So, when are you coming back to work? My viral post hits a nerve.

Last week, I had a LinkedIn post go viral.  376,000+ people read and many, many commented, leaving their stories of workplace harm.

In the middle of the night, during my son's lacrosse game, all throughout the weekend, the comments kept pouring in.

I want to share it here with you, along with some of the eye-opening responses; there is a profound cost to mishandling your people during disruptive life events.

My post
"So, when are you actually coming back to work?"

Unbelievable. This was her new manager's first question, over the phone, as she sat at the hospital by her son's bedside.

The son was intubated, a tangle of tubes and wires after a cascade of medical complications.

She, his single mother, had been anxiously keeping a bedside vigil for days.

Back to the manager - there was no check-in, no questions about the son or about the prognosis.

Just deliverables and timelines.

Her reply was short and tight - "I quit" - and she hung up the phone.

How you care for your employees (and clients) during disruptive life events matters.

The company lost a lot that day - a promising new hire (whose moving expenses they'd already paid), all the work of the recruitment team, and they suffered a huge blow to their reputation as a place that puts people first.

Not to mention the new, added cost of having to find + hire her replacement.

All because one manager wasn't skilled at empathy and connection.

Her story is being repeated to men and women across industries, every single day.

Empathy is skill that we can and should be learning at work.

Have you ever quit (or just totally detached) from a workplace because of a manager who mishandled your disruptive life event?

The response
Here are just a handful of the responses that poured in, detailing inattentive bosses, poor policies, and a host of high performers that decided to go elsewhere

• When I told a former supervisor I was drowning (mostly due to an unsustainable workload with difficult life circumstances also at play), his answer was “I think you need to learn how to swim faster.”

• My boss said, "I don't care if your mother dies; you come in to work."  I got a new job pretty quick. When I handed him my resignation, he asked, "Why are you doing this?" I said, "I can't work for people who don't care if my mother dies." It was hella satisfying.

• My boss at the time of my fathers death asked me upon my return to work after 3 days “I hope you are not still crying?” Ouch! I had no words, just tears and a broken heart.

Your story?
I realize that many of you, perhaps, carry your own stories of being mishandled at work in a moment that really mattered.

And I want to give you the space to share. 

I'm gathering stories for future articles and a coming book...and each story of what should have been helps us to refine our offerings and better speak to all of the life circumstances that are represented at work.

So, if you have a story to share, please do so at the link below:

Context
The story, shared in my post above, is actually from a Handle w/ Care podcast interview that I did with Bre Sprague called Single Parenting, a Medical Emergency, and Inclusivity. 

You can listen to Bre's wisdom (and the full story) below: