When Grief Walks into The Workplace

I recently attended a webinar on grief in the workplace, facilitated by Grief First Aid, and it prompted a deeper reflection on how loss is carried into professional spaces. Grief does not remain neatly outside the office door. It arrives with people, sits quietly beside them, and often goes unseen or unspoken.

I recalled how it was for my husband to go back to work carrying his grief over the death of our daughter, and I wondered if, 22 years later, whether anything had changed.  When grief comes to work, management, staff and workplace structure will vary in response -  some environments create space for compassion, flexibility, and understanding. Others, often unintentionally, move quickly to restore normality, focusing on performance, routine, and productivity.  In doing so, the human experience that sits underneath a person’s capacity to function can be overlooked.

There has also been an increasing reliance on Employee Assistance Programs as the primary avenue of support for employees in distress. Access to professional care is important and often essential. Yet there is a subtle question that sits beneath this shift.  When support is outsourced to a formal service, do we risk stepping back from the everyday human responsibility to connect? A referral can be meaningful, but it does not replace the value of presence, acknowledgement, and simple acts of care between colleagues.

Another important consideration is what grief can look like in the workplace. What may be difficulties with concentration, physical ailments, impaired decision making, withdrawal, and reduced engagement can easily be misinterpreted as poor performance or lack of motivation. In many cases, these are entirely normal responses to trauma and loss.

When these cues are misunderstood, organisations may miss the opportunity to recognise that someone is grieving and in need of support rather than scrutiny, performance management and KPI’s.

This becomes even more complex when the loss itself is not widely recognised or understood. Pregnancy loss is a powerful example of disenfranchised grief. It is a loss that is deeply felt but often not publicly acknowledged. The baby may not have been known to others so there may be no shared rituals such as birthdays, Christmas…no shared language around being a mutual connection such as a relative, a friend…and no clear permission to grieve. As a result, parents may return to work carrying a profound sense of loss that feels invisible to those around them.

Western society often struggles to speak openly about death let alone child death. There is a quiet discomfort that surrounds it, as though it sits at the wrong end of life’s expected order.

Dying is more readily acknowledged when it happens to those who have lived long lives, built identities, and left visible social footprints.

When a baby dies before or shortly after birth, there can be an unspoken belief that there was not yet a life to recognise in the same way. This can leave parents feeling that their grief is minimised, misunderstood, or not fully permitted.

Grief will find its way into every workplace at some point. It may be through the death of a partner, a parent, a child, or a pregnancy that ended before it had the chance to be known by others. How we respond, both as organisations and as individuals, matters deeply.

It is worth asking how our workplaces make space for grief. What support is offered, both formally and informally?  How are conversations held?  What is acknowledged, and what is avoided?

It is also worth asking something more personal. When we notice a colleague who may be grieving, what is our own response? Do we lean in with presence, or step back out of uncertainty?  If we have experienced grief ourselves while working, what felt helpful, and what made the experience harder?

We will all encounter grief at some point in our lives. In the workplace, support does not always require the right words or a structured intervention.

Sometimes it begins with recognition, with patience, and with a willingness to see what might be happening beneath the surface.

If this resonates with you, please don't hesitate to reach out. Darrell