What research, best practices, and personal experience show, again and again, is that one of the best ways to get a person regulated/back to a stable place is not by telling them that they aren't sad or admonishing them to just get over their feelings.

Acknowledgment is powerful.  People want to feel seen and heard.  When our emotions are witnessed, it helps us to move to a different state in freedom instead of pushing down our feelings, pretending that they aren't there, or hiding from a place of shame.

Creating replicable templates for care is an organizational game-changer.  Most companies rely on a patchwork of episodic support.  Some teams or individuals are big-hearted, gifted organizers that show up with care when it matters most.

But true growth comes from taking those best-practices and making them into standard operating procedures.

Your coworkers are not family members, but this same cycle of overwhelm and negativity can happen at work.  We find ourselves hyper-aware of all that is going wrong, keeping mental tallies of all the ways that coworkers and clients are dropping the ball.

Or, when that mental accounting becomes too exhausting, we go numb, merely going through the motions of to-do lists.  

There is a better way. 

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.

Empathy PTO is a great example of a policy that makes values manifest.  Thinking creatively, Monique and her team provided a category of PTO that could be used with flexibility, allowing employees to take the time they needed during seasons of disruption.