Grief recovery specialist Jess Goyder examines what Assistants can teach us about grief in the workplace
Key takeaways:
- How grief impacts performance, confidence and emotional capacity at work – and why Assistants are uniquely affected.
- Evidence-based guidance on navigating grief in the workplace, from emotional overwhelm to cognitive fog.
- Why unresolved grief accumulates over time and how it contributes to burnout, anxiety, and loss of resilience.
- Practical strategies for Assistants to support grieving colleagues and to recognise and address their own grief first.
- How grief can deepen emotional intelligence, strengthen leadership, and reshape workplace culture for the better.
No one escapes grief. If you haven’t yet experienced bereavement or an intense period of loss, you inevitably will. When Executive Assistant Sadie lost both her parents within seven months of one another, her employer responded in the worst possible way. Rather than offering support, they made the most devastating period of her life even harder. Sadie recalls: “Mum died on 11th April, and seven weeks later they put me through a disciplinary for ‘poor performance’ while my dad was terminally ill. I didn’t stay long after that. It massively affected my confidence and self-belief.”
This entire magazine could be filled with everything our workplaces are getting wrong in handling grief – and a fair few getting it right – with a lot of real-world mess and confusion in between. It’s human to turn away from pain and fear, and the legacy of grief avoidance runs deep in Western corporate culture. Yet we need to talk about grief – especially at work.
Grief at Work in Numbers
At any given time globally, one in four employees is grieving – and more than half say they would consider leaving their job if their employer offered no support (Workplace Healing, 2023).
In the US, unsupported grief costs businesses an estimated $225.8 billion a year through absenteeism and lost productivity (PR Newswire, 2024).
Presenteeism linked to grief from bereavement alone costs the UK economy £16 billion a year, rising to £23 billion when absenteeism and reduced employment are included (Ryder, 2019).
58% of UK workers say their job performance is still affected months after the death of a loved one (Marie Curie, 2021). 54% of UK employees worry that taking bereavement leave could affect their job security (Marie Curie, 2021). Only 17% of UK managers feel confident supporting a bereaved team member (Fraser, 2022).
HEADER: Starting the Conversation
As an Assistant, you already know how to navigate emotional complexity and guide others – support is one of your superpowers. This article shines that light back on you – on how you can respond most effectively when life confronts you with its toughest moments. It draws on evidence-based grief recovery work, lived experience, and conversations with Assistants – with no easy answers, assumptions, or false positivity.
The very qualities that make you effective as an Assistant – relational intelligence, discretion, calm under pressure, and the ability to navigate complex dynamics – are the same ones that support you through grief.
Change is needed. This is not an attempt to let organisations – or the wider social and economic structures that fail to sustain us – off the hook. But grief support starts with ourselves. The deeper challenge is that most of us have never been taught what grief actually is.
HEADER: Understanding the Fundamentals
“Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behaviour.” ~ John W. James and Russell Friedman, The Grief Recovery Handbook
Grief is that ordinary. It’s a completely normal, natural response to any loss or change. Feeling grief isn’t only sadness – it’s also guilt, rage, relief, yearning, numbness, a love with nowhere to go, emotional exhaustion, even gratitude. It creates a huge amount of emotional energy. Conflicting, sometimes chaotic feelings are all part of the process.
HEADER: Beyond Death and Dying
Grief is about far more than bereavement. We grieve in divorce, break-ups and estrangements, pet loss, infertility, empty nests, relocation, and collectively at world events we feel powerless to change. Chronic illness and menopause bring a multitude of losses, and unfulfilled hopes, expectations, and relationships all create undercurrents of grief.
HEADER: Grief at Work
Even beyond what we navigate in our personal lives, work brings its own losses – redundancy, restructuring, shifts in leadership, colleagues moving on, or roles being downgraded. For Assistants, a change in the executive you’ve supported closely for years can be profound, and the circumstances of that loss and relationship will be significant. Your professional future can be upended overnight, at the will of your executive’s career path. Quiet erosions, like diminishing autonomy, often accumulate over time.
HEADER: Grief Is Cumulative
Every loss carries the resonances of previous losses, however small, and the impact is cumulative. Unresolved grief lies behind many major challenges to our mental health, from burnout, addiction, and workaholism to depression and anxiety.
HEADER: From Understanding to Action
Understanding grief is one thing; applying that awareness – at work or at home – is another.
Normalise grief for yourself and others; use the words death, dying, and died when you can.
- Expect conflicting, chaotic emotions.
- Acknowledge the impact of endings and change.
- Never compare losses – all grief, in all its forms, is unique.
HEADER: Address Your Own Unresolved Grief First
Before helping others to navigate grief, you need to have attended to your own. It’s a huge act of generosity – for everyone around you, and even more so for yourself. In doing so, you expand your capacity to navigate whatever life throws at you. Life becomes lighter, clearer, and more complete.
