Firms step up in time of losing a loved one

More bosses understand that a short break is not enough for most bereaved.

Laura Madaio and her father, John.

A little over a year ago, a kitchen shelf in Laura Madaio’s Boston home collapsed for no apparent reason, cascading mugs and plates on to the bench and crushing her smartphone.

The mishap delayed her family’s calls and texts about a car crash that happened at almost the same time: her 63-year-old father, John Madaio, was killed in a freak accident when a crowbar that fell from, or was kicked up by, another vehicle on the highway smashed his windscreen, hit him and sent his car careening off the road.

The loss left her reeling, touching off a year of profound grieving and a surprising twist in her ­career. The 28-year-old marketing manager coped in part by posting an essay on LinkedIn about how the tragedy affected her work. It drew almost 10,000 page views. “I don’t think grief is talked about enough, especially as it pertains to the workplace,” Madaio says.

Employees in their 20s and 30s are more open about work-life conflicts than any generation ­before them. Not only are they likelier to talk about grieving at work but they’re also pressing employers to loosen rigid limits on bereavement leave.

About 89 per cent of US employers have a bereavement-leave policy, up from 81 per cent in 2016. But the policies tend to define family narrowly and allow as few as three days off for a death in the family. That’s barely enough time to travel to a funeral in a distant state, says Terri Rhodes, chief executive of the non-profit Disability Management Employer Coalition.

Madaio’s employer was far more generous. She needed the entire week after her father’s death to help her mother, Sue, and her sister, Molly, arrange John’s funeral and wake. Madaio and her mother also spent days sifting through his files and paperwork.

“The standard bereavement leave doesn’t take into account the logistics of managing a death,” Madaio says. “People think you’re attending services or curled up in bed. But in reality, we’d never been busier.”

Her employer at the time, a provider of employer recruitment services with 45 employees, didn’t have any bereavement policy at all. Her boss, Sam Iserson, surprised her when he said: “Why don’t you take two weeks off for yourself and then we’ll discuss things further?”

Later, Iserson urged Madaio to take another five days. “After an event as sudden and tragic as that, I didn’t want her to worry about what was happening here,” says Iserson, president of NC3.

More large employers are moving in the same direction. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg announced a doubling of the company’s bereavement leave in 2017 to as much as four weeks, citing her own need for flexibility after the sudden death of her husband in 2015. Airbnb and Mastercard mentioned Sandberg’s experience in announcing 2017 increases in their maximum ­bereave­ment leave to 20 days.

“It’s a great opportunity for employers to show up in the ­moments that really matter,” says LuAnn Heinen, a vice-president at National Business Group on Health, an employer group.

A few companies are easing ­restrictions on the kinds of relationships that qualify for bereavement leave. “More progress­ive companies would allow the employee to determine who matters,” Heinen says. That avoids putting employers in the awkward role of deciding how many days an employee should be ­allotted to mourn, say, a brother-in-law versus a romantic partner.

It’s also important to let ­employees take their allotted days off intermittently as needed, Heinen says.

For a while after her father’s death, Madaio felt she’d lost her passion and motivation. Gradually she noticed a change. “I began thinking and saying, ‘I need to do something really hard,’ ” she says. She told her boyfriend, Dylan Vitali, she felt like training for a marathon, opening a restaurant and applying to business school all at once.

She stepped up her workouts at the gym. “Whenever I want to dog it or I don’t want to do another rep, I think of Dad,” says Madaio, a Division III college athlete who was captain of her field ­hockey and softball teams.

When she was invited to interview for a challenging job in an unfamiliar industry, she says, it was difficult to leave an employer who had stood by her in hard times. But she felt the job switch could provide that tough new challenge. Her boss, Meghan Kennelly, says she has set up two new marketing partnerships in her first 10 months at Yamaha Unified Communications.

Madaio has even surprised herself. “If you’d asked me two years ago what I’d do if my dad died, I’d have told you I’d need to be hospitalised or bedridden,” she says. Instead, while getting through the workday can be a struggle, “I’m probably more motivated than I’ve ever been”.

Two out of three bereaved ­individuals respond with similar resilience, says George Bonanno, a psychology professor at Columbia University and author of The Other Side of Sadness. Still, grieving can take a mental toll.

People who are shown reminders of deceased loved ones continue for several years to show increased cognitive activity in brain regions tied to emotion, ­research shows. Resilient people tend to suppress those ­responses. “They might be sad for a few minutes or an hour but they go in and out of these states,” Bonanno says. “It’s a fleeting ­consciousness, at the periphery of our awareness.”

It can be hard to navigate grieving and work at the same time. Madaio is sometimes beset by what she calls “brain fog”: an ­unfocused mind state that triggers minor errors, such as leaving her laptop at home.

The good days are starting to outnumber the bad. But the anniversary last August of her father’s death brought renewed sadness, she says. “I told her to take the day off, on us,” says Kennelly, a global marketing and communications manager at Yamaha. She did.

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