Managers play a vital role in supporting the health, wellbeing, and engagement of their team. As a line manager, you also play an essential part in managing particular people management issues that arise in your team, such as bereavement. Managing an employee who has suffered a bereavement requires compassion, sensitivity, and flexibility.

Your employee is most likely to let you know what is happening and accept support from you if you already have a good relationship with them and have built an environment that is open, respectful, kind, fair and consistent, in which people feel ‘psychologically safe’.

Through our own experiences, research and help from specialists, we have found four themes to help guide you through supporting your team member who has suffered parental loss.

Communicate

Empathy-lead communication is so important. Don’t assume you know how the person is feeling, ask open yet simple questions like, “How are you doing today?” Avoid patronising responses and instead listen actively to understand what they need from you.

Another thing to note is bereavement isn’t linear and the individual may be in shock at first/lacking emotion, the full impact and emotions felt may be delayed, so support may need to be ongoing.

Deal with internal processes for them

It is important to find out from your employee how much (if any) information they’d like to be shared about their parental loss experience. By law, an employee can keep their bereavement private from work colleagues. So it's good to find out from the employee what they want to be shared, if anything and if they want to be contacted by employees.

Organise internally who will be covering their work and ensure the support is provided for when they return to work.

Ease back into work

Easing the individual back into work is a way of enabling employees to return to their role in a gradual way. This is something businesses tend to adopt following an illness or injury through an occupational health referral, but we would also recommend it for those that have been bereaved. This would offer the individual a gradual increase in workload until they reach their usual hours. This is usually between two and six weeks but we recommend discussing with the individual and understanding how long they need depending on their circumstance, especially as grief comes in cycles.

In addition to this, any further support in terms of counselling offers or introductions to charities like It’s Time will give the individual support for the medium to long term.