How can I help a grieving colleague?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘How can I help a grieving colleague?’

Gabriella Braun
Trauma isn’t usually something we can process immediately, so it might be that people just need the chance just to say how they feel immediately and then have time later. What you don’t want is it silently and sometimes rather toxically working its way through the organisation because it’s not spoken about and dealt with.

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Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. Work is a big part of life, but it’s not the only one, and the things that happen to us outside the office affect who we are inside it. The death of a loved one, for example, will almost always affect the way someone acts at work. Managers need to know how to support bereaved colleagues even if it isn’t easy. The voice you heard at the top of the show was Gabriella Braun. She’s the director of Working Well, a behavioural consultancy for teams and leaders. Gabriella has consulted widely on the effects of loss at work, and as she’ll tell us a little later, grief isn’t simple and doesn’t fit within the narrower definitions used in some workplaces.

Before I speak to Gabriella, we’re going to hear from Andy Langford. He’s the clinical director for Cruse Bereavement Support, the largest bereavement charity in the UK. I spoke to Andy to learn more about the practical things that managers can do to help grieving colleagues. I started by asking him how managers can strike the right balance between compassion and professionalism.

Andy Langford
There’s a balance between being clear and straightforward and also being kind and compassionate and warm. It’s important to know what policies are in place within your workplace. So some workplaces will have a bereavement policy already. And if that’s the case, that’s fantastic. And that should guide you through it. And what all of that needs to be framed into is actually having as open a conversation as possible with the people who are affected by the bereavement, whether it’s them individually or whether it’s people who are going to receive someone back into the workplace.

Isabel Berwick
I imagine that a lot of bereavement policies have been in place for some time, you know, and people are often only eligible for leave, for example, if someone defined as a close relative has died. But we can often feel grief for friends or colleagues. How should employers take that into consideration?

Andy Langford
So most of the bereavement policies that I’ve seen that are worth their salt usually allow for some flexibility. You know, lots of evidence would state, in fact, I’ve seen it myself, your cognitive functions can be quite impaired by bereavement, so we can start to experience a sort of dullness of thought. It’s difficult to string thoughts together, to make sense of sort of complex information.

So it’s worth, as a manager, being aware what your policy allows and then going into the conversation, knowing what is possible to grant and when. You can have a conversation where the bereaved person may sketch out what they think they need at this point in time, but then you can always go back and check and then come back to them and have a further conversation because the other thing to that in mind, of course, is when we’re bereaved, our needs change as they go. And so we might find that we need a little bit of time in the first couple of days, but we might then need a couple of other days, several weeks down the line, because it takes time to arrange a funeral. There might be an inquest. So each individual situation is really quite different and needs. It does need a bespoke approach, really. So a good policy should allow a little bit of flexibility.

Isabel Berwick
So is it incumbent on the person who’s grieving to tell their employer how they’re feeling, you know, how they’re being affected and when they’re unable to work? Or is that something that the manager has to sort of judge?

Andy Langford
Practically, it’s usually from the bereaved person first. What works best, then, is a mutually agreed conversation of what’s needed by the bereaved person, but also what’s needed for the team and for the business. Now, if a bereavement policy is phrased well, that should give a bit of structure to when those conversations need to happen, and usually it’s as soon as possible. So when the bereaved person makes contact, it’s useful to have a fairly prompt conversation about what’s happened, how the business or how the team can support, if that’s relevant, what the manager might need to do, and then also, when the next conversation will happen. And in addition to this, what the bereaved person would like their colleagues to be told. And it may be for some people that they don’t want to tell their colleagues anything at that point. It may be that for someone else, actually, they want their colleagues to know that a significant bereavement has occurred for that person.

Isabel Berwick
Is there a role for the manager in encouraging employees to be open, and if so, how best can they do it? Or is that something we should steer away from?

Andy Langford
If the manager is equipped in knowing where they can signpost an employee to for additional support, that’s really helpful. We’re not depending upon managers to be counsellors or psychotherapists or even social workers. We want them to be managers who already have a relationship with the bereaved individual. If they could be equipped going into that conversation with knowing what they can provide from the policy but also where the person can get some extra help, that’s really useful. The other thing to bear in mind is that the very person might not be wanting to be open at that point in time. They might wanna deal with some practical things. So really for the manager, it’s useful to be in a position where you can ask, actually, what does that person need right now?

