When grief looks like disengagement

Oct 3

Part 1 of 3 in a Field notes series on grief at work

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

A manager notices an employee three months after their spouse died. Still showing up. Still meeting deadlines. But distant. Slower. Not quite themselves. The manager considers it a performance issue, almost flags it as disengagement, then stops. Something doesn’t fit.

That hesitation matters. What a leader does next shapes whether a grieving person is met with support or with scrutiny.

Grief is not rare at work. It isn’t an outlier or an exceptional circumstance that happens once in a career. In a population-based study of 1,208 Canadian adults, 96 per cent had experienced bereavement in their lifetime, and 78 per cent were actively grieving at the time they were interviewed (Wilson et al., 2018). Grief is a regular, predictable part of working life. So why is it so hard to see?

Why grief hides in plain sight

For decades, organizations have tracked the health of their workforce through one visible number: days absent. Absence is countable and flagged by systems. Presenteeism, working while unwell, is not.

Paula Allen, who leads global research at TELUS Health, draws a clear conclusion from the TELUS Mental Health Index: presenteeism is now a bigger productivity threat than absenteeism (Allen, 2026). In Canada, a national survey found that about 36 per cent of workers had worked while sick in the previous three months, while roughly two-thirds had missed no work at all (Zhang et al., 2025). Among employed Canadians with early multiple sclerosis, presenteeism accounted for 38 per cent of total productivity loss over three months (Rodriguez Llorian et al., 2022).

A workforce with low absence and high presenteeism can look, on every conventional dashboard, like a picture of stability. It is a picture of people working unwell.

Disclosure makes it harder still. Whether people tell their manager about a mental health concern is shaped by stigma, trust, and fear of what will follow, and those barriers can limit access to support and accommodation (Dewa et al., 2021; Richard et al., 2026). If a grieving employee doesn’t say what they’re carrying, a leader can easily read attendance as functioning.

Grief is a textbook driver of presenteeism. The grieving employee shows up. They’re present. They’re trying. But their capacity has shifted, and a leader looking for absence won’t see the signs of reduced capacity.

What reduced capacity actually looks like

In her developing Capacity After Loss framework — introduced in a LinkedIn post that prompted our conversation — Sylvia Wolfer describes several areas in which bereavement may affect functioning at work:

Attention.

Focusing takes more effort than it used to. Distraction is automatic. A grieving person at a meeting is present in body but not fully in mind.

Working memory.

Instructions and details don’t stick the way they did. Not because the person isn’t trying — because a significant portion of their cognitive capacity is occupied by loss. They hear the brief, forget the nuance, have to ask again.

Decision-making.

Even small choices start to feel heavy. What to prioritize, how to respond to an email, which task to start first — these require more energy when grief is running in the background.

Social bandwidth.

Meetings and conversations cost more. Small talk is harder. Navigating group dynamics takes effort they don’t have. They’re not withdrawn because they’re disengaged; they’re quieter because the social overhead is too high.

Physical regulation.

Sleep patterns shift, patience recalibrates, stamina changes. A person who could sprint through a full day now needs breaks they’re not comfortable asking for.

None of this shows up in a performance review as a recognizable pattern. It shows up as “not quite themselves.” Slower. Distant. Less engaged. Without a way to understand it, a leader can read it as disengagement, a problem for performance management, rather than as reduced capacity, which calls for thoughtful support.

When that happens, the grieving employee faces a choice: ask for help and risk being flagged as a performance issue, or double down and try harder. Some work through lunch. Some stay late. They try to prove they’re still capable, and the gap between what they’re carrying and what they’re showing grows wider.

Presence, not presenteeism

In December 2000, I lost my newborn daughter. I soon learned about the protective fog that comes with grief; it somehow moderates the pain. My leader at the time may not have known what to do with my grief but recognized what they saw: a person who needed support, not scrutiny — and acted. They didn’t count the days I took. They didn’t manage my presence. Instead, they engaged me in a project that initially required lower social demand; and it moved my career in a new direction while allowing me to work at a pace that fit my energy and focus. I was not absent, but also not forced to pretend I had capacity I didn’t have. I was still present, and connected to work.

My leader modelled something I didn’t have language for then: the difference between presence and presenteeism. They made space for both my grief and my work. They understood that supporting someone through loss means measuring their capacity, not their attendance. I was fortunate; many are not.

What the misreading costs

When grief is read as disengagement, the costs build quietly. A person may be labelled as checked out at the moment they most need understanding. They may exhaust themselves keeping up the appearance of full capacity. Some may eventually leave an organization that never recognized what was happening.

The cost to the organization builds the same way. Picture someone working at 60 per cent of their usual capacity for several weeks. The work they can’t get to adds up to more than a week’s absence would have cost. But because they’re showing up, and because the work still mostly gets done, nothing prompts anyone to respond.

Output still matters, and performance still needs managing. What changes is the starting point: being able to recognize reduced capacity, having language to name it, and knowing that a different response is possible.

A question worth sitting with

This is not a call for a new program. It begins with noticing.

For a leader, the question may be personal. Who on your team has experienced a loss in the past year, and what did you notice afterward? Did it look like disengagement?

For an organization, the question is about design. What do your systems count? If absence is the main signal you track, what are you not seeing? And when a grieving person returns, does anyone have the time, the language, and the permission to ask how their capacity has changed?

In the next field note, I look at what employers can do: what bereavement leave does and doesn’t achieve, and what happens in the conversations after someone returns to work.

If this raised something for you, I’d welcome hearing it.

Sources

Allen, P. (2026, August 25). Presenteeism is now a bigger productivity threat than absenteeism. People Management. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1968252/presenteeism-bigger-productivity-threat-absenteeism

Dewa, C. S., van Weeghel, J., Joosen, M. C. W., Gronholm, P. C., & Brouwers, E. P. M. (2021). Workers’ decisions to disclose a mental health issue to managers and the consequences. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, Article 631032. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.631032

Richard, C., Corbière, M., Fiset-Renaud, H., Caiada, M., Lamontagne, J., Diotte, F., Kik, A.-M., Merlo, R., & Lecomte, T. (2026). Disclosure impact of mental health conditions in the workplace: A scoping review and a thematic analysis. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 36(1), 131–166. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10926-025-10288-1

Rodriguez Llorian, E., Zhang, W., Khakban, A., Patten, S., Traboulsee, A., Oh, J., Kolind, S., Prat, A., Tam, R., & Lynd, L. D. (2022). Productivity loss among people with early multiple sclerosis: A Canadian study. Multiple Sclerosis Journal, 28(10), 1414–1423. https://doi.org/10.1177/13524585211069070

Wilson, D. M., Cohen, J., MacLeod, R., & Houttekier, D. (2018). Bereavement grief: A population-based foundational evidence study. Death Studies, 42(7), 463–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2017.1382609

Zhang, W., Qian, H., L’Heureux, J., Johns, G., Koehoorn, M., & Woodcock, S. (2025). Establishing work productivity loss norms: Absenteeism and presenteeism in a Canadian working population. Social Science & Medicine, 118892. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118892

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.

Mark S Roach