After the death of her son Jimmy in 2014, Margo Fowkes (Folks) created Salt Water, a blog and online community that provides a safe harbor for those who are grieving the death of someone dear to them. Inspired by Jimmy’s determination to live a rich, full life despite his cancer diagnosis, Salt Water’s articles and other resources focus on healing and building a new life in the aftermath of a devastating loss.
Margo is also the founder and president of OnTarget Consulting, Inc., a firm specializing in helping organizations and individuals act strategically, improve their performance and achieve their business goals. She works with clients to solve problems of productivity, morale and innovation.
Margo recently released her first book, Leading Through Loss: How to Navigate Grief at Work, and she coaches leaders on how to create a more compassionate culture by acknowledging and speaking openly about grief and loss in the workplace.
That’s what we’re talking about today: how to navigate grief in the workplace, from the perspective of the person in grief to her coworkers and her management team.
But particularly from the context of pet loss grief. I remember at one of the newspapers I worked at decades ago, one of our graphic designers had to say goodbye to her horse. She took her year’s worth of vacation, two weeks.
And I’ll fully admit I didn’t get it then. It took the pain of losing Shep for me to understand the depth of pain, and I wasn’t working at the time. I was home alone and I remember yearning to have a job at the time — not just to keep me busy but also to have a community around me, even if it might not have been as supportive as I needed it to be at the time. Because pet loss grief is disenfranchised and might not rank as worthy in the eyes of many who don’t get it.
We talk about that, too.
What to listen for
3:10 What drove Margo into the grief business
7:32 How we carry our grief into the workplace
11:35 How we can create a more supportive workplace
15:41 What can management teams do to help employees in grief
28:24 The essential elements of providing support in the workplace
Where to find Margo
Salt Water: Find Your Safe Harbor
Salt Water on Facebook
Salt Water on Instagram
OnTarget Consulting
Margo’s book, Leading Through Loss: How to Navigate Grief at Work, on Amazon
Angela Schneider
Welcome to One Last Network and The Art of Working Through Grief.
After the death of her son Jimmy in 2014, Margo Fowkes (Folks) created Salt Water, a blog and online community that provides a safe harbor for those who are grieving the death of someone dear to them. Inspired by Jimmy’s determination to live a rich, full life despite his cancer diagnosis, Salt Water’s articles and other resources focus on healing and building a new life in the aftermath of a devastating loss.
Margo is also the founder and president of OnTarget Consulting, Inc., a firm specializing in helping organizations and individuals act strategically, improve their performance and achieve their business goals. She works with clients to solve problems of productivity, morale and innovation.
Margo recently released her first book, Leading Through Loss: How to Navigate Grief at Work, and she coaches leaders on how to create a more compassionate culture by acknowledging and speaking openly about grief and loss in the workplace.
That’s what we’re talking about today: how to navigate grief in the workplace, from the perspective of the person in grief to her coworkers and her management team.
But particularly from the context of pet loss grief. I remember at one of the newspapers I worked at decades ago, one of our graphic designers had to say goodbye to her horse. She took her year’s worth of vacation, two weeks.
And I’ll fully admit I didn’t get it then. It took the pain of losing Shep for me to understand the depth of pain, and I wasn’t working at the time. I was home alone and I remember yearning to have a job at the time — not just to keep me busy but also to have a community around me, even if it might not have been as supportive as I needed it to be at the time. Because pet loss grief is disenfranchised and might not rank as worthy in the eyes of many who don’t get it.
We talk about that, too.
Have a listen.
Good morning, Margo. How are you today
Margo Fowkes
I’m good, Angela.
Angela
So why don’t we get started by having you tell us a bit about yourself, and how you ended up on your journey in the grief and loss business.