Isabel Berwick
So I think anyone who’s lost someone knows that feeling of being upset or perhaps annoyed by certain phrases, and managers might be cautious in what they say. Are there things you should avoid saying to people in the workplace?

Andy Langford
Clichés. Going to sleep, passing on, had a good innings. I’ve even heard things like everyone’s got to go at some point . . . 

Isabel Berwick
Oh God.

Andy Langford
Say in your own words that you’re sorry to hear about the loss, and then also you’re there for them. And then also to mimic or mirror the phrases that person’s using. If someone comes to you and says, actually, my mother, my father’s passed away, it’s OK to mirror that language, because that’s something that’s acceptable for them. It’s when we’re dropping in a cliché from our own repertoire is when it usually goes wrong.

Isabel Berwick
That’s brilliant advice. Thank you, Andy. So when someone’s profoundly affected by grief, colleagues might become resentful because they’re not pulling their weight. Do you have any advice for managers and teams on that?

Andy Langford
It may be that for some people, their workload needs to increase a little bit to take into account when the bereaved person isn’t present. So it’s important to get that in mind and then if needed, seek a little bit of support around planning that through. Because what we know, what research would say is that if we support the person who’s bereaved at that point when they’ve experienced what is potentially one of the most difficult times in their life, but then they’re able to be supported back into work, it’s better for their health, it’s better for our team’s health, and it’s better for business, because generally, if you’ve had as positive experience you can of your employer when you’re bereaved, you’re usually more loyal and, you know, generally more able to bond with whatever the values of the workplace are, which then makes you more productive.

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Isabel Berwick
Talking frankly to someone who’s grieving isn’t easy. After my mother died, many friends and colleagues didn’t know what to say. And equally, I’ve let my own fear of displays of extreme emotion get in the way of talking to others who are going through profound loss. But Andy gave us a sense there of some practical methods that can help. If you’re a manager, read up on your company’s bereavement policy so you know what you can offer employees and recognise that flexibility can go a long way to making their lives easier. Colleagues might not turn to us for emotional support, but they’ll probably appreciate being given some space and small, practical acts of kindness.

Bereavement is the biggest cause of grief, but it’s not the only one. All types of loss can disrupt our working lives. I mentioned Gabriella Braun earlier. She’s the director of Working Well, a workplace consultancy, and is also the author of All That We Are, a book about why people behave the way they do at work. Gabriella has advised many companies on grief and loss, but her definition of grief might not be what you’d expect.

Gabriella Braun
We encounter it in the obvious ways, like we’ve had a bereavement or a colleague’s had a bereavement, or a colleague dies. But we encounter it in other ways that aren’t as obvious. We bring in our own grief about, for instance, when we lose illusions, like we might have thought that we were going to become a big CEO or a world-famous writer or whatever it is and over years we begin to realise, no, that’s not gonna happen. And that can bring some grief with it, the loss of illusion, the realisation of who we are and where we’re going, our capability and our lack of capability. Change always brings about loss, whether it’s for good or not. It brings about some loss, and loss involves some level of grief. So actually, it’s very alive in the workplace all the time because we’re always having change.

Isabel Berwick
The definition of grief is beyond death.

Gabriella Braun
Absolutely. I include loss, so then it’s much beyond death.

Isabel Berwick
And do you meet resistance to that? Because sometimes it can seem a bit, should we say blasphemous or disrespectful to talk about grief in a non-bereavement context?

Gabriella Braun
When you say it in the workplace, loss is part of change and there might be some grief involved in that, not like bereavement, but there might be some grief. It so resonates for people. They all see it immediately. Or loss and grief on a smaller level about when their best mate at work leaves. So it mightn’t be a bereavement and I don’t think people resist it, as I say, because it means a lot to them.

Isabel Berwick
I’ve heard from readers of my newsletter who’ve had colleagues who’ve taken their own lives. Is there a different way to deal with that? Because that is a particular kind of trauma that carries guilt with it, perhaps?

