How to deal with death at work

The Japanese call it "karoshi," or death by overwork, and treat the growing number of cases of staff literally keeling over with strokes or heart attacks as a government-compensated occupational disease.

In the United Kingdom, where the only statistics on workplace deaths are injury-related such as the chef who slipped over while carrying a kitchen knife the notion that excessive hours or too many stressful business trips can hasten your demise is still a fairly controversial one.

According to Alison Widdup, the head of an ethical call-centre outsourcing firm, staff in some call centres are "harassed and stressed virtually to the point of death." However, her view is unlikely to be shared by the majority of employers.

Although most "deaths in service" occur outside working hours, and are a result of long-term illness, a persistent number of office workers can expect to eyeball the grim reaper without any prior warning.

The prospect of dying next to the photocopier rather than within the bosom of our families is something few of us contemplate. And when it happens it can throw the office into turmoil.

"Finding a colleague slumped dead in his or her chair is incredibly traumatic for everyone concerned and while it is thankfully rare, its impact on a team of people can be really profound," says Dirk Hansen, a clinical manager at the employee counselling firm EAR Accor Services, which helps with the aftermath of two to three staff deaths a month. "Most are outside the office and after a period of illness, but sometimes someone dies unexpectedly in work.

"Firms should be better prepared for this scenario and less squeamish about the whole subject of death."

Companies should take steps

When a death does happen in the office, there are a number of practical steps to be taken, including informing the police or ambulance service, contacting the family where possible, arranging for the body to be removed and dealing with shocked and grieving colleagues.

As well as checking out any insurance cover and deciding precisely when to terminate salary payments one or two months after the demise is typical there is also the tricky subject of returning personal effects and retrieving company property; without ever appearing to be heartless.

According to Tracey Flashman, head of policy at the telecommunications firm O2, there is a time and a place to ask for company cars or laptops to be returned.

"When a guy in one of our call centres collapsed at work with a heart attack and later died in the ambulance, we offered counselling to his line manager and colleagues and practical support to his family," she says.

"It was via his death and another fatality this time, a young guy who had a motorbike accident that we realized how essential it was to have emergency contact details for all our staff; something we are collating at present."

Flashman says that O2 does not ask for company property to be returned until after the funeral, since that is one of the most important stages of mourning.

It was the death of a popular employee that prompted the supermarket group Asda to pioneer the use of in-store vicars as a "sounding board" for staff and shoppers with problems. But a more traditional method, and one used by many employers as part of their HR package, is to deploy bereavement counselling.

"Employers need to be very sensitive when someone dies and that means participating in the general reaction, rather than running away from it, especially so when the dead person was very well liked," says Hansen.

"That might mean holding a memorial service in the office or even decommissioning the dead colleague's workstation either temporarily or perhaps forever. It's vital that managers are in tune with the general feelings of the team; particularly so if there is any hint of someone having been under pressure or overworked at the time of their death."

Hansen believes that surviving colleagues can be brought closer together by their shared grief though some people will inevitably be more demonstrative in their feelings than others.

Profound impact

Death affects the living in several different ways. One distressed insurance clerk responded to the sudden, on-site death of a colleague at the next workstation by festooning the whole department with flowers, cards and cuddly toys.

A shocked widow, who woke to find her husband dead in bed next to her, dressed him in his office garb and sat him in the driving seat of his company car. However, the firm later alleged that she had acted this way in a cynical attempt to increase his death in service benefit by making it appear he had died while on company business.

Sam Clark is head of diversity and employee relations at the 11,500-strong consultancy firm Accenture. She says that when a final clocking off happens unexpectedly, it is vital to have "proper structures in place, rather than making fumbling efforts to do the right thing. In a typical year, the number of our in-service deaths is fewer than 10, but we do have a series of guidelines for when this happens," he said.

While there have been cases of workstations being cleared out and reoccupied within hours of a sudden death, firms need to be highly flexible towards the living when an employee dies, says the TUC's head of health and safety, Hugh Robertson.

With work dominating our lives, both socially as well as economically, most agree that the rule of thumb for employers is to recognize that death has as profound an impact in the workplace as it does in the home and that respect should be shown as much towards the living as the dead.

Source: China Daily