Managing Grief at the Workplace:
An Interview with David Russo
By: Brenda Paik Sunoo

Interview conducted with David Russo, president and CEO of Empliant Inc. and Vice President and Secretary-Treasurer of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) www.shrm.org and www.empliant.com

January 2002

The first grief experience I remember most vividly is when I was 13 years old. My grandfather died. It was so vivid because we lived in the same house. He was certainly the patriarch of my family. He and my father were very, very close. And so [my grandfather] and I were also very close.

I can remember the aftermath of the wake. Folks all gathered 'round, and we had fond remembrances. And then, it was over. How my mother and father helped me understand it was by saying he had a long and healthy life. He was in his 70s. That was my first experience. I recall now that the explanation of dealing with the whole situation wasn't done effectively.

As I grew up, my personal expectation of dealing with grief was that death is a very natural thing. When one passes on, she or he goes to one's reward and the afterlife. You think of them fondly, but never ever dealing with the personal loss in a close relationship. That's my earliest remembrances. Until adulthood, I never really dealt with having to pay attention to other people's losses.

In the workplace, as a HR person, you get a broader perspective of how people deal with grief and loss. Not only in death, but also with serious illnesses and caregiving responsibilities. And then, there are the losses that occur with other human events: divorce, the breaking up of relationships, termination, loss of job opportunities. People grieve in a number of different ways. As a young adult, I never realized that grief was a legitimate emotion for lots of these things.

As an adult, I've since faced the loss of my mother and father, close relatives. We're Roman Catholics. Other than what's part of the formal Roman Catholic rituals about death—sacraments, the funeral mass—I can't really think of anything else that was culturally significant. Being of Italian extraction, we did have a wake and viewed the [deceased] in a casket.

In some cases, the rituals really depended on the individual situation. Sometimes, the grief of surviving families was very evident and open. In some cases, the quiet, stoic perspective toward grieving was very, very individual.

[In terms of our nation], I don't think we address grief very well. First of all, culturally, we speak very casually about the inevitability of death. But it's always externalized. We don't really personalize it. It's somebody else's issue. I don't think most Americans, except those facing a personal illness, such as breast cancer or other long-term illness, address their mortality. Otherwise, most Americans don't deal with death as a truly tangible part of life. As a culture, we're uncomfortable around people who are dying, and that's unfortunate. It's almost as if dying was contagious.

When someone is in that physical mode of having death upon them, people get uncomfortable. I know of many times when people had strong relationships with someone, and when they learned of the person's illness, suddenly the healthy one had a hard time visiting the dying individual. They didn't know what to do or what to say. As a result, the relationship became strained.

There's a poem...I don't know where I saw it. My mother had it years ago: "Don't come to my wake. You didn't come to visit me when I was sick. Don't come to my wake. You didn't call me when you could've." Know what I'm saying?

The other thing is that grieving—the real sorrow—in America is viewed as a weakness. There's this whole cowboy, macho mentality. It's not just for men. It's for women, too. "Everyone's going to die. Get over it." Until it happens to you. This is how our culture deals with it.

Until very recently, there was an attempt in the workplace to separate work and life. "Gee, you're Mom's sick? That's too bad. Here's a project." "Your dad died? Well, we sent flowers and we feel bad. But that was two days ago. Now you're back to work, and things should be the same." I think that's the way the workplace was designed. You have work. You have your life. They shouldn't be intertwined. Otherwise, it would create a responsibility on the part of the workplace to treat you as an individual. It would also create accountability for the employer to have empathy, not sympathy for the grieving person.

So when the workers—from executives down to blue-collar, hourly workers—accepted the view that work and personal life were separate, they didn't grieve. That had tremendous psychological impact on individuals in the workplace. They had to be strong or more stoic. But the release they needed still came out in all sorts of ways: in lower productivity, reduced attention span, many different things.

The understanding by enlightened employers that work and life are interdependent, and that people don't leave their lives at the door, are healthy. Unfortunately, those things were pushed at the workplace on the positive side: Childcare, fitness centers, concierge services, healthy cafeterias, gyms and pre-paid physical exams. What was less likely to be embraced by the workplace is what I call the "down side" of work/life. Things that aren't so positive. Those matters were usually referred to the Employee Assistance Programs, such as elder care, grief management, disease management and support groups.

