Grief is generally seen as a private and personal matter and therefore tends not to be associated with public domains like the workplace. However, in reality, grief is very much a part of organisational life, as are the related concepts of loss and trauma.
If we do not take seriously the need to rise to the challenges involved in supporting people through such experiences, then we are highly unlikely to be successful in promoting workplace wellbeing.
Grieving is, of course, a basic feature of human experience. Being human means being open to grief. Forming relationships and putting our heart into jobs, projects and causes are commitments that mean we make an emotional investment (‘cathexis’ is the technical term) – we form emotional bonds with people, places and things that are important to us. The greater the investment we make, the greater the intensity of grief we will feel if or when that emotional bond is broken (as a result of death, separation, redundancy or other major change).
The workplace can therefore be seen as a significant site of grief and grief-related matters – or, to put it another way, grief is a key feature of the workplace (albeit one that often goes unacknowledged).
In addition, it is vitally important to recognise that grief also enters the workplace from outside, in the sense that profound experiences of grief that affect people in their private lives can hardly be left at the office door or the factory gate. Our understanding of grief in the workplace therefore needs to take account of both sets of factors: grief arising within the workplace itself and other aspects of grief that emerge in people’s lives outside the workplace but which none the less make their presence felt within the workplace itself.
Given that grief can have a serious detrimental impact on people’s thoughts, feelings and actions, employees who are so affected may be performing at a level far below what they normally achieve – and may actually be dangerous – particularly in jobs that require close concentration and/or carefully considered decisions. There are therefore health and safety implications for colleagues, customers/clients/patients and other stakeholders arising from grief as a result of the significant and far-reaching effects that a major loss tends to give rise to.
In addition, of course, there may well be health and safety concerns in relation to the grieving person. For example, someone who is grieving intensely may be accident prone, potentially leading to serious injury. But health and safety concerns are not the only ones. Grieving individuals can be error prone as well as accident prone. The consequences of this can be significant problems in terms of quality of service and the reputation of the organisation concerned.
Grief is therefore a phenomenon that organisations ignore or neglect at their peril.
Failing to give due consideration to how to respond to loss and grief is therefore a potentially very costly and harmful oversight. But there is much more to loss and grief in the workplace than this. It is not simply a matter of protecting the organisation and its stakeholders from the effects of the absentmindedness that often characterises grief (although that in itself is reason enough to take the challenges very seriously). What is also of primary concern is the wellbeing of the member of staff concerned.
If organisations are serious about treating people (the ‘human resource’) as the most important resource and thereby making workplace wellbeing a reality, then it would be a very serious error of judgement to omit consideration of how such powerful and far-reaching factors as loss, grief and trauma need to be handled in the workplace. And yet the literature on workplace wellbeing has tended to pay very little attention indeed to such matters. It is as if organisations have a blind spot when it comes to such difficult and painful phenomena as loss, grief and trauma.
Given the complexity of the issues involved, there can be no simple ways of addressing them, no easy answers. Everyone committed to promoting workplace wellbeing would therefore do well to develop their knowledge and understanding of how loss, grief and trauma shape people’s experience – and how dangerous and foolish it can be not to be prepared for responding as sensitively and positively as we can when such matters arise.
Dr Neil Thompson is an independent writer, educator and a visiting professor at the Open University and a SWU ambassador. His books include The Loss and Grief Practice Manual, The Social Worker’s Practice Manual and, with John McGowan, How to Survive in Social Work.
His Academy at www.NeilThompson.info offers an annual subscription service giving access to over 60 online courses. This is available to individuals for less than £2 per course or a corporate subscription for up to 300 staff at just £3,000 +VAT.
You may also be interested in the blog “Embracing therapeutic models and empathy” in which Jane Collins, Director of FosterSupport, writes about the nature of trauma and how damaging zero tolerance policies are for children in care and SEND.