Giving Workers More Time to Grieve in an Era of Loss

The 31-year-old, then the chief executive of accounting software firm inDinero Inc., quickly found herself enveloped in grief. She couldn’t sleep. Her brain felt like it had shut down, she says. Faced with project roadblocks and squabbles between colleagues, she couldn’t summon patience or empathy—or really, the energy to care all that much.

“I was just so disenchanted with life,” Ms. Mah says of the aftermath of the loss. “I was really only operating at like 10% capacity.”

She canceled a week of meetings, then another. In the end, she took three months off—and instituted an unlimited paid bereavement leave policy at the company, where she now serves as executive chairwoman.

“Until it hit me directly, I didn’t think, ‘OK, wow this needs to be a bigger conversation,’” she says. “Bereavement is a part-time job in and of itself.”

Millions around the world have gotten a crash course in grief during the past two years. Nearly one million more Americans have died since the start of the pandemic than would have otherwise been expected, mostly from Covid-19. Other tragedies have marched on, too, with lives lost to illnesses and accidents. Increasingly, we’re talking about it. About half of 4,327 people surveyed last fall by the New York Life Foundation, the charitable arm of the insurance company, said the pandemic had prompted them to have conversations with family or friends about death.

“It’s an acceptable thing to talk about loss,” says Jackie Reinberg, an executive at advisory firm Willis Towers Watson PLC who consults with companies about leave policies. Talk about grief and hardship in work settings has been more common in the past two years, she says. “It’s much more visible.”

Some organizations are allowing workers to take more time following a loss and expanding grief policies to include those who experience a miscarriage or failed infertility treatment. Employees are speaking up too, questioning policies that limit benefits based on family relationships. If a cousin, or even a pet, was close to them, shouldn’t they be able to take time to grieve?

Corporate policies on bereavement had begun shifting before the pandemic swept the globe. The share of organizations offering paid bereavement leave rose to 89% in 2020 from 79% in 2017, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. More than a third of companies offered leave for pregnancy loss as of 2020, Willis Towers Watson says.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. last month implemented a new 20-day paid leave for those who suffer a miscarriage or stillbirth. It also increased time off—from five days to 20—for those who lose an immediate family member, classified as a partner or child.

“The pandemic highlighted the importance of family,” says Laura Young, who oversees benefits for the bank. The expanded, formal policies signal to workers that it’s OK to take time to grieve. They also help the bank stay competitive in a tight labor market, Ms. Young says.

Some technology companies—which compete with Goldman for talent—have expanded their benefits and time off in recent years, with Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. offering 10 days paid leave for the loss of a non-immediate family member and Google paying widows and widowers half of their partner’s salaries for a decade.

As the pandemic shatters the walls between our work and personal lives, what employees expect—or at least wish for—from their employers has shifted. Bereavement, burnout and child-care issues were once considered private matters to be dealt with largely on one’s own. The pandemic revealed how intertwined work and life can be, and now some employees are asking for their companies’ support when they face hardships.

When Namitha Jacob’s uncle died, she didn’t think twice about flying from Washington, D.C., to Houston to attend the services. A first-generation Indian American, she’d grown up with extended family living alongside her or in the neighborhood. Her company’s bereavement policy didn’t include uncles on its list of approved relationships for paid time off, she says.

“What you should deem as your close family, it’s just so strange. We all have completely different experiences,” says Ms. Jacob, who works in international development and is now based in Mexico City. She posted about her experience on LinkedIn, generating nearly 2,000 comments. “So many people have reached out to say, yeah, it’s unfair that my company gets to decide who I should get to mourn for.”

Lawmakers are looking at bereavement leave. A provision passed as part of December’s National Defense Authorization Act provides two weeks of paid leave for most federal workers, roughly 1.9 million people, following the loss of a child. Other legislation, which proposes changes to the Family and Medical Leave Act, would give a much wider group of grieving parents up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, if passed.

“Those 12 weeks put them in a better place to get on with their lives,” says Rep. Brad Schneider, a Democratic congressman from Illinois who’s leading the bill.

He’s been working on the legislation—known as the Sarah Grace-Farley-Kluger Act, in memory of the deceased children of three families from across the country—for five years. He was drawn to the initiative after losing his 21-year-old nephew in 2003, he says, and seeing the devastation of loss up close. Mr. Schneider has yet to get enough support to bring it up for a vote, but hopes the pandemic might convince more colleagues to get on board.

“You see so much suffering in every community,” he says.

Lindsey Fenton lost her grandfather, best friend from college, a former colleague and her cat, Lilly, in a seven-month stretch. By the time her pet died in June 2021, Ms. Fenton had started to feel the compounding weight of the losses.

“Grief is just this weird nebulous kind of blob that will take you over when you least expect it,” she says.

Swamped with work, Ms. Fenton didn’t feel she could take much time off. She believes she wouldn’t have felt as frayed after her string of losses if she wasn’t overwhelmed with all-day meetings, and had been able to step back after the initial deaths of her loved ones.

“You don’t want to be so burned out that anything sends you over the edge,” she says.

Write to Rachel Feintzeig at [email protected]