The Delicate Dance of Workplace Grief
Why we need to grieve work losses and how to create space to support grief
Death. Breakups. Serious Illness. These are tragic life events and losses we mourn and grieve. To cope, there are leaves of absence, funerals, and shivas, breakup playlists — we create space and have practices and rituals that help us through these major life events.
But what about layoffs? Reorgs that change your entire career? Beloved managers and colleagues leaving? These, too, are losses. Do they require grieving as well? In our quest for work-life balance, does separating these personal and professional experiences mean denying our feelings and emotions around work?
Recently, I’ve experienced a grab bag of these “grief-worthy” episodes. A breakup. Layoffs. Moving. A leader I love leaving the organization. More layoffs. Beloved colleagues moving on. I felt guilty equating the losses at work to the losses in my personal life. I was embarrassed when, after weeks of grieving a breakup, the news that my senior leader was leaving caused me to crumble into tears.
“Wait,” I thought. “Why am I crying about work?”
Work-Life or Work=Life?
My version of “work-life balance” is to have a “healthy level of apathy” about work. This means distancing myself enough emotionally from my work by putting it in perspective. This helps to avoid the emotional roller coaster that comes with last-minute requests, frequent plan changes, and one-too-many opinions. “It’s just a job,” I tell myself. I work in tech — it’s not life or death. I’ve learned to adopt this perspective after many years of asking my mom, a doctor, about her day at work, and hearing about the 30-something-year-old who she diagnosed with Breast Cancer that day. A bad day at work in tech marketing just isn’t that bad by comparison. It’s not what really matters.
That may be true of the work itself, but the relationships I’ve built at work are part of my life. They matter. My work relationships have grown into some of my closest friendships. Even those people I only talk to within the context of work, I talk to more often than some of my dearest friends and family. Work is where I spend most of my time and energy, and, well, my life.
When something dislodges or disrupts the balance of these work relationships, we need to acknowledge that there isn’t actually a divide between work and life. This is life. My life. These are the people who matter to me. And I need to be able to grieve the losses and changes and disruptions in my professional relationships just like I grieve the losses and changes and disruptions in my personal relationships.
Creating Space for Work Grief
The challenge with layoffs in 2023 is that there is no space to grieve, whether you are the one laid off or one of the employees still around. Notification goes out to impacted employees only — sometimes even managers aren’t aware their teams are impacted until they’re gone. Slack and email access are removed immediately. All means of communicating with your now former colleagues are gone. It’s a shock impacted further by the complete loss of contact.
How can we make space for grief when it all happens so fast?
In Judaism, mourners hold a Shiva, a formal, week-long mourning period. We bury our loved ones quickly, often a day after they’ve passed, and immediately after the burial we begin sitting Shiva. Friends, family, and neighbors all come to the mourner’s home and spend time sharing stories, eating, drinking, and praying. It’s a whirlwind of people in and out of your home, food piling up on kitchen counters, old friends and colleagues coming to pay their respects whether they knew the deceased or not. Shiva is a blessing because it brings constant support and the camaraderie of others during a time of loss and loneliness. It reminds you that you have an entire community of people who love you and support you and are here to help you.
With layoffs removing access to technology immediately, teams distributed across the globe, and individuals receiving the news alone at home, there’s no sense of community support. LinkedIn becomes the digital town square for collective mourning. But we lack the ability to support one another side-by-side, hand in hand, in a way that shows our former colleagues that we’re here to support them, to lift them up, to help them move on. It’s a necessary part of grief that we’re currently seriously missing.
How can you create space for work grief? Call your work friends. Keep in touch. Let them know they are loved, supported, cared for. Be obnoxious about checking in, bringing food (and drinks), and making time to connect and reconnect. Send a thank you note to those who have impacted your career positively. The personal connections we build at work do not have to end when our employment does. But the sudden end of a layoff means we need to be more thoughtful, and more intentional, about grieving the losses and supporting others in their grieving.
So if you are going through a layoff, a reorg, a beloved manager departing the company, or your work best friend moving on— grieve. Grieve the work changes. Grieve the loss of what you’ve come to know and love about showing up to the office or logging into work every day. Grieve the loss of who you work with and how. This is hard. There is no real separation between work and life. This is your life.
