Have you ever felt heavy at work—not the tired kind of weight, but something deeper that doesn’t lift after a weekend or a good night’s sleep? Maybe it arrived slowly, like fog settling into your chest before a storm. Or maybe it crept in during the quiet moment after someone from your team packed up their desk and walked out the door.
You might have called it burnout. Or anxiety. Maybe you told yourself to push through, to stay positive, to remember how lucky you are to still have a job. It’s not unusual—I’ve done it, too—but here’s what doesn’t get said often enough: the weight you’re carrying may not be burnout at all. It could be grief.
That’s the insight that’s been echoing across workplaces lately, and it’s changing how leaders think about disengagement, fatigue, and “resistance.” In fact, research with nearly a thousand U.S. workers found that one in three reported grieving the changes they’re experiencing at work, even if they didn’t yet have a word for it. What they shared next is more revealing: when grief goes unnamed, it doesn’t disappear. It mutates—turning into feelings of abandonment, invisibility, and distrust.
This isn’t a call to be sad at work. It’s an invitation to name what’s been lost, because only then can we start to feel our way back toward hope—not despite the loss, but through it.
The Quiet Flood of Workplace Losses
Let’s be honest: if you’ve been at work long enough, it’s almost a certainty you’ve already grieved something there. It might have looked different for each person—maybe it was the collapse of your favorite daily ritual, like those spontaneous coffee chats that somehow vanished after the pivot to hybrid work. Or maybe it was the retirement of a mentor whose quiet wisdom anchored your best ideas for years. Perhaps it was watching someone you admired disappear after an announcement about “efficiency gains” and “strategic realignment.”
Whatever form it took, the loss likely arrived disguised as something else. It masqueraded as fatigue—or worse, laziness—because there was no official terminology in your employee handbook to name it. Grief wasn’t covered under wellness benefits or mental health days, so the only script available was to toughen up and keep going.
But here’s what the data from The Change Lab confirms: in 2026 alone, major employers across tech, retail, and financial services announced hundreds of thousands of job cuts—many explicitly citing AI as the driver. For every role eliminated, several more were restructured, renamed, or merged with others. That’s a lot of familiar ground disappearing beneath people’s feet.
You might think only those who lost jobs would grieve, but that’s not what the research showed. Even for people who kept their positions, something else was being lost—the rhythm of work that felt meaningful, the connections built over time, the sense that your contributions still mattered in the way they used to. In fact, when losses pile up—colleagues, routines, identity markers—the things people still feel grateful for begin to fade too. When grief finally outweighs gratitude, that’s when many people start slipping silently from struggling to falling apart inside.
I’ve heard it described in countless ways: as a sudden coldness during Zoom calls, as skipping the weekly team huddle for two weeks in a row, or even just as a strange emotional flatness when you open your inbox. It doesn’t scream “help me.” It whispers, and we’ve trained ourselves not to listen.
When Grief Has No Language
Here’s what makes this so much harder: most workplaces have no language for grief, and no practice to support it.
I sat down with Dr. Margaret Wheatley, a writer, teacher, and leadership advisor who’s been guiding leaders through complexity since 1973. She’d seen this pattern long before the word “grief” entered the workplace conversation—and she helped me see why it matters so much to name what’s happening.
“Grief isn’t the problem to be solved,” she told me. “When it’s expressed—named, shared, acknowledged—it releases energy and opens people to service and connection. When it’s suppressed, it compounds into something much harder to reach.”
What does that suppressed grief actually look like? People who feel abandoned, she said. Distrusted. Dishonored. Of no importance to the people making decisions about their lives.
And here’s what leaders often misread: what they assume is disengagement or resistance may simply be grief that no one has ever given anyone permission to name. The person who stops volunteering for new projects isn’t becoming cynical; they’re grieving the loss of a role that once gave them pride. The team member who stops joining group lunches isn’t being rude; they’re carrying a silent sorrow no one asked about. Even someone who appears outwardly fine can be quietly unraveling.
I remember one manager telling me how she caught herself nitpicking a project proposal—not because it was bad, but because the person who wrote it reminded her of someone they’d lost months earlier. “I wasn’t mad at the work,” she said. “I was furious because someone I admired was gone, and my brain couldn’t tell the difference between absence and insult.” That’s the power of unnamed grief: it leaks into everything, coloring perceptions and decisions long after the loss itself.
The funny thing is, when grief finally finds a voice—when we create spaces for people to say what they’ve lost—it often stops being destructive and starts becoming generative. People don’t need to be fixed; they need witness.
Grief Expressed Is Energy Released
When I asked Meg this very question—what does expressing grief actually look like?—she didn’t talk about therapy or grief counseling. Instead, she pointed to communities she’d worked with navigating devastating loss: Aboriginal populations in Australia and countless communities across Southern African nations. In the most difficult circumstances, she said, the same pattern kept emerging.
“If they have learned to come together in the expression of grief,” she told me, “that’s a release of energy—and then they move on.”
Not past the grief. Through it.
