#BabyLossAwarenessWeek2023 - Support in the workplace

I have been working in the Department for Business and Trade and its predecessors for quite some time.

This is important because it sort of steps the context of what happened. When I lost my sons in 2011, I was working in a very different role. I was working in an operational team.

It was all very exciting, expecting twins. My boss had twins, and he was very excited for us, telling me about all the funny things his twins did so I start creating stories for what my twins would be like.

And then we didn't have twins. Our first-born sons were stillborn at 31 weeks.

And it was a devastating time. Clearly, it was a devastating time. And reading through the grief literature, you go through something called, it's not only going through the death of someone that you love, it's the death of an assumptive worldview.

Everything about your world has changed.

Everything you thought you knew has changed.

Everything you thought was important has changed.

And the challenge in a workplace setting is you spend most of your time at work. You spend more time with your work colleagues in various settings than you do with your own family and friends. So, to have such a harrowing experience and then try and return to a workplace or interact with a workplace is incredibly difficult.

And particularly for partners who have to return before the mothers because paternity leave is not the full amount. Unless you're doing shared parental leave, you're having to return to a workplace at a time where you may not be ready, and your partner may not be ready for you to go to work either. So, it's a strange land where you sort of return to a workplace where your entire world has shifted but nothing has changed for them.

You walk dazed through corridors, seeing people who may or may not know and having to have those conversations. And I imagine trying to do that in a virtual setting is incredibly challenging too. For me, it happened when we were still in offices, and we still did five-day weeks and the sad news email went out and I'd have a few messages of condolence from people.

I think what was interesting to me was the people I worked with largely didn't really know what to do with me. And it was people on the periphery, people I'd never really had that much to do with professionally or in a social context would then come into my life and with messages of hope and condolence and sharing stories of it happened to them too. And I think for a lot of us, before it happens to us, we didn't know it could happen.

And when it happens, we find out how many people we know it's happened to but never felt they could speak about it. And again, these sorts of events, especially in workplaces, are about creating a space where people can have those conversations and have that support and largely reassurance that you're not going mad and that you're not alone. Your experience is unique, but there are shared elements that's where we find support and hope and going to the theme of Baby Loss Awareness Week this year, as it was last year, is stepping stones.

And finding those stepping stones to help not move past grief. You never move past it, but a way to live with it comfortably without it being overwhelming or even if it becomes overwhelming, finding a way that you can recover enough to not be swept away.

And I think the workplace at that time, a lot of what I do now was driven by the absence of what we've been trying to create here, which is a network of support for people who've lived through this and want to help workplaces be better at supporting staff, better at putting things in place, and not just in the immediate aftermath. As important as it is, the fact that I'm still here now, nearly twelve years later, having these conversations and doing this, this is a lifelong impact, and it will change over time, and it does change over time.

And what was helpful to me three years ago may not be helpful to me now, or things that I may never have considered helpful are now helpful. And there is that sort of openness to trying things and that sort of feeling of “your mileage may vary” has been a strong part of my experience in learning about this area. And again, when you're doing this in a workplace, particularly a physical workspace as we return to offices is the one thing I always recommend is knowing where a good place is to hide away if you get hit by that sudden temporary upsurge of grief.

Where is a place that you can be, where you can be safe, where you're not in an open plan office, where you're not scurrying around trying to find somewhere? In the old building we used to have the Tranquility Room, which was a space for that. It may be finding a trusted friend or colleague who can help in this way.

Another suggestion I heard spoken about is in a meeting setting where you know that it's going to be a tricky one or you're feeling that you're about to teeter, having someone you can delegate that responsibility to if you need to take a step out. And I thought, that's a brilliant idea. And it's not one that I thought about because one of the sort of things we explored over discussions yesterday for the Baby Loss Awareness events was how we work in the civil service which like healthcare, is full of acronyms and abbreviations. And as we interact with healthcare professionals, we may find that the acronyms and abbreviations we use in a workplace take on a very different meaning and may become an inadvertent trigger. Project Management PM, that may well be a PM, but it could also mean post mortem to someone else.

And these things can come from nowhere and we can't mitigate all of them. But it's knowing where you can go to find that safe place to find where you can do that phone call either to a friend or an online space or a support group, whatever it is. Knowing where these people are. I found Teams immensely helpful for having these types of conversations because they're not confrontational, they're not face to face and people can do them while they're doing other things.