Margo
We were, we were thrown in to that world of grief and loss. When our then 13 and a half year old son, Jimmy was diagnosed with brain cancer. And he had basically an eight-year journey or an eight-year fight, depending on the terminology that speaks to you, where he went through initial treatment. And then after two years, the cancer came back. He went through much more significant, you know, traumatic treatment, and it was that kind of pattern of it, would, it would, we get it under control, and then it would come back, and then we would do more treatment. And eventually, eight years after his initial diagnosis, he passed away at the age of 21. And that really just, you know, threw me into the grief and loss world. Before he died, we also lost our beloved dog Bronco, which was heartbreaking too because although he was 12 it was I wasn’t, I wasn’t ready. I mean, no one’s ever ready, right when you love an animal, but he was only 12 and seemed very healthy. And I expected to have him a lot longer. And particularly I think, because of what was going on with Jimmy, he was such a key support for the family that it was that much harder to lose him. So that was really my introduction to it. And to being kind of thrown into that space. And it led me to to start writing and eventually set up a website called saltwater, for people who are grieving any sort of loss, including pets, because my experience almost less with our own dog because people were rather lovely when Bronco died for us. But realizing in the context of grief, just how how little support there is sometimes for the loss of an animal. And then also just you know how it so often gets dismissed as being not as important as a human. And that’s always been a mystery to me why we try to rank and and calibrate grief in that way. Grief is grief. If we’re sad, we’re sad. It doesn’t. The comparison doesn’t matter, basically.
Angela
Yeah, absolutely. One of my mentors, David Kessler says that even if you win the comparison game in grief you lose. Right?
Margo
Yeah, exactly.
Angela
And so you also coach business leaders on how to create a more compassionate culture by acknowledging and speaking openly about grief and loss in the workplace. What makes the workplace such a unique microcosm of society?
Margo
Well, I think in general, we are not great at supporting each other when we’re grieving. I think it’s really hard to sit with someone whose life has been shattered by loss. And there’s so much mythology out there about what you should say and what you shouldn’t say. And you know, while I’m sure you and I would probably agree on, on several things, one should not say to someone who’s grieving that the not-so-hidden message in so many of those articles is that there are things to say. And if you just figure out the perfect thing to say, then Angela will feel better because you said it. And so there’s this enormous pressure on people. And what happens is people tend to not say anything oftentimes, or stumble around, which is hard enough to do socially. But when you’re in a work environment, and you’re also worried about well, does Angela have a meeting? You know, if I bring up the loss of her beloved dog, and she’s about to go make a customer presentation, or be part of a staff meeting, am I going to upset her at the wrong moment at work? Which is a legitimate concern, right? Of course, that’s the last thing someone wants to do. And so it’s even more silent at work oftentimes, when we lose someone.
Angela
How would you define grief and its impact on individuals, especially in the context of the workplace?
Margo
I, you know, I think, I think grief, I don’t know that I have a good definition for it, per se. But I, when I think about it, I think about the way in which it affects us in all aspects. So we literally, we, we carry the grief with us, and we wear it in our bodies. So it’s something where, you know, when folks go back to work, and even if the team hasn’t been told that something has happened, you can see it in the way that maybe their shoulders slumped, their head is down, they won’t make eye contact, there’s almost a weightiness to someone who is grieving, and who is very, very sad. So I think it’s something that we, you know, that we carry with us no matter what. And again, it’s just, it’s one of these things that can be so isolating, because we just, we just don’t know what to do with it, when we see someone who’s in that situation.
Angela
Without giving away our respective ages, I think we both come from the same world of two days off, back at your desk and get over it. That is just not acceptable anymore, is it?
Margo
It’s not, but you know, the average bereavement leave, and this is for a child, or you know, a parent or a spouse. So a loss that is on the family tree close to you, is four days, I think, in this country. And you know, for a relationship that’s deemed to be less close, it’s often two days. And for a pet, it’s usually one. And in many companies, it’s zero, unless you have a manager who is understanding and kind enough to say, you know, take some time off, take a day, but it’s usually a day for pets at most.
Angela
How often does pet loss grief come up for you in your work? And do you find that it’s more dismissed than grief for our human loved ones?
Margo
It comes up fairly regularly. And, you know, again, it really varies. It’s everything from the beloved family pet, where there’s kids and a cat or kids and a dog or both. And, you know, there’s sadness around the loss to that continuum of folks where they live alone with their pet. And so it’s their family. It’s their constant companion, which, of course, makes the loss that much harder, because you go home and you are alone in that case.
