Benefits of Grief Management as Part of a Vibrant Corporate Culture
Poorly managed grief in the workplace costs companies money and trust. This article on grief management as a cost factor discusses the direct and indirect costs.
In this article you will learn what benefits you can expect from grief management, beyond the financial aspects.
How Does Your Organization Benefit Grief Management?
Let us start by outlining what grief management entails: At the meta level, grief management defines dealing with grief as the responsibility of managers and HR or health management experts and details the what and how.
What Is Part of Grief Management?
Grief management prepares organizations for dealing with workplace aspects of a situation, when an employee grieves.
As employers, companies can provide their employees with stability in their professional environment during difficult times in their personal lifes.
Preparing for dealing with grief and other crises in the workplace ensures that people who maintain contact with employees during difficult times in their lives can draw on guidelines and support systems (including for themselves).
This is preferable to having to react without processes in place.
Important components for structured grief management within your organization are:
- Clear responsibilities—Who takes on which tasks in the event of bereavement? Above all, clarity is needed between HR and management.
- Enable flexibility—Think of adjustments in working hours or home office arrangements, where possible.
- Psychosocial support—Provide access to counseling and grief support, if possible.
- Establishing a culture of remembrance—How does the company commemorate deceased employees?
- Clarify legal and administrative aspects—Compassionate leave, deregistration from social security, etc.
- Raise awareness among managers and teams— Provide information on dealing with grief.
- Support re-integration—Enabling individual support after a longer break.
Grief Management in Organizations: Offers
Define Goals and Processes for Grief Management
How can your organization achieve this?
- Define goals for in grief management, as well as likely scenarios
- Define offerings, processes, and responsibilities.
- Plan and execute internal knowledge transfer.
- Define and execute monitoring
Build on experiences, when thinking about scenarios and offerings.
Also useful: Think in terms of scenarios. What cases are more likely with regard with you employees? And what might they find helpful?
Building on this preliminary work, you can switch to designing processes:
Defining processes and responsibilities can require a lot of internal coordination—not least because not everyone is equipped to deal with crises. The starting point is to consider: Who learns first from an employee's personal crisis? Possible contact points are HR or organizsational health management experts AND managers—and they all need to be included in the planning process.
In addition, both managers and team members should be informed about offers. It is important that managers understand that in acute cases, they must balance the information needs of colleagues with confidentiality.
Last but definitely not least, consider how the implemented processes are reviewed for effectiveness.
Saving Cost with Grief Management
A sample calculation shows that effective grief management in the workplace can save ar least €8,000 in pure wage costs for an average employee in Germany, with additional costs for overtime, and transferred costs due to lost trust.
Moreover, possible outcomes of dealing with grief in a healthy way are as follows:
- Bereaved personnel may be able to return to work earlier, even after significant losses. This reduces the costs incurred by lost working hours, such as overtime.
- Alienation/uncertainty among colleagues is reduced when a colleague's bereavement is handled professionally by the employer.This reduces the potential for atmospheric disturbances, the costs of which are often difficult to quantify.
- If the manager is the likely point of contact for employees, they can work more smoothly as well: they need to do less research, improvise less, and, in a best case scenario, can be confident that they are acting in the best interests of both the company and the employee.
- Grief management can be extended to cover handling other crisis situations, which helps managers and HR experts.
Grief Management as Part of Organizational Culture
The financial losses associated with grief management are only the tip of the iceberg, with factors regarding the organizational culture below the waterline. For example, dealing well with critical personal situations is in line with the view of humanity and the self-image of many people in HR or occupational health management positions, as well as in leadership roles. At least, that's what I often see: Most HR experts and managers I meet genuinely want to improve their employees' situations, for a bereaved person as well as in other situations.
Unfortunately, quite often managers do not have much to fall back on, if bad comes to worst. And in a situation where someone wants to react quickly, this can cause stress.
That's why my strong recommendation is: Support managers by preparing for likely scenarios! Ideally, this should be something that can be adapted to the situation at hand. After all, it's usually the managers and experts in the service departments who have to deal with difficult situations such as bereavements.
With bereavement management, you do exactly this: prepare your organization for the worst.
Would you like to set up the bereavement management for your employer?
♦ Request a quote for your bereavement management workshop. ♦
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