Grief happens. We're bringing the comfort.

As some of you know, I have a passion project with Lisa Arroyo Seiden (Cervenka) called Comfort Communications. We introduced the concept last year at Craig Fisher 's #TalentNet2023, hosted by the ever-gracious Andres Traslavina at Whole Foods. And on April 23,2024, I’ll be introducing the protocol itself—including guidance details and what the toolkit includes—at EPIC HR . To my friends here on LinkedIn, I want to share a glimpse into what Comfort Comms is all about, why it means so much to me, and why it needs to matter to you.

My ask

As you read this, if you agree that Comfort Comms would be helpful for your company, send me a DM ASAP.

Our goal is to turn Comfort Comms into a B Corp and support people around the world—we genuinely believe this idea will help make the world a better place. But right now, as a passion project, it only gets limited, nights-and-weekends attention. We'd love to accelerate our ability to get Comfort to market, and for that, it's going to take interest and sales. We're not seeking VC funding for this, we're seeking confirmation that we've created something that other people agree is valuable, as measured by their willingnness to pay some amount of money for it.

Origins

Comfort Comms came about because two "words" people live under the same roof, have suffered complex grief, and spent years exploring the impact of communications on their own, and others', healing journeys.

At 16, my wife, Lis, lost her mom, Kathleen, to suicide. Because of the stigma associated with that, Lis had to lie about her mom's cause of death for years. In 2018, I lost my daughter, Elle, to what I’ll call “CRPS-induced suicide” right as I was in the process of joining a company I’d been consulting for. It was unspeakably devastating, with a pain and darkness that defy description to this today. (If you're thinking "I can't imagine," trust me: don't. A better use of energy would be to hug a loved one and let the appreciation for the moment envelop you.)

The unspeakable nature of that moment is not entirely due to its intensity. On a more fundamental level, grief simply robbed me of my ability to communicate. For the first time since infancy, I had to rely on others to help me find the words to express myself. I felt vulnerable in a way I literally could not articulate, which made everything even more scary, and isolating, and hard than it already was.

For instance, looking back, I can see how constantly answering “How did she die?” made me feel like I was reducing Elle to the moment of her death when what I really wanted to do was celebrate her life, and how other peoples’ tentativeness left me adrift in my emotions. The effect of this was to amplify my sense of isolation.

This really hit me at work, too. The company I was with was a great place to work—literally, top 10 on all the lists—but grief was a gap. Like in so many other areas of life, grief was treated like an embarrassing rumor, discussed only in hushed tones and rarely with the person at the center of it. For a long time, it felt as if someone had set up an invisible skrim around me, so I could still perceive the world around me, I just couldn't meaningfully engage with it. I'm very comfortable being alone, yet that was still intensely lonely. Distracting, too: as the grief began to dissapate, the feeling of isolation remained, and continued to impact my productivity, I'm sure.

So what made me feel most supported?

When friends and family just showed up.

I didn’t ask Mark Stelzner , Amanda Hite , Laurie Ruettimann , and Susan LaMotte to put together A Tribute to Elle . I didn’t ask Lis to take over as my personal, one person comms team and full-on support system. I didn’t ask my sisters to magically appear in Chicago, and I didn’t ask Joel Tesch to create the inspired painting that now sits behind me on Zoom calls. They just did those things. At a time when I couldn’t tell anyone what I needed, they let their sense of compassion guide them to actions that were more beautiful, soothing, and helpful than anything I would have ever thought to ask for. I'll be forever grateful.

I do have to acknowledge, my company did show up in spades when it came to funding the Tribute to Elle. Along with friends and family, my colleagues' contributions helped Burning Limb , a charity focused on making CRPS treatment affordable, set up a fund specifically for girls like Elle, and earned me an honorary flag from the Human Rights Campaign (which now greets visitors as they enter my home) for the level of advocacy they enabled in Elle's name. That certainly matters! But I couldn't appreciate it until after I got my head straight, and getting my head straight took a human touch.

I also need to acknowledge that many of the individuals I worked with took it upon themselves to be there for me as well, which will be forever appreciated. Yet they had the same challenge I did, and without a mechanism to coordinate, they would unintentionally put me in a position of having to repeat myself, or they might inadvertently feed the rumor mill simply by seeking out information.

In the ensuing years, Lis and I have talked with scores of people about why it’s so hard for companies to “just show up” like that, and we keep hearing the same thing, which is a version of, “grief is so unique, it’s impossible to know what someone needs.”

But having been through it ourselves, we knew that’s not exactly true. People are unique, sure, but we’re still all people. Like snowflakes, we're unique, but not all that different.

So we kept asking ourselves: how could we help companies be more proactive, while still being respectful, to help their own people navigate a period of grief?

And then, one day, I was reading something about crisis PR and wondered aloud if we couldn’t break the logjam by applying something like a crisis PR model to grief. After all, they're always at the ready to handle delicate, high stress, time-sensitive situations that are each completely unique. The big difference, we realized, was that grief communications would require a long tail in addition to the in-the-moment response. Still, there were enough parallels that it felt worth exploring how they did it.

??

Doh! It's a communication protocol.

The awkward, messy, unproductive current state of grief

Grief support remains a big (and expensive) gap in many companies’ employee support programs. It either doesn’t exist, or, where it does, it requires a person to navigate the company intranet to their Employee Benefits portal, locate various mental health options, research them, evaluate them, decide on one, and activate it—a slew of administrivia that is mildly irritating on one’s best day, but well beyond the mental and emotional capacity of someone on one of their absolute worst and most devastating days.

Moreover, there is no federal bereavement leave standard, no shared cultural norms (I educated a lot of people on the difference between shiva and a wake in the weeks after Elle died), either, and far too few mental health workers to cover the workforce. In fact, in the US, where we have 150 million workers but only 125,000 mental health counselors (that’s a ratio of 1,200:1), the math is such that daily interactions with colleagues is racking up damage far faster than the experts can fix it.

