HR needs to talk about grief at work

Grief affects everyone differently.

That can make it hard for HR pros to guide employees through the grieving process, especially if they’ve never experienced loss themselves. But grief literacy training can help, according to Patricia Bravo, leadership development consultant and author of In the Room: When Grief Comes to Work.

Bravo sat down with HR Brew to share more about grief in the workplace.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

The concept that loss and grief are universal topics that we either have experienced or will be experiencing, and yet it’s one of the most underrepresented topics that’s being discussed in the workplace…We talk more about communication preferences and work styles. We talk about well-being. We talk about mental health, but somehow this topic hasn’t yet made it into the forefront. And, my hope is that HR professionals can really consider what the impact of grief literacy might be in their organization.

How can leaders and HR pros empathize with grief if they’ve never experienced it?

This is where grief literacy can really come in terms of helping professionals and organizations better understand what grief is and how it impacts people…Some of the behaviors that you might see people experience when they’re going through loss and grief might be misattributed to other things. For example, if you see somebody whose, suddenly, their performance isn’t as stellar as it’s been in the past, or they seem checked out, it could be easy to misattribute that to underperformance.

The other thing that organizations really wrestle with is the concept of: What is the best way for me to engage with an individual that has experienced loss and grief? And, my observation is that people don’t always know how to engage because they don’t want to say the wrong thing…My hope is that this book gives organizations and leaders an opportunity to begin the conversation wherever it happens to be in their organizations about grief literacy.

What is grief literacy?

Grief literacy is understanding the foundations and the fundamentals of loss and grief. Grief expertise is attributed to those people that are really deeply steeped and trained in grief, so those might be therapists, those might be thanatologists who study death, and dying, and bereavement.

What I’m suggesting is that we can all become grief literate…It might be as simple as knowing how to engage in a conversation with someone. It might include knowing that an individual’s needs might change from day to day and week to week, and even month to month.

It also includes appreciating that grief evolves over time, and that this often isn’t a one and done situation when you want to offer some support….When leaders and organizations appreciate that, they have a better opportunity to continue the health and well-being of the team member while also supporting them through what they’re going through, which ultimately affects the business.