Angela
What are some common misunderstandings about grief that workplaces should be aware of?
Margo
I think that one of the biggest ones is that if you ignore it, or perhaps acknowledge it, when it happens, right, by sending a card delivering a meal, you know, in the case of humans going to a celebration of life or a funeral service, that somehow if you do that, and then don’t really bring it up again, that the other, that your employee will just kind of manage it, and, and get through it. And you don’t really have to do anything to be supportive. I’ve lost track of the number of times when I’m talking to oftentimes in HR department, but, but even you know, leaders in the company where they just say, Well, you know, it’s been three or four months. And, you know, I saw Angela in the break room, and she was laughing with another coworker, so I think we’re good. You know, I think I think she’s sort of doing better and she’s beyond this, you know, her sadness. Basically, there’s a lot of mythology around let’s just not acknowledge it once the person comes back to work, and maybe it will just get better and go away.
Angela
How can we create more supportive workplace environments that allow us to acknowledge and respect a grieving process?
Margo
I think the most important thing is that for that employees leader to reach out once they hear about the loss and to really just ask, you know, To get some context into the magnitude of the loss, and you know, it certainly applies to pets, but also even just to humans, because oftentimes the place on the family tree doesn’t give you all the information, you know, the, the person may be estranged from the parents. So it’s a different kinds of a grief than if they were close. Or it may be someone like a god parent or a grandparent who’s raised that person, where the loss is, is every bit as painful as losing a parent, but it doesn’t show up the same way, you know, when you look at the family tree, so it’s so important to reach out immediately. And, and find out kind of how your employees dealing with the situation, get some sense of the magnitude of the loss. And also find out if you can share the information or some aspect of the information with the team, because one of the worst things that happens to people is they take some time off for their loss. And they go back to work. And, and their team doesn’t know. So they ask things like, Oh, how was your vacation, and you’re left having to say, Well, I was burying my dog, or my mother or my child, and then you and then you create this really uncomfortable situation through no fault of your own or the other person’s. So I think it’s really important to share that information. And then finally, once the person is back at work, it’s about checking in frequently. And my favorite question, which someone shared with me when I was doing interviews for the book that I wrote, is, what does support look like for you? Because it’s so different for all of us, right? For some people, they want other people to bring up their loss at work. And for others, work is the place where they get away from it. Right, and they may not need in that case, as much support because they are deliberately for them choosing to really focus on what they’re doing. And they just want it to be as close to business like usual as possible. For others. That’s, that’s not an option for them. And so they may need a bit more time or as some adjustment in their workload or some flexibility in their hours. And the only way to know that is to have that conversation, and then keep having it because it will change over time.
Angela
I think we both also come from the same era where we grew up with new sensitivity training and sexual harassment policies and whatnot in the workplace. What would you say to somebody who said this is just something else we have to learn and be all sensitive about?
Margo
That you don’t have a choice, that it’s one of those things where there’s no ignoring this, and it will, it will happen to all of us, including the person who’s saying, I don’t really want to deal with this. And, and the strengthen of the team and the organization. And the very fabric of the culture is based on compassion in the best organizations. And that means leaning into whatever is happening for your employees mean, it doesn’t have to be death, right? It can be divorce, it can be not getting a promotion, it can be a layoff, where 20% of your colleagues are gone, right? There’s so much grief and loss and workplace and not acknowledging it is a terrible strategy.
Angela Schneider
What resources or training can workplaces offer to help employees and managers better understand and cope with grief?
Margo
I think the most important thing is some coaching around how to how to talk to reach out to work with an employee who’s grieving. And then conversations with the team on both on what that support looks like. But also making sure that they’re not starting to feel like they’re some favoritism, or that the workload is getting too heavy, because someone needs some additional space and time because they’re grieving. So much of this is just about conversations, and being open about what’s happening. So giving space to people to come and say like, this is hard, this isn’t working, I’m feeling resentful, etc. But and so again, it’s, I mean, I guess it’s about training, but a lot of it is just about communication and being willing to be a bit uncomfortable or a lot uncomfortable, and having these conversations.
Angela
And maybe just picking up some slack where that grieving employee might not be able to complete her duties.
