the grief within change 🌱
(3 minute read)
Hi! Welcome to Our Best Work Weekly, a newsletter from Healthy Pour where you'll get weekly tips on creating a healthy workplace, becoming a more compassionate leader, and cultivating a regenerative relationship with work.
We all know change is hard, but one of the most challenging (and overlooked) experiences in the change process is grief. As a society and culture, we too often reserve grief for losses like deaths, and maybe we’ll associate grief with other kinds of loss like divorce, moving house, or the end of a relationship.
It’s as though we only recognize grief when it’s big, but grief is far more common than we realize. We might experience tiny bouts of grief throughout the day when we change our habits, or maybe we run into a friend we haven’t spoken to in years, and we feel a bit of grief for those times with them, or perhaps the friendship itself, or grieving who we were at the stage when we were entangled in that friendship. Within habit changes, we might be experiencing grief for the version of ourselves that engaged in other habits—and lived a different life. So it’s not just the loss of someone else, a place, or a thing—it’s the loss of who we once were. Grief is part of growth.
One of the most overlooked areas of grief is in the workplace—particularly during change processes. To resist change is to be human; our brains are wired to cling to proven methods of survival, no matter if they’re maladaptive or unhealthy. This phenomenon can be partially explained by the conservation of resources theory (COR), which suggests that we are more likely to hold onto and utilize the current resources we possess (think: skills, areas of social support, habits, patterns, daily systems, thought processes) rather than adopt new skills—even if we know they’re more efficient, healthier, and could result in a better, longer life. Have you ever tried to change a workplace system only to eventually revert to the more archaic processes because “it works well enough”? (Looking at you, restaurants!)
Grief avoidance absolutely contributes to COR in change processes. Perhaps we’re grieving a version of ourselves that felt in control or powerful. Or we’re grieving when our roles were simpler and without our current stress problems, or a time when our colleagues were more playful because work was more routine and automatic.
In the more nefarious cases, some people might experience grief because they can no longer behave as poorly as they once had. I see this often in the “boys clubs,” burnout syndicates, homogenous workplaces, and industries like hospitality, beverage, and leisure. These spaces are currently confronted with cultural behavior changes that kill off the destructive Wild West-style party vibes that have become part of the professional’s identity. They have to say goodbye to that version of themselves, and that’s scary. A sales professional nearing retirement age might resist workplace cultural changes that are more inclusive because he’s grieving an era when he was young, spry, and innovative but also didn’t experience the challenges that come with being held socially accountable in this way.
All of this is to say that when an organization or institution embarks on change, it’s crucial to hire someone with the skills to manage organizational change systems and the emotional processes that accompany them. Too many organizations are only approaching their change processes from the structural side, neglecting the emotional impact on their workforce's productivity, satisfaction, and well-being. Even worse, I see plenty of large organizations laying people off without any long-term change management plan or process, expecting people to “Figure it out.” Burnout city. Imagine laying off 15% of your workforce to be more profitable, only to hemorrhage because of the resulting burnout.
We must acknowledge the emotional aspects of our relationship with work, our identities, our feelings of social safety, and our grief. That’s the future of work.
See you next Monday!