That distinction matters, and it’s one we often miss in the workplace. Expressing grief isn’t about feeling better and stopping there—it’s about feeling the fullness of what’s been lost so that you can begin to turn toward what’s next. Think of it like this: a grief that stays private becomes stuck energy, heavy and stagnant. But when grief is shared—named, witnessed, acknowledged—it begins to move again.
Meg told me about a leadership retreat she facilitated in Cape Town after one company downsized significantly. Instead of jumping straight to strategy, the HR team asked people to write down what they were losing—specific things like “the Saturday check-ins with Jane” or “the shared office kitchen where people gathered.” Then they read them aloud, one by one. No fixing. No solutions. Just acknowledgment.
“What happened next surprised even them,” she said. “By the end, people weren’t just tearful—they were laughing again. Not forced laughter, either—the kind that comes when you realize someone else gets it, and maybe—just maybe—you’re not alone in carrying this.”
The research backs this up. People who navigate change well aren’t those who suppress grief or pretend everything’s fine—they’re the ones who hold it alongside gratitude. They grieve what’s lost while still holding on to something that still matters: a value, a relationship, a purpose. It’s only when grief crowds out everything else that it becomes overwhelming.
That insight alone changes how I respond when someone says, “I’m just exhausted.” It used to trigger a plan: take a day off, balance your workload, revisit priorities. Now I pause and ask myself first: What’s been lost here? Because if the answer is grief, no amount of scheduling will fix it until it’s named.
Three Small, Human Ways to Start
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “That’s all very poetic, Fatima, but what do I actually do?”*
Here’s the thing: you don’t need a corporate wellness program or a therapist on retainer to begin naming grief at work—though having support is great. What’s often needed is something simpler, slower, and far more human: permission to pause and acknowledge what’s gone.
The research suggests the shift from grief-as-blocker to grief-as-energy rarely happens in one grand moment. It usually starts with a series of small, unglamorous practices—ones that cost nothing but attention and care.
Here are three places to begin, drawn from the people who’ve already done this work and lived to tell the story.
For You: Write Down What You’re Grieving
Take five minutes before your next meeting. Grab a notebook, a sticky note, or even your phone’s notes app—and just write down what you’re grieving. Not everything in your life—just what shows up at work.
Ask yourself: What have I lost—or am afraid of losing—in the changes I’m navigating right now?
Maybe it’s the mentor who left. Maybe it’s the flexibility that allowed you to walk your dog in the middle of the day. Or maybe it’s just the feeling that your role still matters the way it used to.
Writing doesn’t need to be profound. In fact, one leader told me he kept a running list on his bathroom mirror: “The coffee talks we had in the hallway,” “My old calendar system,” “That one teammate who always made me laugh.” Not to fix anything, just to name it. After weeks of doing this, he said something surprising happened: his nervous system started relaxing. Not because the loss was gone, but because it had somewhere to go—down on paper instead of around in circles inside him.
For Your Team: Ask Two Gentle Questions
When the heaviness starts to outweigh hope, that’s your signal. Watch where gratitude dissipates—it usually happens before people disengage entirely.
Start your next team meeting with just these two questions:
- What are we finding hard to let go of right now?
- What might we gain from this loss?
That’s it. Two sentences per person, no fixing or advise-giving. Just witnessing.
One mid-level manager at a tech firm described doing this after her team’s product line was sunset. People braced for discomfort, and maybe they felt it—but what surprised her was how quickly hope flickered back to life. “We didn’t suddenly love the new initiative,” she said, “but by naming what we missed—like our Tuesday strategy sessions and the way our designer told us when something was busted—we remembered who we were to each other, not just what the company needed from us that week.”
For Your Organization: Name What’s Being Lost—Alongside the New Possibilities
When a change is announced, resist the temptation to lead with only the shiny part—the new product line, the market expansion, the improved metrics. People need to know you see what’s disappearing too.
Something as simple as this works: “We know this means losing something that mattered. We want to say that out loud, because it deserves to be acknowledged.”
A communications leader at a financial institution told me they added this line to every major restructuring announcement. Not as an afterthought, but right before the “what’s next” slide. At first, people were skeptical—this wasn’t the tone they’d come to expect from leadership—but something shifted over time. People stopped assuming leaders were indifferent. They started believing they were seeing a full picture.
It costs nothing to name the loss—and the cost of not naming it? That’s paid in hidden attrition, disengagement, and slowly eroding trust.
Final Thought: You’re Not Behind
I’ll be honest: writing this article felt hard. Not because the topic is heavy (though it is), but because I had to remember that grief isn’t a line you cross and leave behind. It’s more like weather—sometimes sunny, sometimes stormy, often both at once.
So if you’re reading this and thinking, “I’m not ready to do any of that yet,” that’s okay. Maybe grief still feels too raw, or too private, or too messy for the workplace.
Here’s what I want you to know: grief isn’t something you finish. It’s something you carry differently over time. And naming it doesn’t mean you’re behind—it means you’re finally giving yourself permission to be where you are.
What if, instead of “I should be over this,” you tried: “This is what’s happening now—and it deserves to be named.”
That tiny shift—permission instead of pressure—might just give you the energy to begin again, not despite what’s been lost, but through it.