February 23, 2026
Explore how grief in the workplace shows up as irritability, distraction, and disengagement, not just sadness, and learn the signs managers consistently miss, why they miss them, and what to do when you suspect an employee is grieving.
Grief in the workplace rarely looks like what managers expect. It doesn't usually appear as visible sadness or someone breaking down at their desk. It shows up as missed deadlines from someone who never misses deadlines, irritability in someone who's always been steady, or a high performer who suddenly seems somewhere else entirely. Only 11% of managers correctly identify performance issues as grief-related, according to Workplace Options. The rest are responding to the wrong thing.
Recognizing what grief actually looks like, including the symptoms that have nothing to do with sadness, is where effective support starts. What follows covers the cognitive, behavioral, and physical signs of grief at work, why managers so often miss them, and what to do when you suspect someone on your team is carrying something hard.
The most common management mistake isn't indifference. It's pattern-matching. Most people have been conditioned to expect grief to look like sadness, so that's what they watch for, and they miss everything else.
What gets overlooked is the sharpness, the fog, the employee who shows up every day but isn't absorbing anything, the one who overworks because stopping means feeling. In a webinar interview with Bereave, grief coach and Grief Warrior founder Leslie Barber described what managers are actually dealing with: "Grief has a lot of fluidity. It's messy, it's unexpected, it's unrelenting, and I can guarantee you it's anything but linear."
Someone might seem fine for two weeks and then struggle badly around an anniversary or a holiday. A manager expecting a clear recovery arc will misread every deviation from it, and those misreadings carry real cost.
Even when a grieving employee appears composed, their ability to concentrate, retain information, and make decisions is often significantly affected. The brain under grief is managing a heavy load, and that shows up in work in specific ways:
According to Empathy's Cost of Dying 2024 report, 94.5% of bereaved individuals report at least one negative physical or mental symptom following a loss, and the majority say those symptoms directly affected their daily functioning. At work, that registers as distraction or carelessness, not as grief.
Behavioral changes are where misinterpretation is most costly. Grief-related behavior can look nearly identical to a performance problem, a motivation issue, or even misconduct, and responding to it as such tends to make everything significantly worse.
Behavioral signs of grief in the workplace include:
Matt Troskey, an HR leader who spoke about navigating workplace loss in a Loss Leaders interview with Bereave, framed the right instinct clearly: "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, changes the entire trajectory.
Loss takes a toll on the body. It's not a metaphor; it's a measurable physiological response, and it shows up in the workplace whether or not the employee acknowledges or names it. Physical signs include:
Treating these as productivity issues misses the point entirely. They're signs that someone is in the middle of something hard, and they tend to improve when the person feels supported rather than monitored.
Bereavement leave is typically three to five days, and many managers calibrate their expectations around that window. Once someone returns to work, there's an unspoken assumption that the acute phase is behind them. Research from Empathy puts the average performance impact of grief at 17 to 18 months. The employee who returned two weeks ago and seems off is often still very much in it.
The second issue is preparation, and most managers have none. As Leslie Barber put it in her Bereave interview: "No one taught us how to address grief. Our intentions are good. That doesn't mean our impact will be good." Without a framework, managers reach for the tools they do have, and those tools are usually built for performance management. The mismatch is where well-meaning managers cause harm without realizing it.
The downstream effect is predictable: behavioral symptoms get labeled as attitude, cognitive symptoms get called carelessness, and the person underneath goes unseen. Among employees who experience a significant loss, 51% leave their jobs within 12 months. A large share of those departures trace back to feeling unsupported, not to the grief itself.
You don't need to know what's going on before you reach out. If something seems off, a private, low-stakes check-in is the right move even in the absence of certainty.
Start by leading with what you've observed rather than what you're concerned about. "I've noticed you seem a little off lately and wanted to check in" lands very differently than "I'm worried about your performance." One signals care. The other signals scrutiny.
Ask open-ended questions, and make them specific to the moment. Matt Troskey suggests adding a timestamp: "How are you today?" instead of "How are you?" takes away the pressure to give an automatic fine and signals that you're actually asking. Don't require someone to name a loss before you offer flexibility or adjust expectations. Create the space and let them decide how much to fill it.
Most importantly, follow up. Managers who check in once and then go quiet communicate that it was a box to tick. Checking in again two weeks later, and again after that, is what actual support looks like. For a structured approach to supporting a grieving employee through the full arc of loss, Bereave's step-by-step breakdown covers each stage in detail. Managers looking to build broader preparation for navigating grief on their teams will find a full framework there as well.
One of the patterns that catches managers most off guard is delayed grief. An employee returns from bereavement leave seeming functional. Weeks pass. Then something shifts, a birthday, a holiday, a meeting that would have included the person who died, or sometimes nothing identifiable at all.
This isn't regression. It's how grief works. It doesn't resolve on a schedule, and it doesn't announce when it's coming back. A manager who understands that will respond to a second wave with the same steadiness as the first. A manager who expected the employee to be "over it" will likely respond with frustration or confusion, which is the opposite of what's needed.
For teams working through what support looks like as someone transitions back after bereavement leave, Bereave covers the reentry period with practical frameworks that account for both the immediate return and the months that follow.
Grief at work presents as cognitive symptoms like difficulty concentrating and forgetfulness, behavioral changes like withdrawal and irritability, and physical symptoms like persistent fatigue and increased sick days. Visible sadness is often the least prominent sign, which is why grief so consistently goes unrecognized.
Grief impairs concentration, decision-making, and emotional regulation, all of which affect work quality in measurable ways. Empathy's research puts the average performance impact at 17 to 18 months, well beyond what standard bereavement leave is designed to cover.
Short bereavement policies create an implicit expectation that grief resolves quickly, and most managers have no training to recognize its non-emotional symptoms. The behavioral and cognitive signs of grief look enough like disengagement or attitude that they get treated as performance issues rather than human ones.
Start with a private check-in that leads with observation rather than concern about performance. Ask open-ended questions, make it clear that support doesn't require disclosure, and follow up more than once. A single conversation opens a door; consistent follow-through is what keeps it open.
Treat it as a normal part of the process, not a new problem. Return to the same approach: ask genuine questions, keep the pressure low, and don't expect the employee to justify or explain what they're experiencing. The fact that grief resurfaced doesn't mean the first response failed.
Most managers don't navigate bereavement with any real preparation. They improvise, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it quietly costs them a good employee. Having a consistent way to recognize grief, respond to it, and follow through over time is what changes the outcome. Bereave gives managers and HR teams the structure to do that well, without guessing each time.
See how Bereave helps teams respond with clarity, consistency, and care.
Help bring Bereave to your workplace. Your co-workers will thank you.
