Grief Doesn't Clock Out

Six years ago, I was responsible for sending an email to announce the death of an employee after a tragic accident. Then, in the weeks that followed, I resigned from my role. 

This isn't a story about an employee whose memory deserves more than being a catalyst in someone else's narrative. This is about what grief taught me about leadership and about the kinds of losses we cannot name.

Beyond Policies

The majority of bereavement policies are dated and callous. They arithmetic-ize grief: three days for immediate family, one day for extended family, zero days for the chosen family who might matter most. They pretend grief respects org charts and genealogical distance. 

Years ago, I wrote a different kind of bereavement policy - one that solved for the bereft, cold standard. It started with a quote from Russell Friedman: "You can't park your grief at the office door and then pick it up at five. When your heart is broken, your head doesn't work right."

The policy didn’t have a set number of days off. There was no qualifying list of relationships. All it did was ask employees to reach out so we could find solutions that worked for them, their team, their family - however they defined it. 

It acknowledged that grief is intensely personal and ongoing. You can’t “bring your whole self to work” when your self is shattered. 

Grief as Catalyst

As a leader, you become the translator between unspeakable loss and operational continuity. You create space for everyone else's grief while managing your own.

In the weeks before that email, the professional ground beneath me had already shifted. 

A new CEO had arrived, accompanied by a new boss for me, taking a role I believed was mine — blindsiding changes. The work world I'd helped build was being reorganized around me. That's a form of grief too; the sudden loss of the professional landscape you knew, the autonomy you'd earned, the future you'd envisioned. 

Grief cracked everything open. Sometimes it takes multiple losses converging to finally see what needed to change.

The Unnamed Losses

Grief is everywhere, unnamed and invalidated. 

We all carry these griefs. They accumulate quietly, unacknowledged by bereavement policies or workplace culture.

Traditional workplaces treat grief as something to be contained - give it a few days, then back to normal. But grief doesn't work that way. It transforms us if we let it. Sometimes grief is supposed to interrupt us, to tell us something important about what's sustainable, what's humane, what's worth continuing.

That employee's death didn't directly cause my resignation. But grief became the catalyst that revealed what needed to end. It stripped away my capacity to pretend things were fine when they weren't.

Building Something Different

The experience of standing at the intersection of personal tragedy and organizational need taught me something vital: the policies we write reveal who we believe people to be. And most policies assume the worst.

My resignation and the journey to starting HRNB involved many factors and conversations, many moments of recognition. But grief was the thread running through it all - grief for what workplaces could be but aren't, for the humanity we lose in the translation to "human resources," for all the times policies fail to meet people where they are.

Now, I support companies when they implement open bereavement policies, like the one I wrote years ago. Every time I work with a leadership team on an open policy, I see the same pattern: The conversation usually starts with logistics ("What if someone takes advantage?”) and ends somewhere deeper - not only what it means to support humans through loss, but all the unnamed griefs that don't fit in standard policy boxes. 

We acknowledge that grief is part of the human experience, not an inconvenience to minimize.

The Ripple Effects

The most powerful moment in these implementations isn't when we finalize the policy language. It's when someone in leadership, often quietly after the meeting, shares their own story of grief that didn't fit the old rules. The miscarriage they had to work through because it didn't qualify for leave. The best friend's death that "didn't count." The slow loss of a parent to dementia that traditional bereavement policies don't recognize.

These leaders realize they're not just changing policy for their employees. They're creating the workplace they wish they'd had when grief found them. The shift from managing grief to honoring it changes everything.

Moving Forward

Every time I help a company implement an open bereavement policy, it feels like a small rebellion against the arithmetic of grief. It's a declaration that humans are messy, loss is complex, and compassion doesn't need a cap.

I still believe in that bereavement policy I wrote. But no policy, however humane, can resolve the fundamental conflicts between how humans need to grieve and how businesses need to operate.

What we can do is be honest about it. Name all the losses, not just the ones that come with certificates. Acknowledge that grief changes us, and that change isn't something to be managed back to baseline.

The work continues, one policy, one company, one acknowledgment at a time, that grief doesn't clock out. Neither should our humanity.