that her grief made her more honest, more creative, and more willing to advocate for important changes. Her “no fucks to give” attitude led directly to her successful advocacy for bereavement leave policies for state employees.
When we stop treating grief like a professional liability and start treating it like a human experience that requires support, we often discover that grieving employees can be incredibly motivated to do meaningful work – they just might have different priorities than they used to.
The Bottom Line
We spend more time with our colleagues than with many of our friends and family members. Statistically, our workplaces are going to be the front lines of grief support simply because that’s where we are when life happens.
We can continue pretending that work is separate from human experience, creating awkward, isolating environments that serve no one well. Or we can acknowledge that grief – like falling in love, having children, or dealing with illness – is part of the full spectrum of human experience that we bring to work whether we acknowledge it or not.
The choice isn’t whether to allow grief at work. Grief is already there. The choice is whether we’re going to handle it well or poorly.
As Rebecca puts it: “Grief should be safe at work.” Not because it will make grief feel good – nothing will do that. But because it will make it easier for all of us to live our full, complicated, human lives while also doing work that matters.
And maybe, just maybe, it will help us all get better at distinguishing between what’s actually urgent and what’s just marked “urgent” in an email.