By Tihitina Girma

We spend a significant portion of our lives at work. We do not leave our humanity behind when we step through the office doors and grief is proof of that. The loss of a loved one is a profound, deeply human experience that walks with us into every space, every meeting and every quiet moment at our desks, shaping how we show up every single day.

This simple truth sparked a journey of inquiry. How do we, as an organization dedicated to human development, manage the emotional realities of our own people? What happens when a colleague is carrying a loss no one else can see? This question led me to explore the support systems within UNDP and the broader UN system, revealing a foundation of care and places where we can do better.

When grief enters an employee's life, its effects ripple into the workplace. Loss is a monumental task that quietly erodes focus, engagement and performance. Bereavement-sector surveys[1] point in the same direction: most grieving employees report difficulty concentrating and reduced productivity, with the effects lasting well over a year. Grief is heavy and people carry it far longer than we tend to assume. 

This is not just an individual challenge, it is an organizational one. The UN System Workplace Mental Health and Well-being Strategy defines presenteeism as a state in which staff are physically present but unable to perform at full capacity.[2] A 2023 Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) review revealed nearly one in five days of all certified sick leave across the UN system was attributed to a mental health condition, up from roughly one in six in 2017.[3] The JIU found that sick leave and disability linked to mental health are rising and that the associated costs are high and growing. People are struggling and the bill for ignoring it lands on the whole system.

This burden does not fall evenly. In households, when loss strikes a family, women tend to absorb both the grief and the care. They mourn and at the same time, they look after everyone else who is grieving.

The Africa Care Economy Index, published by the UNDP Regional Service Centre for Africa in partnership with FEMNET[4], describes the continent as having the most unshared care system. Seventy percent of all care within the family is provided by women. The report traces how unpaid female labour has become the default response to every major human crisis, from caring for the ill and the elderly to tending to the emotional outcomes of trauma.

In the workplace, due to the carried cost of women acting as shock absorbers, they experience acute time poverty, draining their capacity to recover and making them far more vulnerable to burnout and prolonged presenteeism than their male counterparts. Supporting grieving employees, therefore, is not just a well-being issue, it is also a gender equality and women's economic empowerment issue.

None of this is abstract. Behind every figure is a colleague who is quietly struggling and a cost that lands on the whole organization when we look away. The question is what we do about it.

We are not starting from nothing. The UN and UNDP have established a solid base of counselling services, well-being programmes and flexible working. However, recent JIU reports also highlight four critical gaps that prevent these resources from being fully effective. The first is that people often do not know what support exists. The second is timing, as organizational support often focuses on the immediate aftermath of a loss, while the need for sustained care continues for months or even years. The third is that managers, who are the first people a grieving colleague turns to, are rarely trained for the role. They want to help and do not know how. And fourth is that patchy data makes it hard to see what is working or to make the case for investing more in what does.

Closing those gaps is less about new policy than about a change in how we work and that change starts from something more human than any framework can capture. Albert Camus, in his essay Return to Tipasa, wrote: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”  That inner resilience is real, but people need help to reach it. What an organization can do is clear the path and across the UN system there are already concrete examples of how.

Four of them stand out.

• Flexible bereavement leave: UNDP pairs leave with flexible working arrangements. This allows staff to use telecommuting, staggered hours, or compressed schedules to manage their well-being without exhausting their leave.
• Gradual return-to-work models: The UN’s Mental Health Strategy calls for effective return-to-work programmes. UNDP is already implementing this by offering staff the option to work part-time temporarily after an extended absence and by developing specific guidelines to help managers facilitate smooth reintegration.
• Peer support networks:  The UN is investing in community-based peer support networks, ranging from trained municipal workers in Georgia to student responders in Bangladesh. In Georgia, these local peer workers serve as a vital "first port of call" to recognize early signs of distress and provide immediate, basic psychosocial care. Shared experience builds a safety net that feels immediate and real. 
• Manager training: Empathetic leadership is now a core pillar of the UN’s system-wide strategy, designed to help managers create psychological safety and support staff through difficult life events.

Put those four things in place and the returns compound. The most immediate is to staff themselves, since proactive support improves individual resilience and reduces the costs associated with absenteeism and long-term disability. It also shows up in delivery: investing in well-being yields a significant return, as UNDP's own data reveal that offices with stronger people-management scores delivered better on their programmes. Furthermore, supporting employees during a crisis builds profound institutional trust and that trust tends to outlast the moment it was earned in. UNDP’s People for 2030 strategy identifies psychological safety as a primary driver of the sustainable high-performance culture needed to achieve our development goals.

Recommendations for cultivating a grief responsive workplace

UNDP has made commendable strides in advancing staff well-being through strategic frameworks such as People for 2030 and tools like UNDPListens. To build on that and give people consistent support through loss, the following policy recommendations are proposed based on the gaps identified by JIU. 

1. Implement flexible compassionate leave: Grief does not adhere to a strict calendar. Implementing a flexible compassionate leave policy that extends beyond standard limits provides personnel with the essential time and space to heal, honouring their individual journeys with dignity and understanding.
2. Establish structured grief support: Navigating profound loss can make the professional path forward feel overwhelming. Establishing a structured "grief pathway" integrating immediate peer support, professional counselling, and phased return-to-work models creates a compassionate framework that gently guides staff back to their shared purpose.
3. Mandate empathy training for managers: Equip managers to recognize the signs of grief in their teams and respond with confidence rather than avoidance. Training in "Leading with Empathy" gives them practical tools to hold a difficult conversation, adjust workloads sensitively and connect staff to support, translating psychological safety from a stated value into daily practice.
4. Launch "visible care" active campaigns: Bridge the gap between available resources and staff awareness with highly visible, multilingual campaigns. Awareness is the bridge between policy and lived experience. By actively projecting our care systems, we dismantle stigma and transform hidden safety nets into active communal lifelines.
5. Utilize data-driven well-being metrics: Utilizing platforms like UNDPListens to measure psychological safety allows us to hear the unspoken stories of our workforce, ensuring our global ideals of dignity and justice are deeply rooted in how we care for one another daily.

As we work to build a better world for others, let us commit to building a workplace that honours our own. In doing so, we remember that how we respond to one another in our deepest moments of trial is what truly defines us. For anyone who has walked the difficult path of losing a loved one, the truest support we can offer is time, patience and the certainty that they do not carry it alone.

[1] https://research.empathy.com/hubfs/Grief-Tax-2025.pdf

[2] The UN System Mental Health and Well-being Strategy for 2024 and beyond

[3] Review of mental health and well-being policies and practices in United Nations system organizations (JIU/REP/2023/4)

[4] The Africa Care Economy Index - UNDP Publication