Rethinking Caretaking and Bereavement Support

Trigger warning: This article might trigger feelings of loss, grief, or trauma.

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I am still reeling from the loss of my beloved cat Lily two weeks ago and it feels inauthentic for me to just resume business as usual.

Instead, I have decided to lean into my own experience and take it as an opportunity to explore the state of organizations’ caregiving and bereavement support practices. How human-centered are they?

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BCG recently conducted an analysis of the care economy and found that “employed caregivers” (not to be confused with those who work in paid-care jobs) make up more than half of the workforce, account for nearly 60% of the US gross domestic product, and spend 150 billion hours annually on unpaid care responsibilities.

As I was reading through the research, my design thinking mind started to wonder how we might segment our employed caregivers to gain deeper insights. Instead of using personas as an organizing principle, I brainstormed the following scenarios:

• Childcare
• Elder care
• Sick care
• Care for person with physical/mental disability
• Pet care (sick; elderly)
• ...

Most of your team members will likely experience one or more of these caretaking scenarios during their tenure with your organization. [#IWD2023 PSA: According to research, most unpaid caretaking activities are still performed by women.]

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Sadly, some of the scenarios above may end with the death of a loved one. It’s the unspeakable space where caregiving, grief, and loss merge.

It’s how Lily’s and my journey unfolded.

As the CEO of my own company, I was able to grant myself the time and space I needed to adjust my work schedule to first accommodate caretaking and now bereavement. Our policy simply states: “Take as much time as you need.”

Auralee Smith, a Starbucks barista, was not afforded the same privilege. The story of her supervisor asking her to reschedule putting down her beloved dog Gandy so she wouldn’t miss her shift went viral on social media.

When I asked my husband about his employer’s bereavement policy, he responded: “We get two days of bereavement, but I don’t think that includes pet bereavement.”

TWO DAYS!!! NO PET BEREAVEMENT???

Let me tell you what it’s like to lose a pet:

For the last few months, Lily was pretty much in “kitty hospice”. This meant that I needed to adjust my work schedule to her evolving care needs which included more frequent visits to the vet. Anticipatory grief started to impact my ability to focus and be creative at work. Eventually, I had to make the unspeakable decision to put my sweet girl down. I had to call the vet to make her last appointment. I needed to keep her as comfortable as possible and feeling loved during her last days on this earth - all while screaming on the inside. I had to take my fur baby to her last vet appointment. I watched her take her last breath. I had to leave her behind knowing I would never see her in her current form again. I came back to a place that did not feel like home anymore.

If you had asked me to return to work the third day after my cat died, my productivity would have been several shades below zero. Let alone the trauma inflicted on my co-workers due to my persistent ugly crying in meetings.

I’ve come to realize that tending to our dying and to ourselves upon their passing does not neatly integrate into our rigid work schedules.

Furthermore, here are four science-based truths that have crystallized for me:

1. Grief is the feeling associated with the loss of a human or non-human loved one.
2. Every person processes grief differently.
3. Timing and length of grief varies from person to person.?
4. Grief can impact cognitive processing (also referred to as “grief brain”).

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I was curious to learn whether and how companies are accommodating these realities. Here is what I found:

• The U.S. stands out across the globe as the only industrialized nation that does not require employers to offer their employees bereavement leave, either paid or unpaid.
• Even though it’s not federally required, about 89% of U.S. employers choose to provide their eligible employees with between 1-5 days of paid or unpaid bereavement leave.
• Usually, more time off is given when an employee loses a spouse, parent, or child, in comparison to other types of family members.
• Only about 37% of companies currently offer pet bereavement leave. Often, a pet sickness or death is not considered eligible for paid time off from work, and in some cases, it doesn't even allow a bereaved employee to take unpaid time off from their work duties. A possible reason might include persisting cultural stigma around pet loss.

Harley Jane’s story of losing her cat Hog moved me greatly. Her article analyzing current (pet) bereavement practices ends with this impassioned plea:

“Why is there even a timeline on grief? How did society become so obsessed with productivity that we have completely lost sense of what’s truly important? I hope there is a CEO or HR director out there somewhere reading this that will start a movement in the right direction and consider offering employees the time they deserve when coping with the loss of a loved one, pets included.”

Time to re-think how we approach caretaking and bereavement support?

In addition to expanding flex time and paid time off policies (e.g., unlimited time/extended time off for bereavement; inclusion of miscarriage and pet bereavement; rethinking paid time off via discretionary time off policy, etc.), companies might want to co-create additional ways they can support employees with caretaking responsibilities or those who lost a loved one.

Here are my initial thoughts on a human-centered design approach you might take:

• Start by conducting initial research to gain empathy around various caretaking and bereavement scenarios (e.g., by exploring stories like Auralee’s, Harley Jane’s, and mine).
• From there, create a draft journey map to surface initial insights into what support might be needed for each scenario and at each step.
• Conduct empathy interviews with employees who have experienced a particular scenario. During the conversation you might explore what they appreciated, what mattered most, what they wished they had, etc. CAUTION: Please ensure employee participation is strictly voluntary and ensure a safe space where emotions are welcomed. Since you will likely trigger loss, grief, or trauma during your conversations, you want to make sure you are versed in trauma-responsive design practices.
• For ideation, start with initial inspiration from this article and invite employees into co-creation of solutions.
• Make sure you test assumptions around your prototypes before piloting and implementing solutions.

Why should companies care?

Productivity. Grieving employees cost U.S. employers over $61 billion in lost productivity, according to research conducted by The Grief Recovery Institute.?Employers will likely face a minimal level of productivity from an employee immediately after they’ve had a loss, so there is not much to gain if they are asked to come into work.

Attrition. According to the BCG report referenced earlier, employed caregivers spend more than 30 hours per week providing unpaid care. As a result, nearly 1 million more employed caregivers than expected left the workforce during the pandemic to perform unpaid-care responsibilities at home. ?

Well-being. Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being have been elevated as one of the key priorities of the U.S Surgeon General. One of the report’s recommendations: “Organizations should increase access to paid leave—sick leave, paid family, and medical leave (including paid parental leave), and paid time off for vacation. The U.S. remains the only advanced economy in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) that does not guarantee paid medical and family leave to its workforce. … Black and Hispanic workers are disproportionally affected… Increasing access to paid leave can reduce the likelihood of lost wages by 30%, positively affect the physical and mental health of workers and their children and improve retention.” If your well-being strategy does not include support for caretakers and those that have lost a loved one, they are not worth their salt.

Employee Experience. According to research, one of every human’s key defining moments are “pits” - ?moments of hardship, pain, or anxiety. Employers can impact the employee experience when they show up for their people in these crucial moments – from supporting crushing unpaid care work to the compassion shown in times of greatest loss and grief. That’s what will be remembered. That’s what truly makes a difference.

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Let’s share inspiration in the comments: What are innovative or human-centered caretaking and bereavement practices that you know of?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Design Thinking for HR is a biweekly LinkedIn newsletter that aims to inspire HR professionals to experiment with the human-centered design framework. The newsletter is curated by?Nicole Dessain who is the Chief Employee Experience Designer at talent.imperative, Founder of the HR.Hackathon Alliance, and a Northwestern University instructor. Nicole is currently writing her first book about Design Thinking for HR. Join the Early Readers’ Community here.