In a thousand-employee organization, roughly 276 employees experience a significant loss this year. Most will carry it alone. See what that costs -- and what it doesn't have to.
Enter your organization's details above to see your grief impact story.
Data source: grief-seed-events-v2.js -- Village Simulator V2, February 2026. Authors: Gina Pingitore PhD, Dr. Daven Morrison MD, Pete Trujillo MSAI.
Status: DRAFT -- awaiting clinical sign-off. Do not cite specific figures in published outputs until sign-off is received.
Incidence rates: Annual probability per employee by age group, weighted by U.S. civilian labor force age distribution [BLS]. CONFIRMED sources: child [UMBERSON17+EVR], spouse [CDC/ACS], parent [CDC/ACS], sibling [Fletcher 2013 Demography], pregnancy loss [CDC]. PLACEHOLDER: friend, pet, traumatic/suicide bereavement (no primary study).
Productivity impact: MID values from impactProfiles section. MID = tier2_averageSupport = standard U.S. bereavement policy (3-5 days). Year 1 costs capped at 12 months. Losses with longer durations carry significant Year 2+ costs not shown here.
Turnover: 75% of annual salary per departure [SHRM midpoint, 50-100% range]. Flight risk rates from flightRisk.mid per loss type.
Ripple: Coverage burden (coverageProductivityLoss.mid = 5%) + manager cascade (directReportProductivityLoss.mid = 8%, 3 months). Grief contagion excluded -- flagged PLACEHOLDER in seed file.
Misattribution note: The 57.5 lost workdays figure is from the Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) Insights Report -- NOT Harvard Business Review. This calculator does not use that figure.
Most organizations treat grief as a brief, one-time event. Offer bereavement leave, send flowers, and assume people will bounce back. But grief does not follow a corporate timeline. It walks back through the door on day four and stays for months.
Grief shows up as cognitive fog, decision fatigue, and physical exhaustion. Employees describe it as wearing an invisible weight vest -- every meeting, email, and small decision takes twice the effort just to appear normal.
When someone loses a spouse, parent, or child, they don't just lose a person -- they gain a job they never applied for. Estate paperwork. Legal documents. Funeral arrangements. The average executor spends 20 hours a week for up to 12 months closing out affairs while trying to maintain full professional responsibilities.
Colleagues don't know what to say, so they say nothing. Managers feel torn between caring and meeting deadlines. The organization provides no framework, no language, no playbook -- so everyone defaults to incompetent silence. The griever is left more isolated than before they returned.
A grieving employee affects their manager, their team, and the colleagues who quietly absorb their workload. The seed file documents three distinct ripple mechanisms -- each a separate cost source, not a double-count.
Three days of bereavement leave doesn't account for the 12-month productivity curve that follows a loss. These are the figures that don't appear on any P&L.
Figures above from grief-seed-events-v2.js MID values. DRAFT status -- not for publication without clinical sign-off.
PLACEHOLDER loss types (friend, pet, traumatic/suicide) included in the calculator above but not in the static figures shown here.
Three services, sequenced to meet organizations where they are -- whether they're preparing before crisis arrives or responding to an active loss right now.
Builds shared vocabulary, organizational awareness, and manager confidence through education, live cost modeling with the Village Simulator, and skills practice with the Empathy Tutor. Available proactively or in response to an active loss event.
Builds a complete, organization-specific Standard Operating Procedure: bereavement policy, communication protocols, verified resource directory, Grief Companion network, and integrated tools. Anchored by the Workplace Grief Readiness Assessment.
The deepest engagement: moving an organization from having a policy to having a culture. Embeds grief responsiveness into how the organization leads, communicates, and defines its values. Includes tailored interventions, leadership integration, and ongoing measurement.
Three tools in active development -- available for demonstration. Video walkthroughs available on request.
Whether you're responding to an active loss in your organization, building proactive capacity, or just beginning to understand the scope of the problem -- this is where to start.
Gina will respond personally. No sales team. No automated sequence.