🔎 Summary
We explored why bereavement policies alone are not enough, and how organisations can build grief-friendly cultures that balance humanity and performance. Sarah shared her personal experience of loss at work, the limitations of traditional bereavement leave, and introduced the SOFT framework as a practical way to support employees before, during, and long after a grief event.
📊 Why This Matters (The Reality of Grief at Work)
Sarah shared that research shows:
- A significant number of employees consider leaving their job following a major bereavement
- Many people actively hide their grief at work due to fear of reputational damage or career impact
- Grief commonly shows up as exhaustion, brain fog, anxiety, and reduced cognitive capacity for months, not days
She also referenced US-based research indicating that:
- Bereavement is linked to increased absenteeism and presenteeism
- Employees are often given fewer than five days of leave for life-altering loss
- Managers consistently report feeling under-prepared to support grieving employees
Bottom Line: Grief already exists in organisations. The risk comes when people do not feel safe carrying it at work.
💡 What you could do next
- Treat grief as a workplace reality, not an edge case
- Sense-check whether your policies reflect the duration of grief, not just the event
- Ask managers where they currently feel least confident supporting someone after loss
🧠 Why Bereavement Policy Is Broken
Most bereavement policies are outdated, narrow, and focused on administration rather than grief.
Sarah explained that policies typically offer a small number of days off based on relationship type, often excluding chosen family, pregnancy loss, or pets. The underlying expectation is that people return to full capacity immediately.
What tends to be missing is support after someone comes back.
💡 What you could do next
- Review whether your policy reflects real-life relationships
- Stop treating bereavement leave as “grief time” rather than admin time
- Look at what support exists after an employee returns to work
🧩 The SOFT Framework (Key Takeaway 💡)
Sarah introduced SOFT as a practical framework for embedding grief support into everyday work.
S. Soften the Landing
Returning to work after loss should be treated like re-onboarding, not a switch back to normal.
This includes:
- More frequent check-ins
- Reduced meeting load
- Clear conversations about capacity
- Explicit expectations for the first 30, 60, and 90 days
The goal is to acknowledge reduced capacity without penalising performance.
💡 What you could do next
- Treat return from bereavement like a re-ramp, not a return from a long-weekend.
- Agree goals, expectations, and accommodations upfront
- Delay performance reviews if they fall close to a grief event
O. Own the Offering
Vague support creates more work for the person who is grieving.
“Let me know if you need anything” rarely leads to action because people are not given something concrete to say yes to.
Owning the offering means being specific and proactive about what support looks like.
Examples discussed included:
- Offering to take over a specific task
- Organising meals or logistics
- Gathering paperwork and asking how the person wants it shared
💡 What you could do next
- Replace vague offers with clear, specific ones
- Be explicit about what you are comfortable offering
- Make it easy for someone to say yes without asking them to ask
F. Facilitate Connection
“Statements shut conversations down. Questions open them up.”
Generic phrases often end conversations rather than invite them. Questions create permission to share, or not.
Examples discussed:
- What’s your capacity like this week?
- What’s taking up headspace for you right now?
- How does it feel to be back at work?
💡 What you could do next
- Coach managers to ask open, optional questions
- Acknowledge the person who died by name when appropriate
- Let the employee guide how much they want to share
T. Toss the Timeline
Grief does not follow a linear or short timeline.
Support is often strongest immediately after loss, but grief resurfaces later around anniversaries, milestones, or delayed processing.
Sarah shared that she personally needed more support around anniversaries than in the immediate aftermath.
💡 What you could do next
- Avoid one-off support moments
- Encourage managers to check in long after the event
- Normalise course-correcting if support was missed early on
💬 Audience Questions and Practical Answers
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Who is responsible for grief support, managers or HR?
Support should primarily come from managers because they hold the relationship.
HR’s role is to design the system, train managers, and ensure acknowledgement happens consistently.
💡 What you could do next
- Clarify manager responsibility in policy and training
- Equip managers rather than expecting intuition
- Assign ownership for organisational acknowledgement
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What if someone does not want to talk about their grief at work?
Some people use work as a distraction and do not want frequent check-ins.
The advice was to ask explicitly, respect consent, and communicate preferences to the wider team so the employee does not have to repeat themselves.
💡 What you could do next
- Ask employees how visible they want their grief to be
- Communicate boundaries on their behalf where needed
- Allow people to opt in or out without judgement
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How do you support a whole team when a colleague dies?
There is no single right response.
Sarah recommended offering a menu of options rather than a single approach, such as time off, cancelled work, optional gatherings, or memorial spaces.
💡 What you could do next
- Define company-wide options in advance
- Offer multiple ways to engage or step back
- Avoid assuming one correct way to grieve
-
What can managers ask if they do not know the person well?
The guidance was to avoid emotional assumptions and focus on capacity and cognition.
Helpful questions included:
- What’s taking up headspace right now?
- What are you focused on this week?
- What support would be most helpful at the moment?
💡 What you could do next
- Give managers example questions to lean on
- Focus on capacity rather than emotion
- Let employees choose the direction of the conversation
🏗️ Remember…Policy Is Only One Piece
Examples were shared of more progressive approaches, including:
- Compassionate leave taken flexibly across the year
- Trust-based policies without rigid definitions
- Greater discretion at team level
Sarah emphasised that policy only works when paired with culture and manager capability.
💡 What you could do next
- Pair policy updates with manager training
- Focus on the return-to-work experience
- Measure success through psychological safety, not policy usage
An Exercise to Try: Mapping Bereavement in Your Organisation
To close the session, we shared a practical exercise to move teams from abstract policy to real preparedness.
The idea is to map bereavement as an experience, not a policy moment.
How the exercise works
Bring together HR, managers, and ideally employees, and map:
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Types of loss
Immediate family, chosen family, pregnancy loss, pet loss, anticipatory grief
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Moments that matter
Notification, time off, first day back, first performance conversation, anniversaries
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What support exists today
Formal policy, manager discretion, team support, and where gaps exist
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Where friction shows up
Unclear ownership, inconsistent responses, pressure to return to normal, lack of follow-up
The aim is not to design a perfect policy, but to surface where people fall through the cracks.
💡 What you could do next
- Run this as a 60 to 90 minute workshop
- Use real scenarios rather than hypotheticals
- Prioritise one or two changes you can make immediately
- Share guidance with managers so they are not improvising alone
p.s. this is exactly the sort of work Sarah does at Keriah, so hit her up for a ☕ if you want some help here 🤘
🧠 Final Reframe
The job of leaders and HR is not to make grief go away.
It is to make it safe to grieve at work.