Margo
Exactly, exactly. And even in the cases where the loss may not make sense to you, right? I mean, where like I have a friend who lost a bird And the bird was 30. So that bird had gone with her from the time that she was a teenager all the way into her 40s and had been with her through challenges around having children, you know, marital issues, just all kinds of things, right? But when you first hear that she’s, you know, her bird died, you the tendency might be to say, well, okay, like, that’s just a bird, right? And so again, it’s just, it’s, it’s being willing to say like, I may not fully understand this, I’ve never had a pet bird. But it’s clearly hard for you. And so therefore, I’m going to show up and be supportive.
Angela
We have been going through some significant societal change, since the COVID pandemic. We are no longer demanded to be at our desk if we have the sniffles. It’s rather unhealthy for the entire workplace, I think if you show up? How is it changing? Especially in the understanding that we all endured universal grief and personal grief in losing someone, possibly to COVID? Are you seeing changes around grief, because of or since the pandemic?
Margo
Yes, and I think some of it is, is positive and helpful. And some of it only makes some of the challenges more challenging. So for example, when you work from home, you can turn your camera off, if you’re having a moment, you can take a break and go for a walk or sit on the couch and have a good cry if something is upsetting to you. And you have a lot more flexibility and freedom to be in that moment if you’re having one than you ever would in the office. So I think there’s a lot of there’s some real positives, to that to having the space, an opportunity to grieve in the way that you can’t, if you’re working in a cubicle, or an office where you know, you may not have your own space. To do that. What I think it’s made more challenging, is that when you’re looking, when you’re having a team meeting, for example, and all you have on your screen are little boxes, little squares with people’s faces in them, if you’re having a hard time, I may not notice and not because I don’t care, but because I’m looking at 30 faces, and everybody’s following along. And it seems like everything’s good. So it more falls on the employee, I think to reach out to their boss and say I’m having a hard time right now. And hopefully the boss is checking in more, but that just doesn’t always happen. So I think it’s also led to more isolation and more struggle with loss, because you’re not seeing people. And therefore people are not reminded in the way they would be if you walk down the hallway and your eyes are red, or they can see you’re crying, or you just look like you’re having a hard day. Someone will you know, might well say to you, are you okay? You know, do you want to talk? Would you like to go for a walk? That’s not happening in the same way on Zoom.
Angela
It can be so difficult as the person in grief to say, I need help. Or I’m not feeling it right now. How can we encourage employees who are in grief to speak up to say I need help? Or is that just something we need to allow them the space to figure out on their own?
Margo
So I think we can encourage it again by telling them you know, I’m here, you know, come talk to me, I’m available. When that doesn’t happen, as unfortunately, a lot of times it doesn’t I think what can help a lot is for that employee to choose what I would call a point person, whether that’s a friend or someone in HR, or just a colleague, another colleague in the Department, who might be able to help advocate or explain what’s happening for that person. And that can be someone who, who goes to another coworker who’s being a little too invasive, or is just, you know, asking too many questions that the person doesn’t want to answer and kind of redirecting them so that the employee doesn’t have to do anything. They can also be the person who goes to HR or the boss and says, Look, you know, Angela’s having a really hard time right now. And I think she needs some additional support. And it’s hard for her to ask. So I think it would be helpful if you know if you reached out or if she had an afternoon off or whatever it is, so that it doesn’t fall completely on the grieving employee to have to always be the one to self advocate.
Angela
Can you share any success stories or case studies of organizations you’ve worked with, and have implemented grief supportive practices?
