Why it's so hard to say the right thing

Just about everyone I talk to who has been through traumatic grief while working has a horror story about someone who said or did something heartless. At some point in nearly every conversation, a person will interrupt themselves to ask, rhetorically, "How hard is it to be kind?!"

Surprisingly difficult, actually.

Meanwhile, I have yet to talk with anyone who actively tried to be a jerk to a grieving colleague—including, you might be surprised to know—managers.

So why the disconnect? I've been uncovering a combination of personal and structural drivers that conspire to make saying the right thing surprisingly hard.

Unscientifically, here is a short list of the blockers I've started to uncover, starting with ones that hit at the individual level:

Personal blockers to comforting colleagues

• No relevant personal experience. Many people set themselves up for failure by overestimating their ability to empathize based on adjacent experience. Not their fault—they're trying to do the right thing, and society does often describe grief and sorrow as synonyms. But it's like expecting to know how to help someone who just ate a ghost pepper based on your experience with a bell pepper. Eventually, they're going to ask, "C'mon, aren't you over it yet," and that's when they lose all credibility.
• Limited training on how to handle things. "They don't teach you this stuff at school" is a refrain I hear constantly. Guys, aside from your mom, where have you been exposed to empathy training? Maybe a few hours of through work? A therapist? Humorous memes from your wife? It's a frighteningly short list.
• A desire to keep things professional and/or to avoid getting too personal. One thing many professionals have had is a mentor who taught them to "keep it professional." Born in an age before Zoom had us inviting colleagues into our spare bedrooms, however, this concept now lands less like a boundary setting ideal and more like an ejector seat that launches everyone into space while the relationship crashes and burns below.
• Too busy. Being kind may be free, but it does take time. Unfortunately, too many of us are already pulling a second shifts to keep up with emails, Team/Slack messages, compliance trainings, expense recording, global team calls, performance reviews, market research, and LinkedIn posts.

Then there are organizational blockers.

Structural blockers to comforting colleagues

• No True North. Handling grief continues to be a gap in most business cultures. I don't see this as malicious—it's simply new territory. The good news is, for an organization that wants to be a place of belonging, helping employees support one of their own through grief is one of the most effective ways to become one.
• No clear ownership. Closely related to the previous point, without a clear idea about what a good grief response should look, it's pretty impossible to build a process for it, so most companies I've spoken to don't have one.
• Over-indexing on therapeutic solutions. Imagine this: no one's never heard of CPR before, and you want to design a solution to help people who have been injured. Chances are, you're going to build a solution that requires help from people with medical training. That's where we're at when it comes to grief support at work. It's not until I tell people that the US has 30-37 million actively grieving workers but only 200k therapists that it dawns on people that there aren't enough experts to go around, and that we need a solution that activates people who aren't experts to at least stabilize things a bit. (Hello, Comfort!)

The good news is two-fold. First, none of these are things that are cause for blame. People, it seems, are inherently trying to do the right thing. And second, all of these issues is addressable.

So let's address them.

Back of the envelope impact calculations

The impact of grief was measured back in 2002; updating the figure to account for inflation and population growth, the cost of grief in 2024 is something north of $250 billion / year.

I believe that's low.

Over the course of just 2.5 years, Covid took from us the combined populations of Miami and Boston. During that time, the ratio of workers impacted by grief jumped from 1 in 9 to 1 in 5.

(Think about this for a moment. Had a hurricane taken out two major US cities, would we have missed the scope of the human toll? Probably not—impacts are easier to see when they're concentrated and, unfortunately, when there's a mangled cityscape to associate with the death toll. But still.)

It's not just the people grieving who are impacted by how companies respond, either: in a worth-the-watch TED Talk, Dr. Porath describes her research into the impact of incivility on performance, including how witnessing rudeness/impoliteness/disrespect is all it takes to lower performance (by a lot). So if we assume:

• Getting the reaction to grief wrong is a form of incivility;
• An average team has 5 people on it; and
• 1 in 5 people is actively grieving;

Then statistically speaking, fixing grief has the potential to raise performance across the board.

For instance, Dr. Porath found that incivility leads to, among other things, a 12% increase in undesirable turnover. To figure out the potential impact of a better grief response on your turnover, just divide your current turnover rate by 1.12 to see what it could be. Not amongst the subset of employees you have who are grieving, but overall. And that would be the case for turnover, productivity, error rates—everything.

Conclusion

My personal mission is to make the world more supportive, productive, and joyful. Those things work as a virtuous cycle to amplify one another. Let's close the big gap when it comes to support, and do a better job being there for one another in the moments that really matter. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if you're motivated to do right by people, do right by your company, or both; all roads will lead you to the same place.

Visit comfortcomms.co to get started.

That's all I've got. Love you. See you next week!

#morejoy #comfort #thebrilliancewithin