What "normalizing grief" can look like at work

Years ago, while in Madrid, Spain*, I saw something remarkable:

When car stalled out, blocking traffic at a massive roundabout, four guys in cars near the stalled car stopped, jumped out, and started helping the stranded driver push his stalled car to the side of the circle. As they did so, every other car stopped to let them pass—and stayed stopped long enough for the men to run across traffic back to their cars.

Less than 90 seconds later, everyone then drove off.

In the US, this would have been an hours-long back up, filled with honks and people cutting others off, and one motorist stranded dangerously in the middle of traffic.

In Europe, community-based support worked like magic.

(*The photo above is not Spain)

Now imagine a world in which companies handled employee grief the way those folks handled a stalled car, where the people closest to the event knew what to do to provide appropriate support and get the impacted individual to a safe place where the professionals could take over, and where everyone else knew how to "support the supporters," so to speak. Maximum coordination, optimized help, minimum distraction.

When I talk about "normalizing conversations about grief," this is what I mean. No delays in response, no rubbernecking, nobody caught perilously in a throng of people zipping by without stopping. Just the right level of support from the right people for the right amount of time.

So why don't we do this? To be fair, some organizations do. But often, we don't because we look at grief as an individual issue rather than a team issue. This leads to cultural norms that emphasize privacy over support, and ROI calculations that assess lost productivity in terms of an impacted individual without accounting for the impact on teammates (ie, the motorists stuck in traffic behind the stalled vehicle). As a result, solution sets tend to be similarly individually focused.

The team at Comfort Communications Company has put a lot of thought into how to help organizations shift their thinking so they can embrace a more efficient (and genuine, and predictable, and natural, and effective) approach to providing comfort. One important breakthrough? Shifting peoples' focus from the problem (grief/the broken car) to the solution (comfort/keeping traffic flowing).

I'm hopeful that that work will help change the way organizations handle grief for the better—for everyone.

#comfortcommunications #morejoy #griefsupport