By Vanessa Ugatti

Sadly, we are all likely to have to face some serious personal difficulties during our working life.  These may include, but not be limited to, the death of a loved one, divorce, relationship difficulties or the serious illness of a child or parent.  Although the usual dictum may be that you should not take your troubles to work, in such instances, this may be inappropriate or indeed impossible to avoid.

Certainly welfare agencies understand the importance of supporting people in the workplace during times of personal crisis and with more and more people either living alone or without the support of extended families, this is becoming even more crucial.  Camouflaging feelings by pretending they do not exist and throwing oneself into one’s job may work for a short while but ultimately emotions will surface and need to be released.  If this process is not allowed to take place at the right time and in the right way, problems will more than likely arise in the workplace.  Overwhelming feelings of grief and confusion often lead to a sense of inadequacy, low self-esteem, loneliness, weakness and vulnerability which are, in turn, likely to affect the employee’s performance.  This needs not only to be recognised by the employer but also dealt with compassionately. 

Bereavement experts advise us that, simply put, the grieving process consists of several stages.  These are:

* Shock – including disbelief, numbness and hysteria
* Protest – including sadness, anger, guilt, fear, denial and physical problems
* Disorganisation – including confusion, apathy, low self-esteem, loss of confidence
* Reorganisation – including pleasure in remembering the loved one, balanced memories, control, new meaning in life

However, grief is not a simple matter at all.  Where the complication lies is in how long an individual will take to experience each stage and how intense the feelings will be.  Naturally, this will vary quite considerably from person to person.  Moreover, stages may overlap and the bereaved may go back a stage at some point until the final stage is reached.  Finally, it also needs to be said that bereavement is not just limited to a person dying.  It may also extend to the loss of a relationship, a home or other important possession, or the loss of a person as we know them, due to a serious accident or illness (e.g. stroke, chronic depression.)

The real question is, do employers, particularly line managers, actually understand such matters sufficiently well to be able to support staff members who are in the throes of such a crisis?  It was purported to have been said by a business consultant that after the tough 1980s, the 1990s were gentler, kinder and more caring, but in my opinion, the evidence does not always point in that direction.  Many companies are under continual pressure to reduce overheads which often means staff cuts, while more and more employees seem to be complaining of having to do additional work, without further remuneration and sometimes with reduced benefits.   Given these eventualities, it is plainly difficult to see how employers can possibly treat their staff in a more caring fashion and indeed how they would fare in the event of a member of staff suffering a personal tragedy.

Certainly, my own experience of handling personal grief in the workplace has been far from ideal.  In 1998, in a matter of only weeks, I lost my best friend to cancer and my Mother, aged 75, attempted suicide and very nearly succeeded.  During this traumatic period, my life was literally turned upside down and consisted of little more than going to work and hospital visits.  As you may imagine, it was an extremely difficult and highly emotionally charged period of my life and I needed all the strength I could muster to be able to cope.  It was only a year on that the true horror of these two very different yet equally harrowing experiences began to surface.  Fears that my Mother would make a second attempt at taking her life and images of my emaciated friend on her deathbed were frequent visitors to my mind’s eye and needed to be dealt with.  The sheer contrast between the two situations only became crystal clear with time – the fact that one person wanted to die and lived and the other wanted to live and died!  Only sometime after these events could I entertain the idea of seeking the assistance of a counsellor to come to terms with such a bizarre set of circumstances.

Whilst I intuitively felt that it was right to keep my boss informed at all times during the crisis period, I certainly did not feel that I could turn to him for any real support.  Instead, I enlisted the help of the Welfare Officer who intervened on my behalf.  As a result, I was granted a few days compassionate leave while my Mother was on the critical list and subsequently one day’s compassionate leave three months later to bury my friend.  Alas, it is my belief that as far as my boss was concerned, this is where the understanding of my situation began and ended.

(Sadly, the Welfare Officer was subsequently made redundant, leaving a vacuum in terms of the well-being of staff members.  One might suggest that, from the Company’s perspective, Welfare Officers cannot be measured in terms of productivity or sales targets and are therefore only too easily dispensable.  But such short-term measures may well have the desired result of reducing costs but at what price in the long run?  Certainly in terms of the Company’s image as a caring organisation, this may well have been adversely affected, as no doubt was the morale of its employees.)

Thereafter, it was “business as usual” and I do not believe any further concessions were made by my boss for the personal traumas I had suffered and indeed continued to suffer both in the form of grief and in ongoing problems with my Mother.  I was expected to undertake my usual duties without any additional support and frankly, once my friend had died and my Mother was off the critical list, the matter was deemed to be resolved.  The
long term effect of all this was, unfortunately, that the working relationship between my immediate boss and me was far from satisfactory, which, in the worst case scenario, may well have affected the Company’s bottom line.

It is my firm belief that, as a general rule, we as a nation are extremely poor at understanding and dealing with bereavement.  In fact, I would go as far as to say that death is the number one taboo subject in this country..  Although we are beginning to understand the importance of expressing our emotions in relation to maintaining good health and happiness, unfortunately, the great British stiff upper lip still often prevails.  In the event of someone dying, once the funeral is over, the bereaved are expected to return to normal very quickly, including going back to work.  Why then do other cultures openly mourn their loss by weeping and wailing in public and continue to declare their grief by wearing black for many months to come?  Surely they have understood that it takes time to heal and other people need to be reminded of this fact so that they can offer support to the bereaved person.

This national characteristic naturally spills over into the work place and, although some companies may have “friendly family policies”, welfare officers and so on, it is the individual line manager who is still the real decision-maker, holds the power and can make an employee’s life a pleasure or indeed a misery.  In my experience, these people vary greatly in their treatment of staff.  They may well be ill-equipped to deal with serious personal problems and are often more concerned with meeting targets and deadlines than showing true concern for a member of their staff.  Token gestures of compassion are likely to be recognised for what they are and, in the long run, will lead to unhappiness and have a negative effect on performance. 

Bearing in mind hat the majority of managers in this country are men, who were doubtless brought up with the attitude “big boys don’t cry” and can have difficulty when it comes to handling emotions, particularly of the feminine variety, it is hardly surprising that many are unable to cope with their employees’ personal problems.  However, this is not just a male preserve.  It may also be true that some female managers are little better in their treatment of staff, since they may not wish to be seen as “soft” in the eyes of their male counterparts.

Surely, if we are to address these issues radically and create caring companies in the future, we should be vesting more power into our Human Resources Departments to ensure that all staff is treated in a fair, consistent and compassionate manner, no matter who their line manager is?  Moreover, investing more time and money in training our managers in all aspects of people management would surely not go amiss.  Too many managers in the past were promoted to a managerial position and not given adequate training or worse still received no training whatsoever.  Perhaps these skills should be made a pre-requisite of any management qualification or training.

By ignoring the emotional well-being of their staff, companies are likely to cause disharmony in the workplace, as well as in people’s private lives.  This is not conducive to a good working relationship between the company and its staff and, it is likely that both parties will suffer as a consequence of its short-sightedness.  Mutual respect and loyalty between employer and employee does not have to be a thing of the past does it?  After all, human resources are a Company’s greatest asset, aren’t they?