Even though employers are uncomfortable with this stuff, the recognition of these things is newly surfacing and is being recognized by high quality employers. This whole thing with EAPs has to do with the genesis of EAPs. They were created to deal with psychological and other dependencies. The stigma was that if you're using an EAP, you had problems with alcohol, drugs, family or you had some type of mental illness. All those things are stigmatized in the worst ways in our society.

The earliest genesis of EAPs was in the 70s. There's no doubt in my mind that they were designed to deal with the stress of mental illness and psychological problems generated in or outside of the workplace and the advent of a drug-abused society. The other things were added as EAPs got a toehold.

One of the things companies did was put EAP "outside," never realizing that companies still had to understand that they were dealing with people in the workplace who just don't park their lives outside of the workplace. As a matter of fact, what some of the EAPs have done is taken on these problems as a value-added marketing tool. You can see this.

When I worked in HR for SAS, we had support groups for disease management for cancer survivors. We had an elder care support group. We put a person in place not only to oversee the programs we had, but also to create the opportunity for individuals to get together and share. One of the things that's most important in all of these grieving types of situations—not just for death—is for people to know three things: They're not alone; they can share their feelings in a non-judgmental forum with others in the same situation; and their employer supports the concept that grief is OK. They can publicize the programs by inviting speakers to the support groups and by supplying connectivity with community agencies. The effort requires a combination of physical support, resource and referral and the use of internal networks.

At SAS, with 5,000 employees, you knew that one in three of our employees had been touched in the last two years by some grief-generated event. The support groups also help those who may want to understand what a spouse or fellow colleague is facing.

The three-day bereavement leave? That's ridiculous. We said, "Here's five days for paid leave. If you need more, ask. Present your situation." Don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be some price one pays for an [extended] absence. If someone needs 15 days off or needs to do what they need to do, they need to pay that price. It may cost then in salary, pay docking, making up work, a reduced role in a team or whatever.

The idea is to support the individual. What companies fail to see is that if they say people are important, they really have to mean that individuals are important. And the more they can adjust their policies and loosely apply them so individuals get the benefit they need for the time they need, the better off they'll be.

It's so much crap to counter with the argument that it might set a bad precedence. The people who would take undue advantage are the people one should fire anyway. The people who try to do their jobs and love their work, they're not the ones who are going to take advantage. What they're going to do is get back as quickly as they can. It's evidence of their respect for the employer and for the respect shown to them. You know what I mean?

This is what I've always hated about HR policies...they're designed to protect the company from the 15% of the people who are going to try to give the company the shaft. And the 85% percent of the workforce who love their jobs and want to do the right thing end up suffering the pain from an inflexible policy. If you want to be a No. 1 employer, you have to be flexible.

The nuclear family, for example, has been gone a long time. One of the problems with senior executives of organizations over the last 10 years, which I think is coming to an end, is that they made up all the rules and all the goals. Fact of the matter is that two-career families, non-nuclear families, families with no blood relatives, need some type of social structure to support them. What companies can do to really engender loyalty and productivity is to remember that these families, whether domestic partners or not, are the families of today. Showing support for them is critical. Most of them will never need to take advantage of some benefits. But when you create 'domestic partner' benefits, what you're saying to them is that you value them. The fact that a benefit is available creates a tight bond between the employer and employee. It shows you care.

Here's another example of caring: On September 11, I was in Baltimore, Maryland at a tradeshow. I came on the tradeshow floor, and we were all connected because it was a technology tradeshow. We were aware of what happened while we were there. We had heard about the second tower. Shortly after, we heard about the third plane. We were all in shock. The thing that struck me was the disbelief that this could happen. I remember people I know and love saying life in America would never be the same. The third thing I remember were the two employees in Raleigh on cell phones who were worried about our safety because we were closer to the Pentagon. How were we going to get home? The idea of being home meant we'd be safe. We only have four employees. We're a start-up company.

