Part 2 of 3 in a Field notes series on grief at work. Part 1, When grief looks like disengagement, looked at how reduced capacity after a loss can be mistaken for disengagement.
Written by Mark S. Roach
Founder & Principal Advisor, Summit to Shore Human Centred Leadership Advisory. With more than 35 years of experience spanning healthcare, rehabilitation, disability management, workplace mental health, and insurance leadership, Mark writes about leadership, systems accountability, and the human experience behind organizational decisions.
Contribution from Sylvia Wolfer
Grief educator and workplace consultant who explores what bereavement does to attention, memory, decision-making, and capacity at work. Sylvia’s developing Capacity After Loss framework and workplace education programmes help organizations and managers understand the invisible costs of grief. She has given permission to use her framework in this article, and has reviewed the sections relating to her work and area of expertise for accuracy. She works directly with people carrying loss alongside work and leadership responsibilities and brings together research on grief and the brain with embodied practices and lived experience. Her work has been featured in Forbes. sylviawolfer.com
Clinical comment from Carmen Bellows
Registered psychologist in Alberta and Director, Mental Health at Sunlife, where she contributes to mental health strategy and advises employers on psychological health and safety, disability prevention, and employee wellbeing. Carmen brings 25 years of experience across community mental health, employee assistance programs, psychiatry, trauma, substance use disorder, and private practice. She holds a master’s degree in psychology and is completing a Doctor of Psychology degree. She serves on the board of the Psychological Association of Alberta and is a member of the University of Alberta Senate. She is also a past board member of the national mental health charity Unsinkable. She maintains a private practice, trains healthcare professionals, and is committed to evidence-based mental health support and to reducing the stigma of mental illness. Carmen contributed her clinical perspective on how grief can present at work, often as anger, low motivation, or fatigue, and how leaders can support people after bereavement leave ends.
About a 6 minute read
When someone on a team experiences a death, the organization usually knows what to do first. Leave is approved. A card goes around. Someone covers the urgent work. Then, a few days or a week later, the person comes back.
What happens next is less clear. Most organizations have a policy for the absence. Few have thought as carefully about the return. Yet the return is where grief meets work, day by day.
What leave does, and what it doesn’t
The organizational sciences have paid little attention to bereavement. Diane Bergeron (2025) set out to change that with a survey of 388 bereaved employees, looking at how grief, bereavement leave, and other workplace practices related to how people experienced work afterward.
Three findings stand out.
First, grief mattered. The more intense a person’s grief, the lower their engagement, the weaker their job behaviours, and the less they felt their organization supported them.
Second, bereavement leave was associated with people feeling supported by their organization. It was not associated with engagement or job behaviours.
Third, some practices showed promise. The opportunity to talk about workplace accommodations, for example, was positively related to certain work outcomes. Other results were mixed.
Bergeron (2025) is one survey, and it shows associations, not causes. Still, the pattern is worth sitting with. Leave appears to tell people they matter. It doesn’t, on its own, help them work well again. What seems to make a difference is something closer to a conversation: a chance to talk about what they need now.
Entitlements also differ. Bereavement leave depends on where you work and who you work for, and it may change over time. Your provincial, territorial, or federal employment standards set the minimum. Your employer’s policies and benefits may go further. Both are worth knowing before you need them.
Grief doesn’t keep to the leave schedule
Leave is measured in days. Grief is not.
Carmen Bellows, a registered psychologist and Director, Mental Health at Sunlife, notes that many cultures mark bereavement with traditions and timeframes that honour the person who died. In North America, the time we openly allow for grief is far shorter. And grief does not always look like sadness. As Bellows puts it, it can show up as anger, a lack of motivation, or fatigue, the same signals Part 1 described being misread as disengagement.
Among family members of patients who died in three Ottawa acute-care hospitals before and during the first wave of COVID-19, 28.9 per cent reported severe grief (Downar et al., 2022). Twelve to 18 months after the death, one in three had grief that remained high or had worsened (Lapenskie et al., 2024). In the United Kingdom, 34.6 per cent of people bereaved in the pandemic’s first year met the threshold for probable prolonged grief disorder at about 13 months, and 28.6 per cent at about two years (Harrop et al., 2023).
That is not the whole picture. In a Quebec study of people bereaved during the pandemic, the share with probable prolonged grief disorder fell from 32 per cent at first assessment to 13.9 per cent at the second (Cherblanc et al., 2025). For many people, grief eases with time.
Both findings matter for leaders. Support needs to outlast the leave period, but it doesn’t need to be permanent or heavy. It needs to be attentive: noticing who is still carrying a great deal months later, and who is finding their footing again. “Creating space for inclusion is an important part of reducing the stigma associated with grief,” says Bellows, “and remembering that it will pop up at unexpected and uncomfortable times is important for leaders to keep in mind.”
And when people don’t get the support they need, it shows. In an Australian study, people with probable prolonged grief disorder were far more likely to report unmet support needs, along with significant impairment at work and at home (Maccallum et al., 2025).
The conversation after the return
If the opportunity to talk about accommodations is one of the practices linked to better outcomes, what might that conversation include?
Sylvia Wolfer’s work with people carrying loss alongside their jobs points to support that looks different from standard performance management:
Specific offers, not open-ended invitations. Grief can make it harder to identify what you need. “I’m taking the Wednesday report off your plate” helps. “Let me know if you need anything” often doesn’t.
Demanding work in their best hours, not the calendar’s. Capacity isn’t flat across a day. Ask when they feel sharp, and protect that window for the one thing that needs their full attention.
A single point of contact for logistics. Every person they have to update is another conversation they didn’t choose and may not be ready for.
Marking the dates before they have to. Capacity can dip again on a predictable schedule: anniversaries, holidays, birthdays. Lighten the load ahead of those dates instead of waiting to be asked.
