February 24, 2026
Explore what effective grief support for employees looks like from the first conversation through long-term reintegration, with practical guidance for managers and HR on every phase of the process.
Grief support for employees means giving people who have experienced a loss the time, communication, flexibility, and follow-through they need to stay functional at work, without feeling abandoned or pressured to recover on a schedule. Most workplaces provide leave. Very few provide what comes before, alongside, and after it.
The gap has consequences. Bereave research shows that 51% of employees leave their jobs within 12 months of a close loss. That's not just a human cost. It's a retention and continuity problem, and it's largely preventable.
This guide covers the full arc of employee grief support: what it looks like at each phase, where managers and HR each carry responsibility, what gets in the way, and what organizations that do this well have in common.
Grief support is not a single gesture or a policy page. It's a series of deliberate actions that begin before the employee goes on leave and continue for months after they return.
It includes:
The organizations that do this well don't necessarily have elaborate programs. They have managers who are prepared to respond, policies that give those managers room to act, and HR structures that support rather than replace the human layer.
Grief doesn't stay in one part of a person's life. It follows people to work, and it affects how they think, concentrate, make decisions, and interact with colleagues, often in ways that aren't visibly connected to loss at all.
The Empathy Cost of Dying Report estimates that grief costs U.S. employers over $113 billion annually in lost productivity. Most of that cost doesn't come from the leave itself. It comes from the months after, when employees are back at their desks and struggling in ways no one is recognizing or addressing.
What compounds this is how poorly grief gets identified. It rarely presents as visible sadness at work. Research from Workplace Options found that only 11% of managers correctly identify performance issues as grief-related. The other 89% are reading disengagement, bad attitude, or declining output without understanding what's actually driving it.
Leslie Barber, founder of Grief Warrior and a workplace grief educator whose episode on Bereave's Loss Leaders series, A Manager's Guide to Supporting a Grieving Teammate, remains one of the most practical resources on the topic, put it plainly: "Grief is one of the biggest problems that managers don't know they have." That disconnect, between what's actually happening and how it's being read, drives much of the turnover and disengagement data we see.
Grief support isn't linear, but it does follow a rough shape. Each phase has distinct needs, and most workplace failures happen because support stops at phase one.
The first response sets the tone for everything that follows. Employees register quickly whether their manager's reaction felt human or administrative. A brief, direct acknowledgment of the loss, before any conversation about logistics, is what most employees remember.
Practically, this phase is about removing friction. Leave should be easy to access, workload coverage should be handled without the employee having to coordinate it, and the employee should leave knowing work is taken care of. Your bereavement policy should make that handoff clean.
Managers who aren't sure what to say should know that simplicity works. A brief acknowledgment, even just "I'm sorry, we've got things covered here, take the time you need," is more than most employees receive and more than enough to set the right tone.
Coming back is harder than most people expect. A 2025 peer-reviewed study published in the Transdisciplinary Journal of Management found that only 42.5% of bereaved employees felt capable of performing their job in the first month after a loss. Physical presence doesn't mean full capacity has returned.
Sarah Hines, a workplace grief and HR specialist, has spent years helping organizations build more thoughtful reentry processes. In her Bereave episode on grief at work, she was direct about where most plans fall short: "A return-to-work plan should be thoughtful and personalized. It's not just about accommodating hours, but also adjusting tasks and providing emotional support as they reintegrate." A plan that accounts for all three is meaningfully different from one that only changes a schedule.
Before the employee's first day back, the manager should reach out privately to ask what they need, what they'd like communicated to the team, and whether any workload adjustments would help in the early weeks. Reduced expectations in weeks one through four aren't lowering the bar. They're acknowledging a temporary reality.
This is the phase where most workplace grief support quietly disappears. Leave is over, the initial check-in has happened, and the assumption is that things are stabilizing. For many employees, this is when grief becomes most disruptive.
The shock of a loss often buffers the first few weeks. As that fades, the weight of what happened becomes more real. Weeks three through six can be harder than week one, and performance problems that weren't visible early often surface here. A brief, low-pressure message asking how things are going is enough to maintain connection and catch problems before they compound. Managers who check in once and move on are often the ones caught off guard later.
Grief doesn't resolve on a predictable schedule. Empathy's Grief Tax Report estimates that grief affects work performance for an average of 17 to 18 months. Anniversaries, holidays, and unexpected triggers can resurface grief long after the loss, often with no visible connection to anything happening at work.
Long-term support doesn't require a formal program, just consistency. A message on an anniversary, a check-in at month three or six, awareness that certain times of year may be hard. Small actions sustained over time are what separate organizations that retain grieving employees from those that lose them.
Most people assume grief means visible sadness. At work, it usually doesn't.
Grief at work more often shows up as:
These behaviors look like disengagement. Some managers respond with performance conversations. Others avoid the topic entirely. Neither addresses what's actually happening.
Leslie Barber described this well: "Grief has a lot of fluidity. It's messy, it's unexpected, it's unrelenting, and it's anything but linear." That unpredictability is exactly what makes it so difficult to manage, and so easy to misread.
76% of bereaved employees report that their work performance was harmed following a loss, according to Empathy's Cost of Dying Report. Most of that impact goes unrecognized and unaddressed.
