Someone on your team is grieving something right now. And odds are, it doesn't qualify for bereavement leave.
Have you ever sat in a meeting, nodding along, saying all the right things, while carrying something heavy that no one in the room knew about?
Picture your next team meeting.
On Saturday, Sarah's mom didn't recognize her for the first time.
Arjun is in the middle of a separation and sleeping on a friend's couch.
Janice's dog of 14 years passed last week.
Everyone's there. Everyone's nodding along. There's no funeral, no card going around the office, no out-of-office message. But each of them is grieving, and they'll all be back at their desks by 9:15.
Whether any of them feels safe enough to say so has less to do with them, and everything to do with the culture of the room.
Now think about your own team. Who might be carrying something you can’t see? And if they are, would they know your workplace has their back?
The grief that doesn't get a casserole.
In 1989, grief researcher Kenneth Doka gave a name to what Sarah, Arjun and Janice are feeling: disenfranchised grief.
It's grief that isn't openly acknowledged, socially supported or publicly mourned. The loss is real, but the world around you doesn't treat it as "real enough" to grieve. So people carry it quietly.
And where do they carry it? Right into work. Into meetings, deadlines and performance reviews, often without a single colleague knowing.
Five griefs hiding in plain sight at work.
1. The layoff survivor. They kept their job, but lost their work best friend, their lunch crew and the team they built. They're told they're "the lucky ones," so they don't feel allowed to be sad.
2. The caregiver. Grieving a parent who is still here, but slipping away. Or a partner whose illness has changed everything. Psychologists call this anticipatory or ambiguous loss, and it can last for years.
3. The identity loss. A role restructured out of existence. A title that disappeared overnight. A career chapter that ended without anyone saying goodbye. When so much of who we are is tied to what we do, losing the "what" can shake the "who."
4. The goodbye that didn't happen. A beloved mentor retires. A manager who believed in you moves on. A colleague dies, and the team is expected to keep going the next day.
5. The losses people rarely say out loud. The death of a pet. A pregnancy loss or the end of a fertility journey. A divorce. An estrangement. Each one real, and each one often met with silence at work.
Why this matters.
Grief doesn't wait in the parking lot. It comes to work, and the numbers show it.
Grief: 9 in 10 grieving employees say their focus suffered at work, and 79% have thought about quitting. (Empathy, 2025)
Layoffs: 74% of layoff survivors say their own productivity dropped afterward. (Leadership IQ)
Caregiving: 5.2 million Canadians are juggling paid work and caregiving, more than 1 in 4 working-age Canadians. (Vanier Institute)
But the real cost isn't measured in productivity. It's that we quietly ask people to leave part of their humanity at the door, and then wonder why they don't bring their whole selves to work.
Grief shows up before anyone calls it grief
Here's what makes disenfranchised grief so tricky at work: it rarely looks like sadness. It looks like a "performance issue." Using the SPIRE lens of whole-person well-being, here's how it tends to show up:
Spiritual: Loss of meaning. "What's the point?" energy about work that used to matter.
Physical: Fatigue, frequent sick days, a body running on fumes.
Intellectual: Forgetfulness, trouble focusing, small mistakes from someone who rarely makes them.
Relational: Pulling back from colleagues, cameras off, skipping the social stuff.
Emotional: Irritability, tearfulness or flatness that seems to come from nowhere.
None of these mean someone is grieving. But when you see a cluster of them in someone who's usually steady, curiosity beats judgment every time.
Permission to be human
Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar puts it simply: well-being begins with giving ourselves permission to be human. That means accepting painful emotions as part of a full life, not as a sign that something's broken.
Try not to think of a white bear. (You just did.) Psychologist Daniel Wegner showed that pushing a thought away only makes it louder. Grief is the same. Ignore it at work, and it resurfaces as burnout, mistakes and resignation letters.
The hopeful part? George Bonanno's research shows that resilience is the most common response to loss. And grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut found that people heal by moving between facing their loss and stepping back into everyday life. Work can be that steady place, as long as people are allowed to have a hard day there.
What leaders can actually do
You don't need to be a grief counsellor. Compassion researchers Jane Dutton and Peter Frost describe it in three simple moves: notice, feel, respond.
Notice. When someone who's usually steady starts slipping, get curious before you get critical. After a restructure, acknowledge that the people who stayed have lost something too.
Feel. Say it out loud: "It's okay not to be okay here." If it fits, share a little of your own experience with loss. And choose your words with care. Skip the silver linings, like "at least…" or "everything happens for a reason," which can make people feel their grief is being tidied away. Instead, keep it simple and human: name it ("This is really hard"), ask an open question ("How are you doing with it?"), and offer something specific rather than a vague "let me know if you need anything," like "I've covered Thursday's meeting."
Respond. Ask, don't assume: "Would work feel like an anchor right now, or is it too much?" Then adjust. Make room to mark endings, too, whether that's a thank-you circle when a team disbands or a shared story at a farewell. And remember that grief doesn't follow a timeline. Most support fades after the first few weeks, just as the reality sets in. Check in again at six months. Note the anniversaries and the hard dates. A quiet message on one of those days says "you're not forgotten" louder than any policy.
What organizations can do
Leaders set the tone, but policies make it possible. Start by widening your bereavement policy to include the losses it usually leaves out, like pets, pregnancy loss, close friends and chosen family, and let people take those days in pieces, since grief often hits hardest weeks later. Plan a gentle return together with the person, whether that's phased hours, flexible schedules or a few remote days. And give managers some grief literacy. Most want to help but freeze, afraid of saying the wrong thing. A little training turns that fear into confidence.
The bottom line
Every workplace is full of people carrying losses no one can see. We can't take that grief away. But we can stop asking people to hide it.
And this matters more than ever. Today's workforce spans four generations, and the people joining it now expect their workplace to see the whole person, not just the role. The organizations that thrive will be the ones whose culture makes it normal to say "I'm not okay this week," and normal to hear it.
Because a workplace that makes room for grief is a workplace where people can truly flourish.
Want to understand what's really going on beneath the surface of your team? Mingle & Marvel's Workplace Well-Being Survey gives you a whole-person picture of well-being across your organization.
Sources
Ben-Shahar, T. (2009). The Pursuit of Perfect. McGraw-Hill.
Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience. American Psychologist, 59(1).
Doka, K. J. (1989). Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington Books.
Dutton, J. E., Worline, M. C., Frost, P. J., & Lilius, J. (2006). Explaining compassion organizing. Administrative Science Quarterly, 51(1).
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement. Death Studies, 23(3).
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1).