Grief at work: what every manager should know

In France, 66,000 people lose their spouse each year. 24,000 parents lose a child. Millions of employees go through a major bereavement each year, and shortly afterwards, continue to show up in meetings, open-plan offices and performance reviews.

Grief does not wait for the end of the quarter. It enters the organisation with all its brutality and unpredictability. And the way the organisation, through its direct manager, welcomes or ignores this reality durably determines the trust the employee will place in their employer.

The four phases of grief: what your employee is experiencing

The reference model, that of Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, describes five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But in the professional context, it is more useful to think in four experiential phases.

The shock phase (days 1 to 30): the person is in a state of numbness. They may function on the surface, but their cognitive energy is massively mobilised by the work of psychological survival. Any demand for normal performance is out of reach.

The disorganisation phase (months 2 to 6): the initial shock fades and is replaced by emptiness. This is often the most difficult period, because the professional environment thinks 'things are better' when the internal reality is actually worsening.

The reorganisation phase (months 6 to 18): the person begins to find a new balance, to reinvest in work. Relapses are frequent at anniversaries and important dates.

The integration phase: grief does not end, it integrates. The person regains full functioning capacity, enriched by a new depth.

« Grief is the price of love. It is not cured, it is traversed. »

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Cotemporality: understanding the time of grief

One of the most important concepts for supporting a bereaved employee is cotemporality, the idea that the time of grief and the time of the organisation coexist, but are not synchronous.

The organisation operates in linear, measurable time: projects have deadlines, quarters follow one another, appraisals arrive on fixed dates. Grief has its own tempo, non-linear, unpredictable, which does not respect agendas.

A manager who does not understand this cotemporality will seek, often with the best intentions, to accelerate the return to normal. They will set recovery objectives, propose closer monitoring, ask for regular updates. In doing so, they superimpose their own relationship to time onto that of their employee, and create additional pressure precisely where they wanted to help.

The manager's posture: being present without intruding

There is no perfect script for supporting a bereaved employee. But there are postures that help and postures that harm.

What helps: naming the loss without minimising it ('I'm sorry about your mother'), asking how the person wants to be treated at work rather than deciding for them, maintaining a regular and discreet presence without monitoring, adjusting time and workload if necessary without making it a unilateral decision.

What harms: generic consolation phrases ('time heals everything'), comparisons ('I lost someone too'), absolute silence out of fear of 'saying the wrong thing', premature normalisation ('you need to get back on track'), or conversely, over-protection that infantilises.

The fundamental rule is to follow the person's rhythm, not the organisation's. They know what they need, provided they are given the possibility to say it.

« Presence does not heal grief. But absence always worsens loneliness. »

— Christophe Fauré, psychiatrist specialising in grief

What organisations can structurally put in place

Beyond the individual manager's posture, organisations have a structural role to play.

Legal bereavement leave (3 days in France for a spouse, 5 days for a child since 2020) is notoriously insufficient given what people experience. Several companies have chosen to go further: 10 days, 15 days, or more depending on family ties.

Manager training is an underused lever. A few hours of awareness-raising on the phases of grief, the posture of listening and the resources available within the company, this is enough to radically transform the quality of support.

Access to psychological support, via an Employee Assistance Programme or specialist support, must be known to all and accessible without complex procedures.

Finally, the culture around returning after bereavement leave deserves particular attention. The first day back, what the manager says or does not say, determines whether the person feels welcomed or ignored in what they are going through.