Support doesn't have to be elaborate to be effective. The organizations that handle this well tend to do a small number of things consistently, and none of them are complicated.
Loss gets acknowledged directly, not through a form or a policy reference, but through a manager saying something human to the employee within the first day or two. Leave is made frictionless. Check-ins happen after the return, not just in the first week. Workload expectations get adjusted for the early weeks back.
The instinct to move quickly toward solutions, to fix the situation and get things back to normal, is one of the most common places managers go wrong. Faith Holloway, Programme Lead for the Compassionate Employers Programme at Hospice UK, has worked extensively with organizations on what good bereavement support looks like in practice. Her episode on Bereave, Bereavement Policies: What Great Looks Like, is one of the most referenced in the series. On the question of timing, she's unequivocal: "It's crucial that the person feels acknowledged before any solutions or adjustments are offered." Until that happens, even well-intentioned support can land as pressure rather than care.
She also noted that silence, which many managers rush to fill, doesn't need to be uncomfortable. "Silence can feel awkward, but naming it openly makes it easier. It's fine to say, 'We can just sit here quietly for a bit.'" Giving the employee permission to not have it together, without making them feel like a burden, is often the most useful thing a manager can do.
These two functions share responsibility for grief support, but not the same part of it, and confusing the roles creates gaps.
Managers own the day-to-day human layer: communication, tone, workload adjustments, and ongoing check-ins. They're the employee's primary point of contact. Their response, in the first conversation and in the weeks that follow, is what the employee will remember. The manager's step-by-step guide covers the practical side of this role in detail.
HR handles policy, documentation, leave administration, and escalation. When performance needs formal documentation, when extended leave is required, or when the employee needs resources beyond what the manager can provide, HR should be involved. It's worth understanding the limitations of EAPs in bereavement support separately. EAPs provide general counseling but rarely the sustained, grief-specific support employees need over months.
Where things break down is when grief support defaults entirely to one or the other. Managers who treat it as purely administrative miss the human dimension. HR teams who treat it as a counseling function create their own problems. Policy sets the floor, but the lived experience of that support depends almost entirely on how managers show up.
Policies work when employees believe they're safe to use them. That trust comes from culture, not documentation.
Managers who acknowledge loss openly, who don't treat grief as a productivity problem, and who check in without making it feel like surveillance, build the kind of environment where employees feel comfortable being honest about how they're doing. That honesty is what makes support possible.
A few things contribute to this consistently:
Leslie Barber captured something important on this point: "Supported employees are engaged employees. A lot of times we think, 'Let's just give people space, let them go do what they need to do, and come back cured.' It doesn't work like that." The managers who stay present rather than stepping back and waiting are the ones who actually make a difference.
Performance decline after a loss is predictable. It's not disengagement, and it's not a character issue.
The Hansen (2025) study found a correlation of r = .703 between support quality and employee loyalty, meaning how an organization responds to grief directly shapes whether that person stays. Grief support isn't a soft benefit. It's a measurable retention factor.
Matt Troskey brings an unusual vantage point to this question. As the founder of Troskey Fractional HR & Consulting and an HR leader who has navigated employee fatalities and their aftermath firsthand, he's seen what happens when organizations reach for the wrong tool. In his Bereave conversation on a human approach to navigating loss, he put it simply: "When you see non-performance out of somebody who's usually a high performer, you don't just run to the PIP. It's like, what else is going on?" That question, asked early and without judgment, changes what's possible and often prevents a situation from getting worse.
Addressing performance concerns during grief requires a different approach than standard performance management. A conversation that opens with acknowledgment before expectations lands differently than one that leads with consequences, and it's far more likely to actually help.
Grief support for employees includes bereavement leave, direct acknowledgment of the loss from their manager, workload adjustments during the return period, regular check-ins in the weeks and months that follow, and access to additional resources when needed. It's not a single action. It's a series of responses that begin at the time of loss and continue through the long tail of grief.
Research from Empathy estimates that grief affects work performance for an average of 17 to 18 months after a loss. The impact isn't steady. Many employees experience more difficulty at weeks three through six and again around anniversaries and significant dates, even if the early weeks after their return seemed manageable.
A manager's role is to acknowledge the loss directly, adjust workload expectations during the early weeks of return, check in consistently without pressure, and make sure the employee knows what support is available. Managers aren't expected to provide counseling. Their job is presence, flexibility, and follow-through over time.
HR should be involved from the beginning for leave processing and policy administration. More active engagement is needed when performance concerns require formal documentation, when extended leave is requested, or when the employee needs access to resources the manager can't provide.
The consequences are measurable. Bereave research shows that 51% of employees leave their jobs within 12 months of a close loss. Beyond turnover, poor support leads to prolonged performance decline, increased absenteeism, and damage to the employment relationship that often doesn't recover.
Grief is unpredictable, and most managers aren't trained to handle it well. Having a consistent approach changes the outcome for the employee going through loss and for the manager trying to do right by them. Bereave helps organizations respond to bereavement the same way every time, so no one, manager, HR, or employee, is left figuring it out alone.
See how Bereave helps teams respond with clarity, consistency, and care.
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