Why Your Return-to-Work Plan Is Making Your Mental Health Investment Irrelevant

Photo by Haewon Oh on Unsplash

You Have a Bereavement Policy.

But You Don’t Have a Return-to-work Plan.  

Why return-to-work is the leadership test most organizations fail —

and what it's costing them

I want to tell you about a manager I met a few weeks ago and his former employee, whom I was able to talk to a few days later. This is their story, and I’m sure it’s the story of many others.  

The Moment HR Doesn't Think About

Daniel has been a manager for 7 years. He was good at his job and emotionally intelligent. The ratings on the employee engagement surveys had increased over the last few years. 

He’s known as a thoughtful leader. 

When Jesse’s husband died, Daniel was grieving her loss. He did his best to support Jesse through her leave. He’s attended the service, sent a card, and encouraged others to do the same. 

He had a good, trusting relationship with her.  

He even called her to check in while she was out. 

The day Jesse returned to work, her realized he had absolutely no idea what to do next.

He panicked and went with what felt safe. A warm smile and said, "So glad you're back." 

Then he said, “Let me know if you need anything,” and left for a meeting.  

Jesse noticed his discomfort. It was the same discomfort felt from others who didn’t know what to say or do. 

She wasn’t surprised. But she did feel a bit hurt by his reaction. She walked over to her desk, hoping that her teammates would just leave her alone for today. She was exhausted already. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she was trying hard to manage her own feelings so they wouldn't be overwhelming to everyone else.  

For the rest of the week, it was clear to Jesse that Daniel was avoiding her. Her presence seemed to make him uncomfortable. It felt like it made the team uncomfortable as well.  This is where her isolation began. 

THIS is the moment HR doesn't think about. 

No policy covers that moment. And almost no manager is prepared for it. And it's costing companies millions of dollars every year.  

It cost this company Jesse and Daniel.  They both left their positions within 2 years.

(Because of their positions, it cost the company roughly $450K in recruitment and lost productivity)

_________________________________________________________________________

What Jesse Was Actually Carrying

Before we talk about what this company got wrong, it’s important to understand what is happening inside the griever's head.

The biggest and most common mistake Daniel made was when Jesse came back. Daniel sort of expected her to "be back." She was, but not fully. What neither of them realized at the time was that Jesse was doing something much harder than returning to work. She was attempting to hold two realities at once. 

1. The professional one, where she has a role and responsibilities, and colleagues who don't know what to say. 

2. The personal one, where she was managing many other pressures she was not fully aware of, like changing over names on bank accounts, trying to understand how grief was and would affect her kids, how she could or could not help them, and was her neighbor dropping off a meal tonight or tomorrow night? All while trying to appear functional.

   
   

Her cognitive load was already maxed out before she opened her laptop. By offering “anything,” Daniel just added to her cognitive load without meaning to. 

_________________________________________________________________________

Psychological Safety Illusion

Over the next few weeks, Daniel made a few super common but costly manager mistakes.  

Two months later, he was getting frustrated with her performance. She had always been a great employee, but now she was underperforming. He understood that her husband had just died, but he just thought she’d be “better by now.”  

He started to see performance issues, not knowing that they were normal signs of grief at work and that he could help Jesse with them. 

We’ve all heard that in order to do their best work, an employee has to feel psychologically safe.  

Daniel and Jesse felt they had that safety with each other before Jesse’s husband died. They both assumed that the relationship would resume when she returned, but what they didn’t account for was the effect of grief at work. 

Looking ok equalling being ok is one of the most costly assumptions when grief is in the workplace .

Psychological safety is not a fixed feature of any relationship. It is a calculation that every employee makes, consciously or not,  based on how their manager, colleague, or company treats them on a regular basis.  

After the death of a significant person, an employee’s world does not feel secure. They are recalculating their lives, and work is a place where the calculation gets reset.

Jesse was not asking herself if Daniel was a good manager before, but she was figuring out that he was not a safe manager now, based on his kind but clear avoidance of her.   

Daniel didn’t realize he was being evaluated by Jesse AND by his team and those on other cross-functional teams.

HR didn’t know the evaluation was happening either. And that the result of that evaluation shaped the team’s (and Jesse's) engagement, their loyalty, and their productivity.  

_________________________________________________________________________

Return to Work Is a Leadership Test — and Most Managers Don't Even Know They're Being Tested

What happened in Jesse's first weeks was not a policy failure. The policy worked. The leave was approved, the documentation was correct, and the return date was confirmed.

What happened was a leadership failure. A quiet one.

And it’s sneaky because it doesn’t show up in exit interviews and only sometimes engagement surveys, but it doesn’t get tracked to the employee's return to work. 

But in the fourth month, Danie’s engagement survey numbers showed a small dip; at least they thought it was a dip.  

Daniel failed Jesse and the team. He failed because no one had prepared him for this moment. 

• No one told him what to say or not to say. 

• No one gave him language for his initial or subsequent 1:1s with her.

• No one told him how to work with the team that also wanted to support Jesse but didn’t know how.

• No one told him how grief affects the brain

• No one told him about the stages of grief at work.

• No one told him how to support Jesse and the team, and how to protect performance.  

• No one told him how to manage his grief for her.

• No one told him that business as usual would be considered abandonment by someone in her position.

This is the leadership test most organizations fail every time someone returns after a loss (or any kind of leave).  

The cost is not abstract.

Employees and teams that work with a grieving employee feel unsupported and disengage.

They underperform. Then some of them leave. 

It costs roughly $225.8 billion in lost productivity, turnover, and absenteeism. 

And there’s the kicker: 

• 75% of all employees will experience significant loss while on the job.  

• 77% of employees would work longer and harder for a company that showed it cared. 

Meaning that when an employee returns to work after a loss, a team's productivity could actually go up!!! 

_________________________________________________________________________

Your Plan Was Never Designed for This Moment

Here is the part that most HR leaders don't want to hear.

Your return-to-work plan is a policy, not a plan. 

There was nothing to prepare Daniel for the moment Jesse walked back through the door or the months after.  

As a partial result, Daniel’s engagement numbers continued to decline. He would read the surveys, share them with his team, implement a change, and talk about what was implemented, just as engagement specialists suggest.  

But his numbers kept decreasing.  

HR didn’t have a plan and everybody lost.  

Meanwhile, your organization may be allocating a significant portion of its budget to mental health benefits, EAP programs, and other well-being initiatives. 

And part of the spending is going to waste because you have unprepared managers who hold the most human moment in that employee's and manager’s professional life, and they mess it up. 

This makes some of your investment in wellbeing completely useless,  

Jesse stayed for “one year, one month and 7 days” (her words). She started looking for a new position 9 months after she returned to work.  

She recalled putting "lack of support" on her exit interview. 

Daniel left almost two years later. Something shifted on his team, he said, and he couldn’t get the team back. Until we had a conversation, he didn't understand what happened.  

Nobody had a framework for him. Nobody had prepared Daniel. And HR never knew the test had happened, let alone that it had failed.

This is happening in your organization. Not because your people don't care but because nobody has built the leader’s capability to handle it.

It doesn’t have to happen this way. There is a solution.  

The Return-to-Work Support Framework exists to close that gap for HR leaders who are ready to move from policy to leadership infrastructure.

Download the Return-to-Work Support Framework and see where your current plan has gaps."