The cost of this gap is substantial. In 2003, the Grief Recovery Institute pegged the productivity cost of grief in the workplace at $75 billion, with about half of that attributable to the death of a loved one. That number translates into $227 billion in 2024 dollars when we account for inflation, population growth, and productivity growth , though it still doesn’t account for the increased cost of health care or the increased interconnectedness of our networks; I’ve seen all-in estimates as high as $970 billion.

One thing we do know: when Gen X and Millennials start losing their Boomer parents, that’s going to put a tremendous amount of new stress on the most experienced members of our workforce—and for reasons we’re all aware of every time we step out of our homes in the morning, that’s a stress load we can’t afford.

How Comfort Comms makes it better

Comfort Comms starts making a positive impact the moment you read its name, Comfort. We're focused on the million little things people can do day-to-day to make things easier for their teammates. The things that reduce the need for therapy, and accelerate a person's return to full living. The things that bring comfort.

Our first model and templates are focused on comforting one who's lost a close loved one—a parent, partner, or child, or someone else whose loss represents a traumatic event for the employee.

Eventually, we intend to develop versions of the Comfort Comms protocol for a variety of grief events. But for now, we're focused on this use case.

The Comfort Comms protocol has five parts. To minimize as many obstacles as possible to adoption, we designed our MVP (minimally viable product) as a 5-lesson learning module, with all the templates, guide videos, and other assets you'll need embedded exactly in the order in which you'll need them. Just open to the first "lesson" and follow the prompts in real time!

Mercifully, there is no test at the end of it. ??

The sections of Comfort Comms are:

Introduction

We recommend that responsible HRBPs—you—go through the module at least once to acclimate themselves. We also recommend they invite a liaison from Internal Comms to go through it as well.

From Chaos to Calm (Immediate)

Upon learning about a traumatic grief, Comfort Comms immediately guides you through steps that will enable you to take control of the situation, bring together the right people, and let them see for themselves how the situation will be handled and what everyone's role will be. By doing this, you'll not only be taking care of the impacted individual, you'll be taking care of their manager and team, too.

From Confusion to Clarity (within ~3-6 hours)

Take a breath. You’ve taken a big step to make sure everyone can work together to put their best foot forward. Now you're ready to make sure everyone shows up with timely, appropriate, compassionate, and coordinated responses.

From Callousness to Compassion (within ~6-24 hours)

You’ve established calm and have provided clarity in how the company is responding. Now you move beyond first impressions to solidify the company's commitment to the impcted individual and team.

From Conflicting to Consistent (within ~24-48 hours)

The wave of awareness is now hitting the organization now. People are switching from “what happened?” to “what happens now?”

The work you’ve been doing will help ensure that you're a step ahead, with answers at the ready as those questions get asked. This will help reduce cross-talk, double efforts, and misinformation. It will also give people more space to be there for one another in a human way, more easily put emotional boundaries around necessary work conversations, and maintain their focus even as they process something emotionally heavy.

From Curtailed to Continued (after 48 hours)

With the immediate event passed, it’s time to focus on re-entry and a path back to full performance. Comfort Comms provides guidance on how to help the person’s manager and project leads set and manage expectations.

It also sets you up to act as a buffer in those conversations, so that the impacted individual isn’t always talking to someone with the literal authority to fire them every time they're discussing how to handle emotional potential roadblocks to their performance!

Benefits

Comfort Comms has several key benefits over alternative programs:

1. It’s positive. “Comfort” is far more inviting than “grief.” (People can’t run away from grief fast enough, including those of us who have been through it.)
2. It's not tech. Whatever comms tools you're already using, Comfort Comms will help you make sure you get the most out of those.
3. It’s targeted. Comfort Comms provides situation-specific templates and guidance, in a format that makes it easy to act on quickly.
4. It’s accessible. Instead of throwing one more thing at an already-overwhelmed individual, Comfort Comms gets activated by the HRBP, who’s in a much better place to engage.
5. It takes care of everyone. Comfort Comms positions the HRBP to support the team, and positions the team to support the individual. Everyone gets supported.
6. It complements empathy training and other resources—Comfort Comms can be added to existing programs without any need for change.
7. It provides a path for re-entry. Comfort Comms ensures everyone knows what’s going on, so conversations are less awkward.
8. It has legs. Comfort Comms helps keep those check-ins happening long after that first week.
9. It protects the brand. Employer brands are made or broken in moments like this. Comfort Comms provides guardrails that keep everyone safe while alos allowing them the space to care for each other.
10. It creates predictability and equitability. Comfort Comms is a protocol anyone can follow, and using it gives people the peace of mind of knowing what to expect.
11. It comes with expert support—with experts who are supported by experts. I’m talking about Lis and myself here, and our Board of Advisors, which includes mental health, HR, and communications experts. ??

That's it!

Just a little something we threw together, you know, plus all the templates and assets needed to make it happen under intense time pressure. I'm kidding, of course. When we first mapped out all the communications that are required to keep a grief event from spiraling out of control, we were floored. There's at least a dozen email templates embedded in just in the first day's worth of work alone.

May we comfort you?

If you like what you're seeing, please DM me and let me know.

This subject is near and dear to my heart—both of our hearts, actually—which makes it hard for us to tell if it's a great passion project or actually something bigger. We want it to be bigger—we've been the ones in need of this, and neither of us want anyone to go through what either of us did.

But ultimately, we're just the ones offering to do the work. In truth, the scale to which we're able to make this happen is up to you.

#Empathy #Grief #EmployeeExperience #InternalCommunications #MoreJoy #TheBrillianceWithin