Margo
Well, I think one of the shining stars is Delta Airlines. They there is a man who’s who I interviewed for the book named Tim Boyle, who lost his son, Jason, very unexpectedly. And he was at the time, he was a mechanic for Delta Airlines. And he said, You know, I took two weeks off, and then I just couldn’t be home anymore. So I went back to work. And he said, You know, I would see people, you know, walking towards me, and he said, I could read it in their body. It’s like, oh, God, I don’t know what to say, you know, and he said that he would, they would make what he called the face, basically, right. And there was no one to talk to about it. Until one day, someone introduced him to another mechanic who had just lost his son. And he said, the two of us stood there between the airplane hangars, and cried and hugged. And he said, out of the corner of my eye, I could see people just making a wide angle around us, like, I don’t know what’s going on over there. But I don’t want any part of that. And so what Tim realized was how much support there was from talking to another parent who’d lost a child. So he started something called Wrenched Hearts, which initially was just in his, you know, own operation, but has now grown to being Delta wide. So they have a they have a support group. For anyone who works for Delta who is a grieving parent. They have support groups for people who have lost babies through miscarriage or stillbirth. They, I believe, they have a group for survivors of suicide loss, employees who are going through cancer treatment, caregivers. And it’s this really important form of support where people can connect with other people in the company that have suffered a similar kind of loss or setback and talk to them. And that where in the company supports those groups and people getting together in order to do that.
Angela
Wow, that’s incredible. Does it start small, as it did at Delta, and then just grow? And what does a more compassionate … how does a more compassionate workplace filter outside those four walls to help us become a more compassionate world?
Margo
There’s a big question for you. So I think that it’s one of these things where it’s never, at least for me, it’s still hard to sit with someone who was devastated. But it has gotten easier. And one of the things that’s really helped is just reminding myself over and over, you cannot fix this, you cannot make this better. But what you can do is make sure this person is not alone, and that their sadness is seen and acknowledged. And I think that to answer the first part of your question, I think the way the change comes is that it comes from people who’ve experienced a devastating loss, because you can’t know what you don’t know. And so it’s … I mean, you can get it intellectually, right? If you hear that someone has lost a loved one, it’s like, oh, yeah, that must be really hard. But until it happens to you, I don’t know that you can fully understand it. I mean, I think there’s a few rare folks who can do it, but most of us have to go through it ourselves. And so it’s that experience, then that leads us to be more compassionate, more kind. And also, you know, not in everyone’s case, but in many cases, allows us to then sit with someone else’s grief. And the more we do it, you know, we do get a bit more comfortable doing it. And we also understand the importance of doing it, even if we feel like we don’t do it very well. We know that it matters, and it makes a difference. And I really think that’s, that’s how it spreads is just like that. It reminds me a lot of the graphic at the beginning of Ted lasso, where he’s, you know, he’s sitting … it’s in that when they run the credits he’s sitting in in a chair, and then all the chairs around him start to change color. And I think the message is that here you have this one human coaching this, this football team in England, and his kindness and the way in his compassion just kind of spreads person by person, until all of a sudden that whole section is that same color. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that in In how compassion spreads.
Angela
Are there any challenges workplaces encounter when trying to implement grief-related policies?
Margo
I think one of the big ones is that we like formulas in this country. So that’s where you get the, you know, it’s four days, if the loss is this, it’s two days if the loss is that, it’s one day if the loss is a pet. And I think one of the hardest things to change is empowering the manager to make a decision based on the context and the circumstances of the loss. Because we don’t allow enough time off for people. And we tend to just, you know, kind of plug the person into the family tree and say, Okay, I get it, it was her mom, it was her sister, etc. And that’s not always a good way to do it. In the book, there’s a sample bereavement policy that came from a nonprofit in England, and when one of the things I love about it is that they look to the employee who’s grieving to calibrate the loss for them. So that that way there can, you know, it doesn’t have to be in a certain place on the family tree in order to merit time off.
Angela
What are essential elements of an effective great support policy for workplaces?
Margo
I think a big one is allowing the manager who’s directly supervising that person to have some freedom in in deciding the time off. And I say that knowing that there are jobs where it’s much more difficult to take time away, in a smaller company, it’s much more difficult than a bigger company. So I understand that there’s constraints. But within that, you know, what, what freedom can be given to the manager to allow some time off. And then also to have some flexibility to say that if the employee wants to go to an eight-week grief support group for an hour, you know, every Friday, to have the ability to say that’s okay, you can, you can go to that, or you can come in a little bit later, so that you can take your surviving children, for example, to school, now that they’re, you know, your partner has passed away, etc. So, it’s, I think a lot of it is about flexibility. But it’s also about trust, that, you know, if I give you the flexibility, I trust that you will be as productive as you are able to be. And I think people, people will not betray that trust as a general rule. But it’s a really hard thing to break through. Sometimes when people are used to kind of metrics and measuring performance based on you are at your desk from eight to five. And now if you want to work some more flexible hours, are you really productive? Well, I think there’s ways to measure that. And some flexibility to be allowed. But it’s a, it’s a hard transition. I mean, we’ve partly gone through it, I think with COVID, because that was that’s the big battle that’s raging now about companies trying to get employees to come back to work, right, I want you in the office, I want you here, we’re more productive when we’re all together. And there’s some there’s some argument for that. But it’s a tricky road to navigate. Now that we’ve been working from home.