If your cup of unresolved loss is overflowing, supporting someone else becomes very challenging. Your own confidence and familiarity with the terrain of grief makes everyone around you feel safe and relieves them of the extra cognitive load – or even shame – of second-guessing your responses or explaining the basics of grief awareness. People sense when someone has done their own grief work – they feel permission to be themselves, truer versions of themselves, in your presence. You’ll become emotionally clearer, calmer, and a much better listener.
Ultimately, grief work strengthens not only our clarity and empathy but leadership itself. I want a world where there isn’t a leader, executive, or manager who hasn’t done a short course of grief work – or at the very least, some grief education.
HEADER: From Understanding to Action
Explore what works for you – counselling, psychotherapy, or the right group or community event. If talking isn’t enough, a structured, evidence-based model or coaching can make all the difference. Many workplaces now offer counselling or Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs) as part of their wellbeing benefits – find out what support is available and make use of it.
Address your personal loss history; the right practitioner or programme can guide you safely and in a structured way.
Educate yourself about grief, death, and dying. It’s a lifelong process, and there’s never been a better time to start.
HEADER: The Challenges of Grieving at Work
Many Assistants I spoke to returned to work fairly quickly, even after profound losses, and found that stability, rhythm, and a sense of purpose helped. The more people felt acknowledged and trusted, and experienced compassion and flexibility, the more they gradually recovered the capacity to contribute. Others were compelled back far too soon, forced by policy or work pressures.
For many, the hardest part of grieving is the sudden loss of control, which can be even harder at work. Our usual superpowers – the ability to problem-solve, anticipate, plan, and fix – can feel as though they’ve been whipped away. As one Assistant put it, echoing many: “I’m meant to see things coming. I’m used to firefighting and fixing anything… and suddenly, with grief, I can’t do any of those things.” There’s no clear map with grief.
Grief is a question of the heart that needs to be answered by the heart – a vital natural process that needs to be supported. Grief exposes the limits of our executive function – that not everything can be solved, managed, or optimised. You may know this rationally, but it’s vital to remember that if you’re grieving, you’re not broken and you certainly don’t need fixing. Grieving people need to be listened to with dignity and respect – and the same applies to how you respond to your own grief too.
HEADER: Losing Your Thinking Mind
Many return for the healthy distraction of work, only to be met with too much distraction. “I usually think for someone else as a living,” said one Assistant. “Now I can’t even think for myself.” When focus, precision, decision-making, and organisational skills are core to your role, grief can make you question your very sense of self. Cognitive impairment, distraction, and emotional exhaustion are major aspects of grief. It also brings heightened stress, anxiety, intense emotions, and disrupted sleep.
Overthinking is a natural attempt to master the unfathomable and regain control. When you’re used to thinking your way out of everything, it’s only natural to keep trying – even when it feels like wheels spinning helplessly in sand.
With grief, your problem-solving skills – and above all, your emotional intelligence – need to be redirected into supporting the grieving process itself.
HEADER: Indispensable or Out of a Job
Many of the Assistants I spoke to found themselves in a double bind, unable to work but unable not to work. They were under pressure to return to the office quickly, in departments already in crisis, or with huge workloads and schedules, with no time to do anything but ‘crack on’.
“The downfall of being an Executive Assistant is that you’re the person they can’t be without,” said one EA who has experienced grief at work. Another spoke of the challenge of being her executive’s ‘spare brain’, when there was ‘no back-up spare brain”. Another Assistant had carefully prepared a document listing everything needed to keep the office running in their absence. On returning from two weeks of bereavement leave after their mother’s death, they discovered they’d effectively organised themselves out of a job – replaced by a temp.
HEADER: Turning Difficulties into Opportunities
As well as being completely normal and natural, and in many ways a learning process, grieving is also a verb – this is a skill. Assistants are some of the fastest learners I have ever met – agile, adaptive, constantly navigating shifting priorities, relationships, and circumstances. As one Assistant made clear, you are already sitting on an extensive toolkit. “As an EA, you spend your days turning difficulties into opportunities. If we all did that in our personal lives, we’d all be rock stars!”
Out of the rich spectrum of skills Assistants possess, emotional intelligence is perhaps the strongest. You already do this, but with grief more than ever, it’s a moment to apply all of the compassion, understanding, and listening you would offer another to yourself. This is an invitation to ‘keep reading your inner room’.
“I can’t just take a day off,” said an Assistant who has dealt with multiple pregnancy losses and the death of a parent while working. “Grief catches me at random moments. When it does, I deal with it right away, even if it’s only for five or ten minutes.”
“I decided to deal with my grief the moment it showed up, even if it was just going up and down in the lift a few times, because that helps more in the long run,” she says. “I deal with my grief when it’s raw. If I file it away for later it’s always worse. …I always know it’s there for a reason. If I catch it the moment it arrives – those five minutes where you stop and think, ‘Gosh, I feel awful; maybe I’m just tired’ – it’s always better.”
