What to Do When an Employee's Performance Drops After a Personal Loss
An employee experienced a significant personal loss, like a death in the family, a serious illness, or a divorce, and their work has noticeably declined in the weeks that followed. You want to support them. You also have a business to run. Here is how to hold both.
Give a Reasonable Adjustment Period First
Grief and personal crisis affect concentration, energy, and motivation in ways that are predictable and temporary for most people. A performance decline in the first two to four weeks following a significant personal loss does not require a management intervention. But it does require patience.
What is a reasonable adjustment period depends on the nature of the loss and the role. A week of reduced output following a bereavement is expected. Two months of sustained underperformance is a different situation. Use your judgment about the severity of the loss and the degree of impact on the work.
Check In With Genuine Care
During the adjustment period, check in with the employee as a person, not as a performance management conversation. 'How are you doing?' is a real question, not a segue to feedback. Let them tell you what they need. Sometimes what a grieving employee needs most is to feel seen (and heard) by their manager.
These check-ins are not soft management. They are the kind of investment that determines whether an employee comes back to full performance or gradually disengages. Employees who feel genuinely supported through a difficult time typically return their loyalty in kind.
Be Honest When the Adjustment Period Has Passed
If the performance decline continues beyond a reasonable period, be honest and direct with compassion: 'I have given you space to recover from what happened, and I want to continue supporting you. And I also need to be direct with you— the work over the past few weeks has not been meeting the standard I need. I want to figure out how we address both things.'
This is not a contradiction. It is honest management. The employee deserves to know where they stand, and pretending the performance issue does not exist is not supporting them. It is setting them up for a harder conversation later.
Consider Whether Professional Support Is Appropriate
If the employee's difficulty extends significantly beyond a typical grief adjustment, it may be appropriate to mention available resources like an Employee Assistance Program if you have one, or simply acknowledgment that professional support is available and that using it is not a sign of weakness.
Do not diagnose, do not pressure, and do not make this a condition of continued employment. Mention it once, genuinely, as a resource.
When to Move to Formal Performance Management
If the performance does not recover after a direct, compassionate conversation and a reasonable timeline, move to the same formal performance management process you would use for any other performance issue. Document the timeline of the decline, the conversations that occurred, and the specific performance gaps that need to be addressed.
Don’t want to do the work yourself? Our PIP template provides the documented structure for a formal performance conversation. One that can be delivered with compassion while maintaining the clear expectations your business requires.
Questions about this or other HR topics? Visit pragmatichrgroup.com for more resources.
