Your employees are the most important asset for running your organization and serving clients. Research indicates that illness or a death in the family is the second most common problem which affects workplace performance (stress is #1). When a death or other serious crisis occurs, on average it impacts the lives of more than 25 other people. Grief and loss can affect the individual or the entire team. Handling loss at work is challenging on a personal and professional level.

While 84% of companies have Employee Assistance Programs, only 10% of employees use them.  A manager needs to do more than just send a grieving individual to an EAP program which only addresses part of the grief/crisis picture.

You need to know:

• The impact of grief and how it affects the entire team.
• What to do and say in times of crisis & grief.
• How to talk to a grieving individual as well as their co-workers.
• How the team’s productivity is affected during the grieving/crisis period.

Get ready to put plan in place to train your staff on how to handle grief or crisis in the workplace BEFORE a crisis arises.

About the Presenter: Linda Trignano, Certified Grief Coach
Linda is the owner of Grief Coaching and Trignano Coaching and Consulting. After going through one of the most difficult grief periods in her life, she began her journey of healing and renewal. She was working at a large corporation with a full load of responsibilities as well as a single mom raising two children. She was on her own to sink or swim when it came to keeping up with her job and balancing her personal life.

She received little or no support from the company, and it made her realize that most managers she worked with did not have the tools or training to understand the grief journey she was on. If she was feeling this way, others who were going through a similar loss or difficult life event were also experiencing the same lack of understanding and support.

She decided that the best way to fill this void in the workplace was to focus on training human resources professionals, managers, and teams to help them offer better support for their employees going through grief and loss.

For more than 24 years Linda has worked facilitating grief recovery support groups, training grief facilitators, as well as working with individuals who are in the process of recovering from grief and loss. She has worked with individuals experiencing a divorce or death, children who have lost a parent, relative or close friend to death or divorce, as well as training for a unique Rainbows program to work with the children of 9/11 victims. She is a certified facilitator through the Newark, NJ Diocese to create and run grief support groups. She also has training from Hospice to work with terminally ill patients.

All of this combined with over 18 years of corporate management roles with extensive experience in Employee Development Planning, Team Dynamics, Change/Transition Management and HR Quality Process Management has given her the unique skills to effectively train managers, staff and employees to be compassionate.