The future of work has a heartbeat

The future of work has a heartbeat

Jane Roques-Shaw on WorkPossible

‘The Future of Work Has a Heartbeat’ – the title of this report couldn’t have sung to me more! At the heart of my work, and my life, is a commitment to improving the human experience, both in the workplace and through life’s most significant moments. Fauna’s WorkPossible research beautifully highlights precisely why the future of work should be more human and how organisations need to show up when life gets real.  

Why this report resonated

I read the report with my own lived experience in the back of my mind. Professionally, I’ve spent 20+ years working in global organisations across employee experience, culture change, internal comms and engagement – working with businesses to shape the employee experience, particularly the ‘moments that matter’, including the significant life moments that inevitably impact work. Then one of those ‘life moments’ happened to me! 

My Own Significant Life Moment

In January 2023, my husband, Seb, died suddenly of a heart attack at just 46. He was seemingly healthy but never made it home that day. My world was turned upside down. 

At the time, I was leading a team of nine at a global advertising agency. One of the first things I had to do was call a colleague to let them know I wouldn’t be in work that day. I have absolutely no recollection of the details of that conversation – mostly just silence on the other end of the phone and my own tears. They simply didn’t know what to say. And sadly, this is not unusual. Workplaces are often the frontline of grief support and colleagues simply aren’t prepared for calls like that. As the WorkPossible report states, “there are no playbooks for humans. No cut and paste. No standalone policy that equips us for every scenario or every conversation”. 

Answering the phone to a colleague telling you their husband is dead is not something you learn to deal with in your induction.

The Human and Organisational Response

According to the WorkPossible research, 46% of people have experienced the death of a close family member or friend. This is not an insignificant amount. So why are we not more prepared for the possibility of this life event impacting someone we know at work? 

In my case, the HR team were kind and caring and did the basics:

• Provided the bereavement leave policy
• Gave me the phone number for the Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) which, incidentally, offered no bereavement support
• Told me take “all the time I needed” which felt ambiguous and anxiety-inducing (how was I supposed to know how much time was acceptable? And would I be paid for this time off?)

We couldn’t hold the funeral until four weeks after Seb died. Those weeks (from what I can remember) were a blur of visits from close family and friends, conversations with the funeral director, the celebrant, suppliers involved in the wake and endless phone calls and emails dealing with the ‘sadmin’ (which was relentless and went on for over a year). I was fortunate that my boss was particularly compassionate as she had lost a parent and understood more deeply what I was going through. This made all the difference.

But your experience shouldn’t rely on luck or whether your manager has lived through something similar. Organisations should have the right practical support, signposting, and simple human check-ins in place.

There were positives:

• A reduced workload, thanks to the support of my immediate team
• Flexibility in how and when I returned to work
• Emotional support from my manager (even though she lived in another country) and my colleagues. All of this was based on their personal experiences, not company guidance. 

There were also challenges:

• Being removed from a key project without a conversation, which created an irrational (and very real) fear about job security
• Three different bosses within the first year which is disorienting at the best of times, let alone in fresh grief.

To give this some context – grief is not just an emotion, it’s a full body and full brain experience. It affects how we think, how we sleep, how we feel physically, how we regulate emotion, and how we make sense of the world. This doesn’t all just stop after the funeral. The most acute phase can often last months; this can then hit an adaptive phase which can stretch for years. This is why sustained communication and an understanding that grief ebbs and flows are so essential.

What We Learned From Our Internal Employee Research

Following my own personal experience, and the unfortunate experience of someone on my team, with the support of the business we ran internal employee journey mapping sessions across the globe to understand how various life moments affected people at work – from becoming a parent or carer to dealing with a long-term illness or bereavement.  

On the subject of bereavement, our findings mirrored the WorkPossible Report, including:

• Senior employees reported better experiences due to autonomy and access to additional benefits
• Positive experiences often hinged on whether the manager had lived through something similar, offering more empathy, understanding and flexibility.
• Cultural differences were significant, for example, there was more openness around death and dying in India
• Workload pressures often prevented managers from being more human due to pressure on performance and managing team dynamics
• Many managers and colleagues avoided sensitive conversations entirely due to the fear of “getting it wrong” and feeling they had no support with these conversations
• There was little access to specialist support like bereavement counselling or help with administrative tasks
• Most striking was the lack of consistency of experience across the business  

There is so much opportunity for organisations to do better. 

It starts with truly listening to employees, understanding what’s working well and what isn’t, then making  human-centred changes that reflect the reality of life. 

A Call to Bravery

I recently attended the EndWell Conference in Los Angeles, themed around Radical Bravery.  Radical bravery is about showing up, even when it’s hard. It’s about the everyday courage it takes to face grief, illness, caregiving, and dying with open eyes and open hearts and the brave, collective action it takes to build a more compassionate world. 

Rebecca Feinglos (founder of Grieve Leave), shared something that stayed with me:

“If you’re a CEO, part of your job is to model humanity in our toughest moments. You need to build bereavement policies that actually reflect how long grief lasts. Train managers to listen instead of trying to fix something that really can’t be fixed.

If you’re a manager maybe those conversations that you’re avoiding are some of the most important ones for you to have. Invite the grieving employee into conversations about their workplace. Make those decisions together. Don’t make assumptions. 

If you’re a colleague of a grieving employee, keep showing up after the sympathy cards. Your presence matters. 

And if you are the grieving employee coming back to work, please hear me. You do not have to hide your grief to make everyone else at your workplace feel more comfortable. It perpetuates an impossible standard. Your grief belongs at work too because it has to. It has nowhere else to go. 

When we create workplace that are more sustainable for grieving people we are actually create better workplaces for everybody”. 

I couldn’t agree more. 

Designing Workplaces With a Heartbeat

As the WorkPossible report says, ‘we all know life is messy and defined by twists and turns beyond our control…too many organisations are still structured around the one-size-fits-all experience design’. 

It’s time to design workplaces with intention. Workplaces that recognise the fullness of being human.

The future of work really does have a heartbeat. We just need to listen, and act. 

Jane Roques-Shaw, founder of Life Moments with Jane and Rock Global, is an Experience Designer and Celebrant with the vision to inspire people to live life fully, love deeply and let go peacefully.