Gabriella Braun
It’s a terrible trauma. And I think often that might be a time to get in an outsider to help with that, actually, because everyone will be affected by that. And managers and leaders will be very affected by that. They might feel very guilty that they had no idea that this was going on and somebody was in this kind of state. So it does need careful attention. You can’t pretend that’s not happening and will go away. Trauma isn’t usually something we can process immediately. So it might be that people just need the chance just to say how they feel immediately and not try and digest it at all, because we can’t immediately. So it’s probably something to come back to because what you don’t want is it silently and sometimes rather toxically working its way through the organisation because it’s not spoken about and dealt with.

Isabel Berwick
What advice do you have for people listening who are the person who’s bereaved? You know, what do you tell your team? How could work help you or not help you? Or is there a particular way you should be, or is it different for everybody?

Gabriella Braun
I think it’s different for everybody. What I recently said to a client I see in coaching who’s had a very serious bereavement and very, very unexpected bereavement. Don’t assume it’ll all go in a linear pattern. Be prepared for it to go up and down. I think we have to be kind to ourselves, not expect OK, I’ll do this in this amount of time. I’ll be able to go back to work in two weeks, or I mustn’t go back to work for two months.

The thing that’s really important is also to allow ourselves to do the mourning. Freud wrote a paper back in 1917, rather a long time ago, called “Mourning and Melancholia”, what we’d call clinical depression now. And he said mourning and clinical depression share the same symptoms. We become lethargic. We’re not interested in the world around us. We’re not interested in people. All of those things go on when we’re mourning and when we’re very depressed. And if we don’t allow ourselves some mourning, we’re liable to get depressed. Having said that, let ourselves escape at times. I mean, I remember when my mum died, being at the hospital with my sister with her dead body, and I said to my sister, this is the first time in our lives we’ve been in a room with mum and she’s been quiet. And my sister burst out laughing. But you know, there can be funny moments in grief as well and that’s OK.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. And perhaps work has a role to play there in lightening our load.

Gabriella Braun
I think it absolutely does. And remembering that we can be competent again, remembering that other side of us is very important.

Isabel Berwick
There’s often not much organisational give for these things. Are you seeing any changes in organisations? I think there’s probably a standard — is it two weeks bereavement leave?

Gabriella Braun
Yeah.

Isabel Berwick
So a lot of it is down to managers’ discretion, I would imagine.

Gabriella Braun
A lot of it is down to managers’ discretion. I think the pandemic brought a little bit of change, actually, and some have fled from that and gone back to how it was before. But I think the pandemic, there was so much grief and loss and shock around the pandemic, and managers had to be different. And I certainly had managers at that time and senior leaders saying to me, I’m prioritising looking after my staff. I’m prioritising relating to my staff in ways I hadn’t before. I don’t want to go back to how it was before. It’s so much better. And I think that gave a little bit of give because nobody could escape grief and loss around the pandemic.

Isabel Berwick
Could we recap how grief shows up in workplaces? So I think it’s when a relative of ours dies, we have a personal bereavement. It’s when a colleague is very ill or dies. Are there other ways that grief shows up?

Gabriella Braun
Yes, there are. So an organisational closure, that’s a grief. I worked with an organisation as it was closing down. That’s an obvious one. Mergers — often people forget that there’s grief involved in that. Sometimes people think only the organisation in effect being taken over will have any loss and grief. Well, the other organisation does as well because it’s a loss of identity. You’re changing your identity and that involves grief. Loss because of people leaving. Loss because of our own frailties and illusions going. Or we’re getting older and we can’t do things that we did before. All of those things bring about loss and bring about some level of grief.

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Isabel Berwick
I think we should draw a distinction between individual bereavement — losing someone close to us — and organisational grief. For most of us, even a severe change at work won’t compare to the loss of a loved one. But both give managers a chance to think about the kind of workplace culture they want to foster. Being understanding and flexible will help your employees, which will ultimately help you. People want to work for understanding bosses. The kinder you are to them, the happier they’ll be, and the happier they are, the more they’ll want to pull their weight. That’s the theory, anyway. I think my most important takeaway from this episode is not to be embarrassed by emotions at work. Grief is the hardest thing that any of us have to deal with. And having support at work is so important.

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Thanks to Andy Langford and Gabriella Braun. There’s a link to Cruse’s resources on grief in the show notes. This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. Manuela Saragosa was the executive editor and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.

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