Angela
I did. I did a year and a half marketing job for a tech company here. And they very much expected 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. And I’m like, but I’m a creative, it can’t just conjure this stuff up at one o’clock, and make sure it’s done by four or whatever. It has to come to me. And they never really got that.
Margo
I think it’s a big challenge. I do. And for some folks, it’s you know, again, it’s about working certain hours laying eyes on you when the truth is, is you know that they’re you know, people playing solitaire on their computer just because you know, and the fact that they’re in the office doesn’t necessarily mean they’re any more productive, they might be more productive at home.
Angela
Right, scrolling Facebook over and over and over again. Meanwhile, I go home, I get in the shower, and all of a sudden something comes to me and I’m like, ah.
Margo
Exactly, exactly, or you go for a walk.
Angela
You’ve mentioned it a few times. Tell us about your book.
Margo
So last September, I published a book called leading through loss, which is a basically a guide or a roadmap for leaders on how to navigate loss at work. So it covers everything from managing an employee who’s had a loss losing an employee and how to, you know, to help support the team who’s grappling with that grief. And also remember and honor the person you’ve lost, how to deal with grief as a leader, when you’re both grieving and also trying to continue to lead the team. And then finally, how to navigate grief during this, this hybrid work from home environment, which was we’ve touched on earlier presents its own form of challenges.
Angela
What is one last piece of advice you can leave our listeners with, with respect to losing their pets and grieving and their workplace?
Margo
I think the most important thing is just to be kind. But no matter how much the little voice in your head is saying, you know, it’s a fill in the blank, right? A pet rat, a pet bird, a pet horse, a pet, you know, a pet anything, that it’s just so important to be kind to someone when they’re grieving and not try to calibrate the loss for yourself. And just allow them the space to be sad and to be as supportive as you can, because that’s really what makes all the difference. I don’t actually need you to understand my loss fully. But I need you to acknowledge that it’s devastating for me. And I think that’s one of the most important things we can do for each other.
Angela
Beautiful, Margo, thank you so much. This was wonderful.
Margo
Oh, thank you so much for having me on, Angela. I really appreciate it.
Angela
There are two things Margo said that I think really bring home the practice of supporting colleagues in the workplace.
The first is asking “what does support look like for you” to understand better a person in grief’s needs, rather than stumbling through saying the “right thing.”
And second, that our coworkers don’t need to fully understand the loss, especially when it comes to pets, but to acknowledge that it’s devastating for the person in grief.
Grief is such a powerful and complex experience and it affects every individual differently. Our pets are family, our best friends, who offer companionship, love and unwavering loyalty. The grief we experience after losing a pet is profound and requires respect, consideration and support from our community, which can include friends, family and even coworkers.
Too often, the people in our community offer generic condolences, like “you’ll feel better soon” or “he’s in a better place now,” especially if the companion animal was old or required significant health care procedures. Or they try to impose their own coping strategies on the person in grief.
They may be well-intentioned and perceive themselves as compassionate, but those methods aren’t always helpful.
If we ask “what does support look like for you?,” we shift the focus from a one-size fits all approach to a personalized and empathetic one. By asking this question, we open the door for the person in grief to express not only their needs and desires but also their boundaries.
And oh boy, we are going to have an episode on boundaries in October — why we need them and how to set and maintain them — but first …
Next week, I’m speaking with Melissa Lunardini and Lianna Titcombe from HelpTexts, a subscription program that delivers via text message grief, caregiver and mental health support.
Until then