She’s attuned enough to recognise what’s there – and has learned to make it an immediate priority rather than suppressing it. She validates and names the feelings. She’s also found a private space, even if it’s a lift.
You can’t contain grief; it ebbs and flows and spills everywhere despite our best efforts. But the grieving process benefits hugely from ‘containers’ – specific places, routines, and people where we can take our feelings. Perhaps this lift can continue to be a place she brings her grief to, even if only for a moment to acknowledge and connect with it before returning to her day. No one can and should be with their pain all the time, but you might find in time, if you keep doing this, the grief is less likely to ‘spill over’ into other parts of your day.
If you really can’t show your feelings at work, wear that professional mask more intentionally – from a place of protection, not suppression. Do it from a place of power. Take back control and own your grief. Above all, find as many people as possible with whom you can regularly take off the mask and be completely yourself. The downside of suppressing the emotions of grief for too long is the flatline: while we keep the pain at bay – our sadness, rage, despair, devastation – we also shut ourselves away from joy, vitality, laughter, clarity, purpose, and aliveness.
HEADER: What Remains and What Grows
No one chooses grief. None of this can ever take away how agonising and relentless it can feel. Yet many of the Assistants I spoke to found that, in facing it for what it was, they had become wiser, braver, more compassionate and discerning. Having learned and been shaped by loss, they are now able to influence their organisations and culture – a true form of leadership, grounded in empathy and lived experience.
“I was told to check in on a staff member two weeks into her month of bereavement leave. I knew it was too soon and said she’d leave if I did. I knew because I’d been there. I pushed back, and it worked out far better,” explained one Assistant.
Another described how her experience has inspired advocacy at the highest level: “Everything I’ve been through has helped me push for change. I persuaded my company to extend bereavement leave to ten days – which will never be enough – but I’m proud. My role at the executive table lets me remind leaders that people show up differently after loss, and that’s OK.”
Others have built peer networks of support – one of the strongest aspects of the Executive Support community: “There are five of us, all in support functions – and we all support each other. I can ring them and say, ‘I’m feeling emotional.’ You are entitled to feel vulnerable. You don’t have to show that to your boss.”
A number of Assistants modelled the change they wanted to see through openness: “I didn’t write to my colleagues for sympathy, but to encourage a different approach – to talk about a loved one’s passing rather than have only a few people know, which can leave others unsure how to respond or ask for help. It only works if you feel comfortable, but functioning teams naturally adjust and are kind – and awkwardness soon dissipates.”
HEADER: From Loss to Leadership
This is only a glimpse of what’s possible. Grief showing up at work is far more than a disruption – it’s an invitation to develop our inner, outer, and organisational relationships and resources. This is a call to lead in the truest sense: to engage with our whole selves and hone both our emotional and practical capacity to respond. And we can never, and should never, do that without others. For EAs and administrative professionals, loss can deepen relationships and sharpen systems, communication and boundaries. It teaches us to meet complexity and life’s limits with clarity, agility and, perhaps most of all, compassion.
Supporting a Grieving Colleague: What Helps (and What Doesn’t)
| Do (say/do) | Don’t (say/do) |
| Say something – even clumsily. Even “I don’t know what to say” can make all the difference. | Avoid them or stay silent. |
| Listen fully – be present and intentional. Listen from the heart, not the head. | Listen distractedly or half-heartedly. |
| Ask vague questions such as “How are you?” – unanswerable at the best of times. | |
| Make assumptions or unilateral decisions about what they need. | |
| Acknowledge the magnitude of the loss and validate feelings. | Compare losses, impose beliefs, or use platitudes such as “At least he lived a long life.” |
| Gestures matter – send the flowers, write the card, walk across the office to speak, and do it soon. | Leave it until later. |
| Be consistent – check in over months and years. Remember anniversaries. | Expect anyone to be “over it” within any given timeframe. |
Further resources and helplines can be found at griefisnatural.com/resources.
With thanks to all the Assistants whose collaboration made this article possible.
HEADER: References
Fraser, P. “More Workplace Support Is Needed for Staff Facing Grief.” People Management. 2022. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1801035/workplace-support-needed-staff-facing-grief
James, J. W., & Friedman, R. The Grief Recovery Handbook. New York: William Morrow. 2009.
Marie Curie. “Respecting and Supporting Grief at Work.” 2021. https://www.mariecurie.org.uk/globalassets/media/documents/how-we-can-help/bereavement-hub/respecting-and-supporting-grief-at-work_sep-2021.pdf
PR Newswire. “Empathy Releases Annual ‘Cost of Dying Report’ for 2024.” 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/empathy-releases-annual-cost-of-dying-report-for-2024-302036982.html
Ryder, S. “Grief in the Workplace Report.” 2019. https://media.sueryder.org/documents/Sue_Ryder_Grief_in_the_workplace_report_0_rW0nAiA.pdf
Workplace Healing. “Leading Through Grief.” 2023. https://workplacehealing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Leading-through-Grief-white-paper.pdf
