Grief is a difficult subject to deal with at the best of times, but how should companies handle employees who are grieving at work? In 2017, a devastating incident occurred in Portland, Oregon, leaving two men dead. Stephanie Blakey, a senior HR business partner with the Cadmus Group, soon discovered that one of the men who had died was an employee in her company’s Portland office. Blakey spoke about this at Workhuman 2019 alongside grief and trauma consultant Jennifer Crow. Together, they went through the process of how to deal with the extremely sensitive issue of what to do when a co-worker dies.
While an incredibly sombre topic, it was one of the most compelling sessions at the conference for me, and I heard several other attendees mention it as one of the highlight sessions, most likely because of how well it was dealt with by Blakey and Crow, but also due to the importance of the subject itself and how little it’s talked about.
