Bereavement at Work: Setting the Standard with Justin Clifford

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach joined by Tullio Siragusa. And today's conversation focus on a topic that affects us all, but is rarely talked about in the workplace, and that's bereavement. And consider this, one in nine employees in the United States experiences the death of a loved one each year, and yet 51% of those employees leave their job within 12 months after the loss, according to the Harvard Business Review. And on our podcast, this topic alone is enough to get us interested, but for those curious, the financial impact is just as significant with grief-related costs, losses costing US businesses over $75 billion annually, according to the Grief Recovery Institute. And our guest today is someone who is changing the way we think about grief at work. Tullio, introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:13)
Absolutely. We're excited to welcome to the podcast Justin Clifford, who is the CEO of Bereave, which is a platform dedicated to helping businesses support employees through the most difficult times in their lives. Justin's journey is one of transformation, moving from a career in education to becoming a sales leader and now a first-time CEO. Congratulations. His mission is very clear.
Bring compassion, clarity and support to workplaces where grief is often ignored. Justin, it's really an honor to have you here with us.

**Justin Clifford** (1:53)
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Really honored to step in with you guys for a few minutes today.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:00)
Yeah, Justin. I think companies somewhat are familiar with having a bereavement policy on paper, but a few have a real system supporting grieving employees. Can you share how bereave is helping companies go beyond the basics to support their teams?

**Justin Clifford** (2:19)
Yeah, I appreciate that. I think having a structure, a playbook, some might call it a roadmap, write a framework, whatever you want to call, whatever your name is for your processes.
This topic is often overlooked when you think about business processes, and what ends up happening, the result of not having that, is what we refer to as random acts of bereavement support. You've got an HR teammate that's doing something, you've got a manager that might be doing something, maybe just ushering somebody, a teammate that needs a hand over to HR. Somebody sends flowers, somebody sends you to the EAP, you're back in three to five days, and you're back in full production, is the concept. In reality, we have developed and happy to share with anybody a framework for this, but we've developed a playbook for HR leaders and for managers to follow, as well as playbooks for families of employees to be able to follow in the moments of loss. So really giving people something to hold on to at the moment of impact and really helping guide the way, whether it's somebody that is offering support to that employee who has suffered a loss, or it's that employee themselves and their family.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:37)
I like that concept you mentioned, like random acts of bereavement. This is really when we're talking about bliss for us, build love into scalable systems, it's really moving those random acts into more of a systemized approach so that you're doing this continually, and it's not just a one-off and it's not just that one person who lights up the room always or has that empathy with them, it becomes more of a system and everyone sort of prompt it and understands this is the best way, a best practice and caring for something.
It's interesting how you bring that up because that's what we talk about all the time is building systems of compassion really.

**Justin Clifford** (4:18)
Yeah. In reality, it's not that difficult. I probably shouldn't say that about something we're selling, but in general, it takes some thoughtfulness, it takes listening to trends, it takes listening to people's stories.
All hard things to do, especially when you're talking about stories about loss and grief and trauma sometimes. But in reality, what we have been able to do is actually take those stories and build them into our platform so that we can work to eradicate the really bad stories we hear from the world, but also bring in and build around some of the beautiful stories that we hear, that have meant a lot to employees in the workplace.

**Tullio Siragusa** (5:02)
You know, Justin, so this is a very personal topic. You know, grief is very personal, but it can have significant impact on our professional lives. Personally speaking, both times I lost my parents, I was just starting a startup and I gave up on it. So it had a dramatic impact personally. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see companies make when it comes to handling bereavement?