A pre-written exit line. A simple phrase for leaving a conversation that becomes too much spares them from improvising when they have nothing left to improvise with.
None of these is a program. Each is a small decision a leader can make, and none is a burden on the team. Each one protects the capacity the person has, and keeps them connected to work.
How a loss is acknowledged
The Quebec study offers one more finding. During the pandemic, participants had, on average, 2.9 of eight common mourning rituals prevented. Yet the number of rituals lost did not predict how grief unfolded. Satisfaction with the rituals people could hold did (Cherblanc et al., 2025).
That study was about funerals and family rituals, not workplaces. But it echoes Bergeron’s findings. In both, what seemed to matter was not how much was provided, but whether it meant something to the person receiving it.
A policy can be generous and still feel impersonal. A brief, sincere acknowledgment from a leader who has thought about what this person needs may carry more weight than its size suggests.
What this asks of an organization
In Canada, the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (CSA Group, 2013) gives organizations a way to look at work through 13 psychosocial factors. Grief tests several of them at once. Psychological and social support asks whether co-workers and supervisors are supportive of employees’ psychological and mental health concerns. Workload management asks whether tasks can be accomplished within the time available. Balance asks whether the organization recognizes the need for balance between the demands of work, family, and personal life (Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, 2023).
Under all of these sits something harder to write into policy: whether a person feels safe enough to say, “I’m not at full capacity right now.” Amy Edmondson calls this psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson, 1999). Without it, even good policies go unused.
Leaders shape whether that belief takes hold. In a New Zealand study, Clarke and colleagues surveyed 89 lawyers twice, four weeks apart. Employees who described their direct leader as fair, people-oriented, and clear about roles reported greater psychological safety a month later, and that sense of safety was the path through which leadership was linked to better wellbeing and job satisfaction, and to less burnout (Clarke et al., 2025). It is one small study in one profession, and it shows association rather than cause. But it suggests that what makes support usable is less the policy than the everyday conduct of the person someone reports to.
So grief offers a useful test of how work is designed. If someone on your team were carrying a significant loss right now, would your systems help you see it? Would your leaders know what to say? Would that person feel able to tell you what they need?
A question worth sitting with
For a leader: when someone on your team comes back after a loss, what happens in the first conversation? And who checks in three months later, when the cards have stopped?
For an organization: does your bereavement policy end when the leave does? What would it take for support after a loss to rely less on luck, on whether a person happens to have a thoughtful manager, and more on how work is designed?
In the final field note, I look ahead to the next generation of workers, who are growing up with a language for grief that most of us were never taught.
If this raised something for you, I’d welcome hearing it.
Sources
Bergeron, D. M. (2025). The working wounded: The effect of bereavement grief and organizational policies and practices on employee outcomes. Group & Organization Management, 50(5–6), 1522–1556. https://doi.org/10.1177/10596011241310272
Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. (2023). Mental health: Psychosocial risk factors in the workplace. https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/psychosocial/mh/mentalhealth_risk.html
Cherblanc, J., Côté, I., Mercure, C., Boever, C., & Zech, E. (2025). Rituals in grief: Why meaning matters more than numbers. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 30(6), 871–892. https://doi.org/10.1080/15325024.2025.2471816
Clarke, E., Näswall, K., Masselot, A., & Malinen, S. (2025). Feeling safe to speak up: Leaders improving employee wellbeing through psychological safety. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 46(1), 152–176. https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X231226303
CSA Group. (2013, reaffirmed 2022). CAN/CSA-Z1003-13/BNQ 9700-803/2013 (R2022): Psychological health and safety in the workplace — Prevention, promotion, and guidance to staged implementation.
Downar, J., Parsons, H. A., Cohen, L., Besserer, E., Adeli, S., Gratton, V., Murphy, R., Warmels, G., Bruni, A., Bhimji, K., Dyason, C., Enright, P., Desjardins, I., Wooller, K., Kabir, M., Noel, C., Heidinger, B., Anderson, K., Arsenault-Mehta, K., … Lawlor, P. (2022). Bereavement outcomes in family members of those who died in acute care hospitals before and during the first wave of COVID-19: A cohort study. Palliative Medicine, 36(8), 1305–1312. https://doi.org/10.1177/02692163221109711
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Harrop, E., Mirra, R. M., Goss, S., Longo, M., Byrne, A., Farnell, D., Seddon, K., Penny, A., Machin, L., Sivell, S., & Selman, L. (2023). Prolonged grief during and beyond the pandemic: Factors associated with levels of grief in a four time-point longitudinal survey of people bereaved in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Public Health, 11, 1215881. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1215881
Lapenskie, J., Anderson, K., Lawlor, P. G., Kabir, M., Noel, C., Heidinger, B., Parsons, H. A., Cohen, L., Gratton, V., Besserer, E., Adeli, S., Murphy, R., Warmels, G., Bruni, A., Bhimji, K., Dyason, C., Enright, P., Desjardins, I., Wooller, K., … Downar, J. (2024). Long-term bereavement outcomes in family members of those who died in acute care hospitals before and during the first wave of COVID-19: A cohort study. Palliative Medicine, 38(2), 264–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/02692163231223394
Maccallum, F., Breen, L. J., Ivynian, S., DiGiacomo, M., Luckett, T., & Lobb, E. A. (2025). Prolonged grief reactions and help-seeking in bereaved adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Affective Disorders, 374, 467–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2025.01.056
Sylvia Wolfer has given permission to use her developing framework for Capacity After Loss and has reviewed the sections that refer to her work for accuracy.
Carmen Bellows has reviewed this article for accurate representation of her comments.
© 2026 Summit to Shore Human Centred Leadership Advisory. All rights reserved for this article. Attribution required for reprint or adaptation. Free to share, with credit.