And that's what we try and do within the network is we provide that sort of level of informal peer support. We're not counsellors. We're not necessarily trained professionals although I am a trained befriender for the Twins trust.

But we provide someone who is accessible in a work time to be able to have conversations, to have someone to check things through. And I think one of the other things that we do within the support network is we support line managers to support their staff. And what I found heartwarming is the number of people who have come to us who don't have lived experience but are trying to help someone who does.

And we can be that space where we can have those conversations. They can test what they are planning on saying and giving them the permission and space to try those things before they do it directly with the people involved. Because I think the challenge is these are not easy conversations.

They're not easy for anyone. But the only way we can get better at them is with practice. And again, that is challenging because one of the challenges that we sort of talked about didn't get to address in the Q&A yesterday was how do you deal with people who were well meaning but put their foot in it? And I think my suggestion in that is you have to look on a case-by-case basis.

You have to consider where you are at that time you have to consider where they are at that time. And trying, where possible to separate the content from the intent. Is the intent to try and make them feel better or is the intent to try and make you feel better? This is not an easy thing to do if you're in a particularly bad state or it's very early on.

Some things may just be deeply unhelpful and it's hard to see the intent behind that. And sometimes people are just genuinely unhelpful because, and this can even come from people within our community, they may have had their own experience of loss and feel that they're okay with it.

And for them it wasn't a big deal. For them, that was what worked for them. But the mistake is to try and map that approach directly onto someone else.

One of the things that we try and do with the support networks and workplace events that we do is recognise that talking is not for everyone. Talking about deeply difficult topics is not for everyone and we are not obliging or compelling people to do so. What we are trying to do is create a space and to let them know that if they do need to have those conversations or they want to and they change their minds, then they can and this is the place they can go to do it.

And I think that's what we're trying to do because it's a very sensitive area and particularly looking at things like anniversaries and milestones, all of these things can cause challenges. So reflecting on my own experience, I will say openly and on a recording, I've not done much work this week.

What I've tried to do is keep the wheels turning, doing the bits that I can do. But my focus is not there, my concentration is not there. Baby Loss Awareness Week is an incredibly active week for me. There's lots of writing, there's lots of events like this. It's intense, it's an intense period, but it's also very close to the anniversary of my sons’ stillbirth.

All of this makes October a very challenging time. And I have been lucky to work in a directorate and an organisation which recognises when I go “doomspiral” and I'm able to have an open conversation with my manager and colleagues about what can we do, what can be delegated, and what can be just put down, forgotten about. It's a chance to prioritise, to really think about what is adding value, what needs to be done, when does it need to be done, does it need to be done by me? Because at this point my concentration is away with the fairies.

I have very little concentration. I have a hair trigger temper that comes from nowhere. This is not conducive to a productive work.

One of the things is trying to create a space where having a good relationship with your colleagues and your team, so you can feel that you have the permission to take time away, to take time off. And I don't just say that for things like for anniversaries it's the lead up to the anniversary. But also I tend to find, again, this is my experience, yours may be different.

We can talk about that if helpful. The lead up to the anniversary can be quite bad. The actual anniversary itself can be a time of celebration.

There are ways to do it. And one of the things that we tried to do is celebrate our sons’ death and birthdays as though they had lived. So we do fun, age appropriate things with their siblings as a way of the continuing bonds and building memories.

But I always try and tack on leave afterwards for the day after the anniversary, the day after the milestone, because that's generally I've geared myself up to the dread of the actual event. And then once the event has passed, there's this sense of sort of deflation. And again, that takes some time to recover.

And being able to recover is important. One of the things that we've explored within the workplace is understanding that ebb and flow, the sort of flash points within a year, what are the key dates, what are the key periods that I need to take account, what can I put in place to help support? And I think I'm jumping around timelines, and I apologize for that. If I think back to the very sort of beginning, I remember very vividly having a conversation with HR about leave.

And it's my firm belief, and one thing I've tried to instil within the conversations with HR now in policies and such, is that any complicated questions about annual leave, entitlement, special leave arrangements, flexible working, all that stuff, should be within the line manager. The line manager should have access to the material and support to do those complex calculations and minutiae, because in the aftermath, you don't know what way is up. The last thing you need to be doing is wasting valuable brain power and psychic energy on navigating, a 27-page special leave guide.

And I think when people say, "I don't know what to say", you can always 'do'. There are things you can do to take things off the grieving parent to help them focus on what matters most. And what matters most is not grinding through annual leave, entitlements, maternity leave, parental leave, bereavement leave, all of that material is available.

