When tragedy strikes: How HR should handle grief and trauma at work

When an Air Canada plane from Montreal crashed on landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport on March 22, two pilots were killed and dozens of passengers and ground personnel were injured. The accident shut one of North America’s busiest airports and triggered multiple safety investigations in the US and in Canada. 

The tragedy also brought into focus certain questions for HR leaders around crisis response and trauma-informed leadership within an organization following a work-related tragedy, and a stark reminder that such an event can send shockwaves far beyond those on the scene. 

Candace DiCresce, a senior advisor on occupational and psychological safety at Deloitte Canada, argues that an HR leader’s first move must be to think broadly about an event’s impact on people, not just operations. 

DiCresce notes that safety and operations teams will focus on what happened and why, but HR’s duty of care is different — it’s about “anticipating harm and opening pathways to support, not waiting for employees to self-identify.” 

She also stresses that the way employees are impacted can be unpredictable and the people who are most shaken may not always be those closest to the incident:  “Direct witnesses might find themselves highly affected, or they may avoid being deeply impacted, while those who are distanced might find the situation very distressing from reactivated or vicarious traumas — people can be very empathetic and just experience situations in different ways.” 

Kevin Kelloway, Canada Research Chair in Occupational Health Psychology at Saint Mary’s University, says organizations must plan for that wider reach. “The effects can be really widespread within the company and even beyond,” says Kelloway, noting that employees performing similar functions or in similar locations can all find themselves thinking that an accident “could have been me,” with direct implications for their sense of safety and trust. 

Outdated grief policies 

Kelloway believes that formal policies are often the weakest part of an employer’s response to grief and trauma. He says he recently led a review of bereavement clauses in Canadian collective agreements and came away with a blunt conclusion: “The grief and bereavement policies in most organizations, as far as we've seen, are absolutely horrible,” he says. “They're typically very brief and define members of immediate family, and often that language is very outdated.” 

Kelloway also says that many bereavement policies don’t take into account the death of a co-worker, so he suggests that HR leaders review their policies and expand them to include organizational deaths. 

Kelloway also says his research underlines that grief doesn’t end when formal leave does.

“The data suggests that we're all better off if organizations have some flexibility and recognize what people are going through, and then try to accommodate that,” he says. He believes that bereavement should be treated “as any other form of crisis — if I break my leg, my organization will put supports in place for me, and the same should be the case for bereavement.” 

Trauma-informed care in the workplace 

Many employers still treat grief as an issue that can be solved with a few days off, and DiCresce believes that this can unintentionally deepen harm when the tragedy is linked to work. 

“It can amplify the grief and continue exposing workers to trauma,” she says. “So days off are nice and they can be helpful, but a trauma-informed response understands that grief is a process that isn’t a time-limited or encapsulated event.” 

In the first hours and days following a workplace tragedy, leaders should prioritize steady presence, low-stigma check-ins, and clear direction to supports such as EFAP providers and community mental health services, says DiCresce. Over the following weeks and months, she recommends continued check-ins, peer supports, and accommodations where needed, as well as deliberate attention to anniversaries and similar events that may re-trigger trauma. 

“We all know that a broken leg varies greatly from a psychological injury — we can see that broken leg and we can have a linear path to healing, whereas a psychological injury can take many different paths and can be very unpredictable,” says DiCresce. 

Supporting HR teams dealing with trauma 

HR leaders also need to recognize that those tasked with supporting others — including themselves — are often themselves traumatized by the same event, particularly in smaller or close-knit operations, according to DiCresce: “This is something that can be so often overlooked,” she says. “They tend to be people-oriented and very focused on support, but unless there’s real thought leadership or even a protocol that says this is how we're going to support the caretakers, sometimes it can get set aside and forgotten, and then you end up burning those folks out.” 

DiCresce notes that HR and safety professionals “are those frontline groups that are shuttled out to support the people affected by these incidents but they're often overlooked as needing help, too.” To counter that, she has used an “HR business partner support protocol” – a concise one-page tool that offered “some key messages, some loving reminders, pointing to care” for HR teams and their leaders, she says. 

“The leaders of HR are those caretakers who are now elevated to leadership positions, so it gives them something in their hands that they could use as a foundation to create a framework of care and to create space around those HR caretakers where they can give each other peer support and take those breathers when needed,” adds DiCresce. 

Leadership under scrutiny during grief  

In addition, both employees and the public often scrutinize leadership closely when an organization suffers a tragic loss or crisis, says DiCresce. 

“How an organization responds to grief and to negative incidents in general, really tells employees and customers and the public what its values really are under pressure,” she says. “It needs to be genuine and woven into the culture and the fabric of that organization to create that true leadership alignment, so that you’re intentionally creating that culture with purpose and meaning — so that the story isn't being woven around the absence of that intention when a big event happens, because employees will create a story if there isn't one that's available for them to tap into.” 

From Kelloway’s perspective, these moments land directly on employer brand. In his work on workplace deaths, he finds that when organizations mismanage the process, “that's what starts to plummet and people start saying, ‘Maybe this isn't such a good place to work.’” 

DiCresce acknowledges that there isn’t a “perfect data source” for HR to measure the impacts of trauma on a workforce, but things like use of sick days, short-term disability leaves, or absenteeism can indicate the extent of immediate impact. These can translate into longer-term leaves, chronic absenteeism, and turnover, according to DiCresce. 

“This can translate to increased strain on leaner teams and lead to turnover and dissatisfaction that can show up in engagement scores,” she says. “And it can move into social media and how employees talk about the organization, which can then translate into challenges in recruitment.” 

Building psychological safety 

For DiCresce, the work to support an organization’s alignment in terms of shared grief and recovery starts long before a tragedy happens. 

“An organization where psychological safety is fostered — where barriers to being honest, vulnerable, and communicating empathetically are minimized and offers people the permission to unite see one another's humanity — comes from being intentional,” she says. “So when you get into that moment, when each of these groups feel seen and respected, that psychological safety provides a net for alignment and mutual support.”