Creating Grief-Aware Workplaces

Somewhere in your workplace today, someone is grieving. Not in the way we usually picture it, with a card passed around the office or someone taking three days of bereavement leave. It's quieter than that.

Maybe it's a colleague who signed separation papers on the weekend and is presenting the quarterly numbers on Monday. Or the manager who is in the middle of another round of IVF, taking calls from the parking lot between appointments. Perhaps it's the teammate who received a diagnosis last week and hasn't told anyone yet. Or the person whose closest work friend was laid off last month.

None of these losses are visibly acknowledged, and yet the grief that surrounds them can feel like it's taking up the whole room.

The Grief Nobody Puts in the Calendar

In 1989, grief researcher Kenneth Doka gave this kind of sorrow a name: disenfranchised grief. It describes the grief that follows a loss that isn't openly acknowledged, socially mourned or publicly supported. And Doka has been clear that it isn't limited to death. Losing a job counts. So does the end of a marriage, a pregnancy that doesn't continue, a body that no longer does what it used to, a future that quietly closes.

Grief is a reaction to a loss, not just a reaction to a death.

Workplaces are where so much of this grief goes unrecognized ~ not out of cruelty, but because we've built a culture where being professional means leaving our losses at the door. The trouble is, they don't stay there. They surface in a meeting that turns unaccountably tense, in the person who can't seem to engage with the new plan, in the frustration of a team that had to experience yet another round of layoffs.

Why Ritual Helps

Ritual is one of the oldest tools we have for carrying loss, and researchers are beginning to understand why it works. A 2018 review in Personality and Social Psychology Review, led by psychologist Nicholas Hobson with Juliana Schroeder, Jane Risen, Dimitris Xygalatas and Michael Inzlicht, brought together decades of research and proposed that rituals do three things for us: they help regulate our emotions, they steady us in uncertain, high-stakes moments, and they strengthen our connection to one another.

That last one matters most here. In a study of a fire-walking ritual in a small village in Spain, anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas and his colleagues measured the heart rates of the fire-walkers and of the people watching them. The heartbeats of spectators who were family and friends of the walkers rose and fell in step with theirs. Strangers in the same crowd didn't share that pattern. Being witnessed by people who know us isn't passive. It's something we share, right down to the rhythm of the heart.

Doka's work shows us the other side of this. Part of what makes disenfranchised grief so heavy is that it has no rituals ~ no ceremony, no gathering, no agreed-upon moment when others say, we see that this happened. Without a place to be witnessed, grief tends to get minimized: first by the people around us, and eventually by the griever themselves.

Beyond the Celebration of Life

Much of my work with organizations has begun with a phone call after a death. A colleague has died, and a team doesn't know how to come back together. I've created many celebrations of life for workplaces, and they matter deeply ~ they give people permission to stop, to remember, and to grieve alongside the people they spend most of their waking hours with.

But by the time that call comes, an organization's grief culture has already been written. The way a team meets a death is shaped by everything that came before it: whether anyone ever acknowledged a colleague's miscarriage, how the last round of layoffs was handled, whether a manager knew what to say when someone's marriage ended.

More and more, the calls I receive aren't about a death at all.

A Business Closing Ceremony

One company reached out as it was about to close. The owner had decided to shut the business down and pivot in a new direction, which meant a dozen or so employees were suddenly grieving the end of the company as they knew it ~ along with their jobs, their paycheques, their friendships at work and their sense of purpose.

Together we co-created a virtual closing ceremony in three movements. First, we honoured what was, and made room to release what needed letting go: the frustration, the anger, the grief and the disappointment. Then we turned to what is, using ritual to be present with the ambiguity and uncertainty of that moment, and with the quieter reminder of their own resilience. Finally, we marked what will be ~ how they would move forward and how they wanted to remember this time. Each person chose a song, and together they built a shared playlist: a soundtrack of the impact they'd had and the relationships they'd built, to carry with them wherever they went next.

A Burnout Ceremony for Care Providers

Another organization came to me because its team was facing compassion fatigue and burnout. As care providers, they hold so much for other people, and they wanted a ceremony where their own grief could be expressed and witnessed together, so it wouldn't keep quietly building. Having something designed and held for them, for once, was powerful.

We gathered on the beach. Each person named what was weighing them down and offered it to a safe bonfire. We walked in silence to reflect on where each of them was now, personally, then came back together to share ways to strengthen their connections and protect their energy going forward. We closed with a red thread ritual, a single thread passed from hand to hand to connect each of them to one another, and to the purpose and intention that had brought them there. Then they warmed up in a sauna and plunged into the cold sea ~ a way to feel their aliveness, welcoming their grief without being overwhelmed by it.

How we respond to death and loss is only one part of the picture. Every workplace will meet loss ~ a beloved colleague leaving, an organizational change, a team member carrying something heavy from home. A grief-aware workplace tends to its grief culture before that loss arrives.

What a Grief-Aware Workplace Looks Like

It's simpler than people fear. Mostly it's a set of small, steady signals that grief is allowed here.

• Grief is named early. It shows up in onboarding, in the handbook, in the way leaders speak ~ not as a policy footnote, but as a plain acknowledgement that people bring their whole lives to work.
• Leave reflects real losses. Bereavement policies that reach beyond the death of an immediate family member, to pregnancy loss, unsuccessful fertility treatment, the death of a friend or a beloved animal, or caring for someone who is dying.
• Leaders are grief-literate. They can recognize the many ways grief shows up on a team, move past awkward avoidance, and have practiced the hard conversations before they're needed. A few simple words ~ I heard, and I'm sorry. You don't have to talk about it. What would help this week? ~ go further than any perfect speech.
• Endings are marked. When a project is shelved, a team restructured or colleagues laid off, there's a moment to acknowledge what's ending before everyone is asked to move on. A circle, so nobody sits at the head of the table. An invitation to say what this work meant, with no obligation to speak. Something physical to mark the close. An hour, sometimes less.
• Small rituals recur. A remembrance shelf with a bowl of stones anyone can add to. A quiet moment at the start of the year for whatever each person is carrying. A card that goes around for the hard things, not only the happy ones.
• There's somewhere to go. A quiet room, a flexible morning, permission to step out of a meeting without explaining why.
• Sharing is always optional. Nobody is asked to perform their grief. The invitation is the point.

Making Room For Grief

That last point is the one I keep returning to. A grief-aware culture isn't one where everyone talks about their losses. Many people never will, and that's their right.

It's one where grief is welcome at the table, even when we choose not to bring it. Knowing our grief would be received ~ not minimized, not rushed, not quietly held against us ~ changes how we carry it. The colleague going through a divorce may never mention it at work. But if she knows she could, she's no longer carrying it alone in quite the same way.

That shift in mindset costs very little. And it changes how a team meets the losses that are, inevitably, on their way.

For Leaders

You don't need to be the one who knows what to say. That's usually the thing that stops this from happening at all ~ a manager who senses something is owed, doesn't trust themselves to lead it, and so does nothing.

Bringing someone in isn't an admission that you don't care about your people. It's often the clearest evidence that you do. Supporting people through difficult seasons isn't a distraction from good business. It's at the heart of a healthy culture.

I offer workplace grief and loss workshops for people leaders, HR professionals, managers and teams ~ from a lunch and learn to a full-day session or a retreat. They're built around real workplace scenarios: language for difficult conversations, frameworks for supporting grief and transition, and ritual-informed practices teams can keep using long after I've left the room.

I also work with organizations in the moments themselves: marking layoffs, closures and restructures, making room for the quieter losses colleagues carry, and creating celebrations of life when a colleague dies.