It's available on the civil service website under the civil service learning. It's available on people's intranets. But it should not be for the bereaved parent to have to navigate that.

So that's why we have the policies, that's why we have the training in place to help support them. The other thing I would sort of explore is again, and I've mentioned it before, and I'll keep doing it because it's important for me. And it's one of the things that's truly helped is going back to the conversation is I've been very lucky to have an incredibly good manager and she was able to spot me spiralling before I spiralled because one of the things that we've become good at, or I became good at, is self-deception.

“I'm fine, this is fine, everything's fine. Yes, I feel teary. Yes, I'm finding it hard to concentrate, but I'm fine. This is just fine. I'll work through it”.

Having someone to pull you aside gently and just say, “have you thought about taking some leave? Here's what we can put in place”, can help shift the burden.

And I know this can put a lot on line managers, but the difference it makes is massive. The small things that people can do, that staff can do for others, makes a big difference between someone staying in a job and leaving a job, or worse. We try to equip people through these events to know what to say.

And one of the things I try to help reassure people is that even having gone through what I've gone through, I still don't know what to say. And that's okay because while we work in the workplace and our job is naturally to fix things, these things are not to be fixed. You don't have to fix the unfixable and no one is expecting you to.

All we're expecting is to not make it worse by actively punishing or treating differently or dismissing loss or doing all those things. Which again, going back to the content and intent discussion, is starting sentences with at least starting sentences or phrases where you imply that a loss is somehow replaceable, anything like that. Those feel like they're designed to make the person who's saying them feel better rather than the person who's receiving that message.

I think it's trying to give people permission that you don't have to know what to say, but you can at least say, “I don't know what to say. This is awful, this is horrible. I'm here”.

And just keep those check ins wherever they may be and recognize that it changes over time. And I think that's one of the other things is returning after the immediate aftermath. You may be making decisions about your working patterns or your working style that are not made in your rational mind and again, having the flexibility to revisit those plans.

Is this still working? Is this still helpful? Is it still useful? So, knowing that whatever decision you make is not fixed, nor should it be treated as fixed, is also important to try and get back to that sort of return to a workspace while you're still trying to rebuild your understanding of your life. What I'm doing now is finding my way. I have found that supporting people in the workplace, supporting people through befriending has become something that helps me.

It helps me make use of a skill set I never asked for. It makes use of transferable skills around, compassion, understanding, patience, relationship building, resilience, all those horrible things that I never asked for. It helps me make use of them.

This isn't a lemons into lemonade situation. This is about finding purpose and meaning and in doing so, honouring my children, and keeping them as part of my life and honouring everyone else's children that I encounter so that people can talk about them openly without fearing they have it to hide.

Doing events, writing blogs, influencing policies, changing guidance, working with other networks. All of these are ways to take a very personal experience and put it into a workplace setting in a way that can help others. One note of caution on doing that is that that can be exhausting. And one of the reasons that we have staff networks across the civil service is because there will be times where you will need to put down that torch because it's burning too bright too fast, and it needs to go to someone else.

And the purpose of the network is that there are enough people that you can feel able to put it down without fear that you're letting everyone down, or that you're not doing what you should be. Whatever you're doing is enough. If you're not doing anything and that's right for you, that's enough.

If you're doing a blog, that's enough. If you're doing a network, that's enough. There is no sense in setting yourself on fire to keep others warm if it's no longer helpful.

Knowing that you can take a step back is an important part of doing this in a workplace. And it may be that people will join for a week, they may join for months. We may speak to people regularly; we may speak to people only once.

It's not about us, it's about them. It's about supporting them. And one of the things I do as a befriender, as a peer supporter, is if someone comes to me to talk about their experience, I will talk to them about their experience and I will listen.

I will not talk about my experience unless asked, because it's not about me. So I think I will close now. So we've got a fair bit of time for Q A, if that's helpful, or just a time to decompress.

I'm aware this has been quite a heavy topic. I have jumped around a lot. One of the things I will say is a lot of the topics I've covered today, I've written about at length in various blogs and articles.

If there's anything specific you wanted more detail on, then I can help point you towards those. The Knowledge Hub and my personal site has a wealth of resources across all the different facets of loss and grief, from the different types of pregnancy and baby loss, to elements about race, gender, faith, all sorts of aspects. There there's a lot of stuff there for dads and partners too.

So I thank you for your patience, thank you for listening.