Grief in the workplace
Bereavement leave isn’t a benefit - it’s an enterprise protection measure.
14 years ago today, February 4th, 2008, I woke up in Sydney to a phone full of texts & voicemails. As I stared at the screen in the early hours of the morning, I knew something bad had happened. Something very bad. I started listening.
My dad had died of a heart attack, back in Ireland. There would be no final conversation, no goodbye, he was gone, felled in his early 50s. It was the worst day.
Reflecting on that worst of days today, it makes me think of this bone-headed situation at the @nytimes:
Before diving into the NYT negotiation piece, let’s talk about the impact of grief. In the first flush, the feeling can be like the world just falling out from beneath your feet. It is utterly disorienting, you become a void within a void, hollowed out and reeling from the shock of it, before paralyzing sadness rushes into that inner void like a tidal wave, filling you with weight that drags you down the hole beneath you.
I lost Dad unexpectedly and Mum after a long illness, and while the degree to which you experience that horrid weightlessness differs in those two situations, there are commonalities. The brain fog, the tunnel vision, and just the crushing weight of grief that blocks out the light for an indeterminate period.
Generally, while experiencing grief, you are not capable of making good decisions. You will almost certainly make many bad ones, in fact. You will make many emotionally-driven decisions, and in doing so it may seem like there is no other choice at the time, but there likely always is, it’s just invisible to you because of your grief - as is the grief itself. Some decisions will be small and relatively inconsequential, but any more complex, significant decision-making - be it personal or professional - should just stop. Put them down, hand them off, delegate and distance yourself from them. You are not capable. You are going through a major trauma, a serious bout of poor mental health. You are intoxicated beyond your comprehension by baffling levels of emotion. You are not in control. I say this as someone who made regrettable decisions in periods of grief - you need to protect yourself and other people from doing the same by any means possible.
Management is decision-making. As a leader, your job is to make smart decisions and enable your teams to make smart decisions. Team members add value by making good decisions, from the big, strategic ones that define your vision and how you deliver on it, right down to what colors a button should be A/B tested with on a website or which emoji to use in a tweet. It’s decisions, all the way down.
If you know a team member is temporarily decision-impaired, you don’t want them making decisions. It’s very simple. It’s why we prevent people getting behind the wheel of the car when they’re drunk or high. Until a person has a handle on grief, especially that overwhelming first wave, they’re drunk on grief, so high they might not even know it. So the NYT expanding bereavement leave to 10 days is a good thing. It’s more than most offer, it’s to be applauded.
Denying that expanded leave based on union membership is hugely self-defeating. Bereavement leave isn’t a benefit - it’s an enterprise protection measure. The longer the buffer you can afford to put between the emotional trauma and the return to work, the better for all concerned. Inviting someone back to the workplace drunk on grief, out of spite or as a negotiation measure can only backfire. You’re setting them up to make a bad decision, a set of bad decisions, which could harm your business. It doesn’t matter if they’re in management or way down the operational chain. A fact-checker who misses an error, someone coding payment parameters who accidentally moves a decimal point, a photo editor who misidentifies a senator or labels an innocent person a criminal - these are all avoidable bad decisions that have bottom-line impact.
Deliberately forcing someone back to the controls when they are unfit to be there, earlier than a defined group of others, could be construed as entrapment. They are set up to fail cataclysmically - which puts their employment at risk, even though accountability for their failures in that mental state during the denied period of bereavement leave lies with whomever made that policy decision. It’s a way of forcing attrition. During a period where excess mortality is higher than it has been in a decade, the odds of it coming back to bite you are high.
So on the anniversary of my very worst day, maybe put yourselves in the shoes of a team member who’s having their very worst day, and ask yourself how long it will be before you want them making decisions on your behalf again.