The biggest impact it had on our company was that it made us realize that what we have in America is very precious. We talked at length about the responsibility and accountability that comes along with our [freedom]. Also, the absolute futility of not living every day in a high quality fashion and caring for others. Most people feel they have some measure of control over their lives. But recent events showed these people that they have less control over outside events than they realized.

HR can now take the opportunity to deal with the entire issue of [loss] of privacy at the workplace. How the absolute right to privacy needs to be overtaken by the greater good of security. HR will have to deal with it more directly than it has in the past. The responsibility is to create a measure of security and sense of being in control and dealing with problems without becoming a business bully. That is a big opportunity for HR. I've had people who I have thought were liberal fringes on personal rights say, "I don't care if they delay my plane an hour or strip-search me, as long as they do it to everybody else. I need to know that when I get on an airplane or enter a public place that I am safe."

Before September 11th, you never would've heard somebody say that. People who thought about security over personal freedoms were seen as right wing extremists. And now, the vulnerability of living in an absolutely open society has been exposed. I hope the pendulum doesn't swing too far to the right, but at the same time, it's certainly a reality check.

Those who've traveled outside of America already know that in European, Asian, Middle Eastern, South American countries—where there's less security—they do much more rigid things to protect their citizens. I just flew back from the West Coast yesterday. I can imagine how different things would be in August 2001, if an airline agent called 15 passengers to the counter because their bags were going to be checked. Can you imagine the reaction? Now there's a whole new understanding about the importance of security. We have to remember that the absence of another terrible event doesn't mean there's no potential of another terrible event. We have to be vigilant.

Now the grief we feel in Raleigh, after the 11th, is television grief. If we're feeling sound byte grief, and it goes away without our having a keen understanding of the grief in New York City and Washington, D.C., then we become vulnerable again. I see America grieving about this in a way that I've never seen before.

Everyone remembers where he or she was when John F. Kennedy was shot. I remember exactly where I was and what I felt. It was awful, heinous and catastrophic. But it was an individual situation. The magnitude of what happened in New York and D.C. is unbelievable.

One of the things that any of us can do at the workplace for our employees is to help them relate to the later grief. You don't know why you're fearful. You don't know why you have nausea. But it's there. How can people deal with that? It's the fear and trembling of uncertainty and loss of control that were non-issues before.

When we talk about "post-traumatic stress syndrome," we label stuff and talk about it with analysts, and then the word becomes meaningless. They lose their personality. It becomes "Oh yeah, post-traumatic stress." Everyone thinks they know what it means. Nobody knows what it means. People then start to take from the media how they think they're supposed to behave. When they don't behave in the ways that signals come across the TV, radio and the written media, they're lost.

One of the older movies I saw with an inspiring treatment of grief was "Terms of Endearment." I thought it was handled very, very well. The characters were behaving like people behave. "Who's Life is it Anyway?" with Richard Dreyfuss about wanting control. "On Golden Pond." My wife saw and loved "Steel Magnolias." There's a book by Bernie Siegel about cancer. I love that book, too.

There's another thing about the way one deals with grief. Because you're sad, you're not supposed to be happy. I learned something from my wife. Not everyone cries when they're grieving. Some women cry much more often when they're angry or happy, but not when they're sad. So the depiction of sadness being a veil of tears is not accurate. Sometimes, sadness is stillness and quiet. That's why I go back to the support groups we had at SAS. People need to know it's OK to be sad and be around people who know that it's OK to be sad.

Grieving is not a constant state. When my wife's mother died, she didn't grieve for a period of time. She was too busy taking care of things. Then, she would grieve in small bits, when driving along in her car or at some other unexpected moment. Grief isn't like a three-day bereavement leave. You grieve when you remember or something happens during a conversation that reminds you of a wonderful time and you feel the loss. Grief is a process. That's why the three-day bereavement is not logical or very healthy. It creates false expectations of how the employee is supposed to behave. But with better knowledge on the part of employers, it would increase employee productivity, increase loyalty and brand their company as a "Great Place to Work."