Navigating Bereavement at Work: How Bereave Eases the Process for Employees

Scaling the mountains of paperwork that come after the death of a family member is a daunting and exhausting task. The recently bereaved are often forced to put their emotions to the side while they deal with logistical matters like funeral planning, probate and insurance cancellations.

Sometimes family members, a good friend, or a lawyer get involved to make the process a little easier. The last place we expect to be helpful, however, is often our employer. With a paltry 3 days of bereavement and awkward managers and co-workers who fumble at offering condolences, it’s no wonder we have little faith in finding any assistance at our place of work.

Here is where Indianapolis-based death tech company Bereave steps into the picture.

After founders Elijah Linder and Keagan McGuire experienced major losses in their family, they found themselves overwhelmed navigating the various responsibilities that followed. Linder and McGuire, aspiring entrepreneurs, shared in their mutual struggle during the time after their losses and wanted to figure out a way to use their business ambitions to create something that would make the process easier.

In interviewing various bereaved individuals, they noticed a common thread that many other death tech businesses had overlooked as an entry point. The workplace, they observed, was often a major stress point for those trying to navigate loss. The demands of work continued after a death of a loved one, piling on additional stress when individuals were actively trying to plan a funeral or attend to legal matters. It was like they were juggling two jobs at the same time. With their attention split, often the quality of work at one of the jobs would end up suffering.

Rather than create an isolated service that people would have to seek out and find on their own, the two decided they could make a bigger impact by helping companies help their employees. In the same way employers offer tax and financial services to assist employees planning for retirement, so too could they support employees with death and bereavement.

Bereave developed into a Business-to-Business product sold to employers to offer their employees when following the death of a family member. By creating a service that’s integrated into an employer’s Human Resources Department, employees can get direct support from their employers rather than seeking out a third party. The Bereave platform offers a host of services, from proactive estate planning to helpful checklists that clarify all the paperwork to be completed after a loved one dies. In addition to offering clerical support, Bereave also offers emotional support to employees with handy grief guides and assistance in finding grief support groups within their community. Managers can also receive training on how to better understand their grieving staff members, making them more equipped to offer emotional support and flexibility.

Bereave also markets itself to businesses as a productivity booster and a way to retain their employees, acknowledging the emotional toll and stress that affects employee performance. If employees are more prepared and supported to deal with a death in the family and if managers are better equipped to aid in the process, then the hope is that they will be less haggard by external stressors and better able to perform at their job.

Bereave is still currently in its fundraising stage, but it already has 12 clients using its platform. Integrating death planning into the workplace, while beneficial for both employees and employers, has the greater potential to start normalizing conversations about death as a culture. So many of the obstacles bereaving individuals face could be avoided if their loved one would have had a conversation earlier or put some kind of documentation in place. Our aversion to speaking about death, however, often stops these conversations from happening and prolongs suffering. Normalizing death, as we already have normalized taxes in the workplace, might help all of us grieve better.