What Employers Owe Grieving Employees
No workplace can fix the pain of loss, but experts say organizations can take steps to better support those experiencing it

A few hours after her fiancé’s unexpected death, Danielle Gelineau texted her boss.
It was late on a Sunday night in September of 2021. Earlier that afternoon, Brian Keefe, Gelineau’s partner for the better part of a decade, experienced a sudden and fatal cardiac arrest while playing soccer in a field not far from their Toronto home. He was 32 years old.
Somehow, in her shock later that evening, Gelineau pulled out her phone and typed a message to her manager at Smith School of Business, where she today works as associate director of the Master of Management Analytics program. “I just wrote ‘Brian died. I’m not coming to work tomorrow,’” she recalls. “Looking back on it, it was such a jarring message to send, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’d never been in a situation like that.”
Gelineau’s boss replied quickly and supportively, advising her not to think of her job at all. Indeed, in the devastating, disorienting weeks that followed, work barely crossed her mind; barring the occasional touchpoint to share funeral details, she disconnected completely.
Five months after Brian’s death, when Gelineau decided it was time to end her short-term leave and get back to work, she came to understand an entirely new frontier of grief: The ambiguous, unpredictable and utterly exhausting experience of grieving in the modern workplace. “I didn’t know how tough the transition would be,” she says. “I didn’t realize how hard it would be to be back.”
Gelineau is quick to emphasize that her co-workers and boss were kind and meant well. Still, she’d experience sudden, debilitating waves of sadness, sometimes in the middle of a workday. Crying in the office, a practice she’d been raised to avoid at all costs, became a regular occurrence, sparked by everything from kind questions to flashes of memory. When colleagues didn’t acknowledge her loss—out of awkwardness, or politeness, or obliviousness—she felt hurt, unseen, even a bit angry. “My mind was 24/7 thinking about Brian,” she says. “I so badly wanted to share that with people. I think I wanted them to understand how much I was suffering.”
Gelineau is not alone in experiencing a rocky return to professional life after loss. Grief affects nearly every workplace at some point, with two-thirds of Canadian employers reporting at least one bereavement leave per year. Yet most organizations struggle to give grieving employees what they need: Fewer than half of the people surveyed for a 2024 report by digital mental-health firm Calm felt their employer offered sufficient support for those who’d lost a loved one.
It’s no wonder: Grief can be an amorphous, messy and highly personal process. When it enters the professional realm, it can create uncomfortable challenges for both the individuals experiencing it and the peers working alongside it. “We will all experience grief at work, or support a colleague experiencing it,” Gelineau reflects. “Yet no one really talks about it, and few of us are equipped to address it.”
Many—Gelineau included—would like to see that change. It may be true that, when a teammate experiences loss, there is very little any organization can do to “fix” the situation: Grief just doesn’t work that way. But according to experts in workplace grief, and those who’ve experienced it, employers can do better by bereaved employees by understanding and honouring a few core responsibilities.
Responsibility 1: Assume nothing
Glenda Fisk believes most colleagues and bosses want to do the right thing for a peer who’s experienced loss. “It’s not that people have ill intent, and it’s not that they don’t care,” she explains. “It’s that they don’t know what to do or what to say.” And because absolutely no one wants to make a colleague cry at the water cooler, people often draw their own conclusions about how to proceed.
Fisk is an associate professor and undergraduate chair of the Department of Employment Relations at Queen’s University, where her research encompasses emotional regulation, leadership, and—in recent years—how grief affects workplaces. She started studying the effects of loss at work five years ago, a few years after she had to navigate her own mother’s death while simultaneously starting a new job in a new city—a “shattering experience” that exposed to her the complexity of the matter. Recently, Fisk has been working with the University of Guelph’s Laurie Barclay and Oakland University’s Michelle Hammond to interview leaders in a range of industries about how grief affects their job performance, work relationships and professional identities. “It is fascinating,” Fisk says. “We are learning that there is absolutely no ‘normal’ grief experience.”
Some people need only a few days away before they get back to work; others need months, even years. Some want their co-workers to acknowledge the loss; others prefer to compartmentalize it and carry on with business as usual. As the University of Alberta’s Donna M. Wilson and Gail Low, and Universitat Internacional de Catalunya’s Andrea Rodríguez-Prat put it in a 2020 research article “grief is universal but individually impactful.” No one experiences it quite the same way as anyone else.
For her part, Gelineau loves to talk about Brian. She’ll gladly tell you their love story: About how they first became friends in 2011, while studying at Algonquin College, and about how they started dating in 2014, a month before she left for a year-long backpacking trip. She’ll recount how they moved in together in Ottawa, and then relocated to Toronto, where they pursued their respective careers, bought a house and, in 2020, got engaged. She’ll share that Brian was an extrovert and an enthusiast. That he loved microbreweries and good coffee and shawarma and gardening and carpentry. That he built a vegetable planter on their balcony that blooms to this day.
