29-04-2025
Grief In The Workplace: Why Addressing Loss Can Be Good For Culture
The cost of leaving grief unaddressed in the workplace can be high.
Endings can lead to new beginnings, growth, and lasting lessons. Yet all too often in the workplace we avoid talking about endings, whether it be the ending of a project, a client relationship, our retirement, or the most universal ending of them all, death.
'By avoiding conversations about endings, we never get to fully distill the learnings of the life cycle of a project or a company, and I think we can also add the ending of a human life into that because we live in a death-denying culture,' says Carla Fernandez, co-founder of The Dinner Party, a nationwide peer support community for young adult grievers between the ages of 21 and 45, and the author of Renegade Grief.
"Renegade Grief" is a new book that helps people navigate life after loss.
'What's happening around The Dinner Party table is time to process and reflect and learn about what has happened, and how the lessons from this loss experience can inform how we want to spend the rest of our precious lives,' Fernandez says. 'Yes, it's about grief. And yes, it's about somebody's death. But really it's about, how do we want to live moving forward? A lot of people around the dinner party table naturally reflect on the type of work that they want to do, since we spend such a large part of our lives at work.'
We are in a culture that often equates endings with failure rather than as part of a natural cycle, and thus avoid taking time to reflect on the patterns or lessons to be learned from the ending, or the transformations they may have sparked in us.
Carla Fernandez is on a mission to help companies become "grief ready."
In addition, Fernandez says that grief in particular in the workplace is too often seen as having baggage, and many think someone's loss is something we should not bring up or just try to forget and move on. 'My work with people who've experienced significant loss actually finds grief is this incredible initiation, where the person experiences a deepening of empathy and a strengthening of leadership abilities,' says Fernandez. 'Loss becomes this life experience that can allow someone to prioritize what's most important. A lot of the work that I'm doing is about how we reframe the experience of being a griever from something that we need to hide or feel shame about, and instead own as one of the most quintessential, deep human experiences we will all go through at one point or another.'
The cost of leaving grief unaddressed in the workplace can be high, as it may contribute to presenteeism, lower retention rates, and hinder psychological safety. One in nine employees faces a loss yearly, and grief-related losses may cost organizations around $75 billion annually. About half of employees will consider leaving their jobs if employers don't provide support after a loss.
Yet despite its impact, there has been little precedent set for addressing grief when it's present in the workplace. Most companies aren't equipped to handle grief and loss in the workplace, as is evidenced by the standard bereavement leave being only about three to five days. A few days of bereavement leave isn't a sustainable solution because grief isn't something that can be processed in a few days and moved on from. It's not linear, and trying to ignore it doesn't make it go away. Grief expert and author David Kessler says that grief must be witnessed, and The Dinner Party premise is about witnessing grief by bringing grievers together in community.
'Capitalism is a force that wants us to be on and productive, organized, and moving forward,' says Fernandez. 'But grief is this kind of energy that asks you to stop and rest and reflect and feel, and it doesn't always jive with the standard operating procedure of a company.' This prompted Fernandez to create a workplace program called Workplace Resilience that The Dinner Party's Executive Director Mary Pauline Diaz-Frasene now runs to offer talks and training to give organizations the tools and structures to be grief ready and create cultures of care.
When somebody on a team experiences a loss, it's about having the skills to support them, not by being their therapist, but by knowing the questions to ask to make sure that that person has what they need to re-enter the workforce. 'It's about normalizing conversations by teaching managers and leaders how to be more grief ready so that when an employee comes back from bereavement leave, the language of grief has already been introduced into a professional setting instead of being something that's taboo or not talked about.'
While healing from grief can be supported in community, there is a paradox in that grief is also an internal process that calls for inner reflection. This applies to endings of all kinds, and reflecting on our own inevitable ending can help infuse our losses, our relationships, our work, and our lives with more depth and meaning.
Krittika Sharma founded Maajhi to offer experiences and tools to empower people to humanize loss.
Krittika Sharma founded Maajhi to offer experiences and tools to empower people to humanize loss, grief, and find meaning. It's the first of its kind in India, and growing globally. The idea was born soon after her father, now retired air force Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma, her biggest role model and the first Indian astronaut, had a serious medical episode that put him in the hospital. She says the possibility of losing one of her most important people in her life felt unimaginable.
'I got drawn into grief work because of my lack of preparation, so it was this auto-ethnographic approach to understanding why I was so afraid of loss,' says Sharma. 'Then my father was in the hospital, and it can feel very isolating, like you're the only one who's going through it and no one really teaches us about it. But I recognized that I was not the only one who was feeling this way, and that there's a whole healthcare industry that's not talking about grief. There are cultures that don't talk about it.'
Sharma is normalizing these conversations in the workplace through guiding Fortune 100 corporate teams with practices such as death meditations, where you reflect on the end of your life, as well as writing your own obituary so you own your narrative. 'It's about truly humanizing loss, grief, and helping people see meaning through it all. Reflecting on death enables you to live life more fully,' she says.
An exercise such as a death meditation can help people reconnect to their purpose, their value system, and their humanity. This in turn can benefit workplace culture, since people who feel connected to purpose at work are more innovative, more productive, and have higher retention rates.
'A person's performance on the job is rooted in their values and engagement,' says Sharma. 'In some cases when we work with senior leadership, it's really about what they want to leave behind, how they've gone through this journey of getting to being a leader, and what are the values they want to pass on to their peers and their teams?'
Sharma sees these exercises as a pathway to bringing more humanity to work, because reflecting on death can help you live more intentionally. 'There's a reflective quality to a death meditation that actually fits into a corporate structure, because it enables people to apply the insights they get today rather than wait until they retire to ask themselves what they are doing with the finite amount of time they have,' Sharma says. 'It allows you to question yourself now, and you get to do something about it because insight leads to action. Is the way you're living your life enabling you to reach your potential both in and outside the workplace?'
Workplaces may be more open to creating space for conversations about grief and loss in a post-pandemic era after people felt grief on a collective level, and as geopolitics and technological advances such as AI lead to ongoing disruption and uncertainty.
'There are so many situations in which we don't talk about loss in its many forms unless it's right in front of us,' says Sharma. 'What I recognized about my own experiences with grief, or seeing others through it, is that there is a language of loss that we all inherently know but don't often use, and it belongs to all of us and changes our trajectories. There's thinking attached to it, which doesn't come up unless there's a safe space to address it. Like David Kessler said, grief isn't something that needs to be solved for; it needs to be witnessed.'
