There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.
Remember the letter-writer working for a company where no one wanted the office an employee died in four years earlier? Here’s the update.
Before I get to the update, I wanted to follow up on some of the questions/comments the letter generated. Some folks suggested moving to entirely new office spaces and that wasn’t ever going to be an option because that would realistically have had a million dollar price tag, so that was never on the table. There were also some comments about the lack of ritual or memorial event. I think there were some employees who were really bothered by that and that is valid. Due to the nature of the death and the fact that the employee’s family asked that nothing about her death be disclosed and that we NOT do a memorial, it was a hard balance to hit. We did have a session for connecting folks with grief counselors and some open hours with a therapist but there was never a ceremony. We likely would have turned a blind eye to folks wanting to have their own rituals in the office except that some of the stronger personalities in the office made things contentious in a hurry (one person wanted to bring in a shaman and another wanted to bring in a psychic and then someone else wanted to bring in their pastor to cleanse the space from the “occult energy” a psychic would bring…) so leadership felt like the odds that we could grant all the requests in a way that wouldn’t result in someone being (rightfully) offended were too low so they drew a firm line about it.
Ultimately, our president talked with the exec team from the company we’ve now merged with and shared about the death and the space. It turns out that one of their senior managers is both deeply pragmatic and very rarely has meetings and was delighted to take an office that nobody else wanted. We decided to go with that approach since we felt like relocating a storage room or trying to create a lounge space or quiet working area wasn’t going to be welcoming for the staff who strongly want to never go into the space.
The manager moved into the office space this summer and there were a few weeks where people continued to call it “Jane’s office” but people seemed to get used to seeing the lights on and someone in the office fairly quickly. The manager has a quirky sense of humor and style and has decorated the office in a way that is very…specific… so it looks very different than it did before, so that might help.
I sincerely hope that none of the readers will have to experience a similar situation in their careers (and it definitely stung when a few folks in the comments suggested that there must have been some work related reasons she died in our offices). It still feels like a situation where there were A LOT of ways to get it wrong/cause harm and balancing the needs/wants of the family with the needs/wants of the staff was complicated.
