Showing up for grieving employees: what culture is really made of

Remember when Randall walks into the office and quits on "This is Us"?

His dad had just died and despite bringing in 80% of the company's clients, putting in nights and weekends, and being a completely reliable company guy, he gets a basket of pears (which his boss knew he was allergic to) and a card with a typed out signature line that reads, "from the team."

So he quits.

I love how the scene is written: Randall is not rash, or upset, or hurt. Just the opposite—his dad's passing has left him with clarity of vision, and with a drive to honor his father by living his life the way his dad would have wanted. Which he realizes is not by giving more of himself to a boss who could be that thoughtless.

And that's the thing about grief: when all you feel is the void where there used to be love, you become acutely aware of how precious emotional real estate is, and sharply attuned to who shows up to fill it... as well as who doesn't.

Now, coworker relationships often occupy a weird emotional space even without the crucible of grief applied to them. Coworkers can be friends, or friends of convenience. Acquaintances. People-you-tolerate. Assholes. Mortal enemies. On any given day, some or all of those things.

If my experiences (both personally and as a org behavior consultant) are common, then fluidity in coworker relationships is actually common, I'm guessing for two reasons: one, from what I've seen, many people treat work relationships as fungible, and not worth the investment. And two, even when you do care, there's rarely a reason to push a coworker into a single box. When the priority is the job as opposed to the relationship, there's power in keeping things flexible.

Except.

When the day comes that the chips are down and you suddenly need people, and you're having that clarity of vision and acute awareness of who's showing up for you, that flexibility becomes intolerable. Grief makes relationships fairly binary: you're either here for me or you're not. You take a moment or you don't. Bear witness or don't. In or out.

Pass / fail.

All that flexibility goes out the window, and all the people who occupied those flexible roles are now judged by what they do next, full stop.

After all, what do you have to lose? You've just been left by someone who meant the world to you. The cost of losing anyone else is negligible—a whisper on a scream. So when your coworkers let their fear of saying the wrong thing stop them from saying anything? You hear that silence, you register it, and you act.

It's not even hard: 56% of people leave jobs based on how they're treated while grieving.

Kinda makes you cringe thinking about how many others can't leave their jobs but mental check out, doesn't it?

Lessons for HR & managers

When people are grieving—and by people, I mean 20% of your staff, if you're statistically average—they are not only at their most raw, but also at their most unencumbered.

Grieving people (speaking as a focus group of 1 here) do not care about employee perks, employer brands, or employee experiences. Free lunches don't matter, semi-annual team off-sites in exotic locations don't matter, home office allowances don't matter—which is why I haven't mentioned them in this post until now. They do not matter to someone who's grieving.

To someone who's grieving, the only thing that matters is whether you show up.

As a person, not a company representative. (Or at least, not just as a company representative, since there's still work to do.)

You know the saying, "you only get one chance to make a first impression?" Not true.

Grief clears the slate.

So there's your employee: acutely aware of who's showing up, caring only about who's showing up, and grading everyone pass/fail based on whether they show up.

Grades, by the way, that will define those relationships forever more.

Your move.

The good news

You can do better, and I can help. I want to help.

I've lived this, I've studied this, I've teamed up with experts on this, and I've pulled everything I've ever done—related to communications, leadership, organizational development, talent management, product development, and user adoption—into solving this.

We can normalize how your org addresses loss so it doesn't hit you quite as hard, either in the heart or the bottom line. We can do a better job bringing comfort to your grieving employees.

Let's schedule a call. Maybe we can work together to make one small corner of the world a little better.