For Gelineau, sharing details like these can be helpful and cathartic, whether she’s chatting with a co-worker, an old colleague or a new acquaintance. “I want people to know about Brian, and I want to tell them about the really horrible nightmare that I lived,” she says. “His life and his death are a big part of who I am as an individual and I want my colleagues to know that, just as I want to know about what makes them who they are.” So, she has no problem at all when a colleague pulls her aside to check in on how she’s doing or asks about a photo on her desk.

But Gelineau recognizes that for others experiencing loss, such inquiries might be too triggering or painful to table between meetings or over lunch. She also understands that her colleagues aren’t mind-readers.
That’s why she’s grateful for a simple call she got from two close office friends once she decided to come back to work. They asked her whether she wanted people to address her loss, whether she felt comfortable talking about Brian, and what else her colleagues should know before approaching her. They then shared these rules of engagement with the entire team, which helped give everyone clarity. “Having those colleagues take that on for me, to advocate for me and relay my needs, was really, really helpful,” Gelineau says. “I just did not have the capacity to explain those things over and over again.”
Responsibility 2: Be flexible
Most workplaces are built around policies and processes that are broadly applied and clearly defined. Yet because people mourn in highly individual and unpredictable ways, an uneasy tension tends to emerge between blanket rules and unique requirements. Grief just doesn’t fit neatly into the constraints of company-sanctioned time off.
“A lot of bereavement policies are very specific in terms of what they consider to be acceptable or legitimate types of grief,” Fisk explains. Most organizations understand the need for an employee to take time away or receive accommodation when they lose what’s often known as a first-order relation: a partner, an immediate family member, sometimes a close friend. But Fisk points out that people can also experience traumatic and profound grief from many types of loss, such as the death of a pet, the end of a relationship, or even the loss of a home. Their grief can be anticipatory (which happens before a terminally ill loved one dies) or disenfranchised (which happens when a loss is publicly unacknowledged or taboo). “It is interesting to see how many of those experiences aren’t validated by organizational policies,” Fisk says. “There is often no formal way to recognize them, unless you have a really attuned, emotionally intelligent manager to help you navigate the situation or give you permission to use other supports.”
Some organizations are updating their bereavement policies to remove definitions of which types of loss warrant time off. Others are creating banks of bereavement days that employees can take without having to declare a reason. “This can make people feel less vulnerable, especially early on in their grief experiences,” Fisk says.
When the policies won’t bend, it helps to have managers who can. “It helped to have a director who was flexible and understanding and willing to let me work a bit outside the lines sometimes,” Gelineau says. On days when she couldn’t handle work, or—later—when she had to spend interminable hours at Service Canada to settle Brian’s estate, it was a comfort to know her boss wouldn’t give her a hard time or burden her with bureaucracy. “That was really valuable.”
Responsibility 3: Encourage empathy
Then there’s the matter of what Gelineau calls the “giant elephant in the room”: A lot of people have a lot of hang-ups about death, and they don’t necessarily want to be confronted with its aftermath during a presentation or team huddle. And while no employer can be expected to make anyone comfortable with mortality, experts say workplaces can do a good deal to encourage more empathy and understanding about it.
Leaders can set the tone, according to Fisk. “It is important for people in key workplace roles to have the tools to talk about this,” she says. “It’s a very nuanced experience. It requires sensitivity and self-awareness and enough emotional intelligence to be able to read what a grieving colleague might want and need.”
Fisk acknowledges that not every leader is equipped or inclined to engage in this kind of vulnerability. Indeed, talking about feelings at all—much less personal, sad ones—has traditionally been verboten in many workplaces.
But more leaders are airing the ways in which loss affects work. Take former Meta COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg. Since the 2015 death of her husband Dave, Sandberg has written and spoken extensively about her own grief. “There’s no one way to grieve and there’s no one way to comfort,” she wrote in Option B. “Growing up, I was taught to follow the Golden Rule: treat others as you want to be treated. But when someone is suffering, instead of following the Golden Rule, we need to follow the Platinum Rule: treat others as they want to be treated.”
In Canada, after Cathy Thorpe, CEO of Vancouver-based home-care services provider Nurse Next Door, lost her husband Harry to cancer, she opted not to hide her grief from her team. “For me, the best way I could support my team and myself was to be honest about what I was going through,” she wrote in a 2024 Entrepreneur article. “If I was sad one day, then I would let my coworkers know. I didn’t want to be tip-toed around, and it was important my team felt comfortable looping me into workplace conversations.”
When leaders talk about loss, or take bereavement time, or demonstrate compassion for a grieving colleague, it helps foster cultures in which people feel more comfortable broaching difficult interactions with one another, Fisk says: “It’s important for people to see leaders model healthy grieving behaviours.”
In Gelineau’s view, the more we can normalize grief at work, the less terrible the experience will be for everyone. She’d love to see it afforded the same attention as birthdays, or births, or retirements, or other life events that don’t compel people to change the subject as quickly as possible. “Grief asks to be acknowledged,” she explains. “It is a natural part of life, so including it in the workplace the way we would any other major life milestone would be incredible.”