Employers often get it right at first, but fail to provide long-term support: Expert
The explosion that killed Shirley Hickman's 21-year-old son, Tim, in a workplace accident 16 years ago led to the creation of a charity dedicated to providing support for families who have lost family members to workplace tragedies.
Threads of Life, based in London, Ont., matches families with a volunteer family mentor who helps guide the family through the months following a death.
“I like to think of Threads of Life as the opportunity to help people move from being the victim to the survivor,” Hickman says of the organization, which was started in 2003. “When people are ready, we help them take that story and be part of prevention.”
When a fatality occurs in the workplace, the first number to be called is obviously 911, says Jeff Dolan, director of investigation services for WorkSafeBC, the workers’ compensation board in British Columbia. Employers then have a responsibility to contact the province's workplace compensation board. It will send investigators to visit the site to conduct an investigation, he says.
“They would stay at the site and maintain control of the site until all of the evidence that is deemed to be relative or appears to be relative is either analyzed at the site or seized for final analysis,” he says, adding employers in B.C. are also required to conduct their own internal investigation.
WorkSafeBC also assigns a human factor specialist to every workplace fatality incident. The human factor specialist is an ergonomist by trade and examines the relationship that exists between a worker and his or her environment, Dolan says.
“We would never dismiss an accident as, ‘This worker obviously made a mistake and walked into the back of a machine that they shouldn't have.’” says Dolan. “We’d want to trace it back and determine why is it that this person thought on this day that was the right thing to do.”
Threads of Life has helped more than 1,400 families, but Hickman's work also leads to her employers and employees who are looking for support after a fatality occurs at a workplace.
“I think what has been learned over the past 20 to 30 years is that co-workers need crisis debriefing as soon as possible,” says Hickman. “The sooner that support is provided to them as a team, the quicker it is for them to return to work right away.”
Ontario’s workplace safety and insurance board has crisis counsellors assigned to counsel employees at workplaces where a fatality has occurred, says Hickman.
B.C. has something similar.
“Within investigations, we do have critical incident specialists who provide that immediate response either to an injured worker or to the family of an injured or deceased worker who are obviously affected by the traumatic incident,” says Dolan. “For someone to receive support from a member of our team, a claim doesn't have to be initiated for that individual. They can just contact us and have a conversation with one of our specialists and they'll either be provided with the appropriate services or be referred to somebody who can provide the appropriate services.”
Employees may be dealing with two categories of reaction — there’s trauma and there's grief, says Brenda Marshall, founder and principal at Solacium Group, an Uxbridge, Ont.-based consulting firm that helps organizations support employees affected by grief.
“Trauma happens whenever there is something that is absolutely horrific, when it seems sudden or random,” Marshall says. “A trauma reaction requires a different type of support than grief. Most (employee assistance programs) would have councilors that are specialized in trauma.”
When it comes to grief, employers do a really good job initially, according to Marshall. They may get councilors in, but they don't necessarily provide adequate long-term support.
“What we know is grief is a long term process and it's a normal reaction to loss, so it likely is going to extend for much longer than anybody thinks,” she says, suggesting ongoing educational sessions on reactions to grief and loss may be helpful. “Allow time after where employees, who want to, can stay and talk to the facilitator one-on-one.”
Marshall suggests choosing an individual in the organization who will oversee a disaster relief plan and can check in on any employees who may be suffering. This person can then lead a communication system to keep everyone informed. This individual is often the CEO or a human resources employeebecause they are equipped with the leadership skills to manage a support plan during times of grief, she says.
“It’s almost like creating a plan around education that's ongoing for much longer than anybody thinks they need to,” she says. “The leader of the organization is probably going to have to play a bigger role than they ever have before and so is anyone checking in with them?”
It's also important for a workplace to consider the victim's family beyond the legal requirements, Marshall says. She suggests offering a tour of the workplace to the family or offering a recording of the employee's voicemail message instead of immediately deleting it.
“The extent that you can keep them informed about what's going to happen on these things can be helpful,” she says. “That voicemail may be the last time they hear their loved one's voice.”
Hickman suggests employers use the victim's name around the office so it's not an uncomfortable subject. She says setting up a scholarship or having a barbecue in memory of the individual can help people who are struggling.
“When (employers) can show the human-compassion side of life by doing something to honour that person’s life… their employees realize that their employer is suffering, too,” she says.
Threads of Life holds an annual walk called Steps of Life that allows people who have been affected by a workplace tragedy to walk in memory of the individual who died.
“We have employers who will contact us and tell us they had a fatality,” she says. “When people are doing something collectively as a team like that, those co-workers get a chance to reflect, but also to journey forward and recognize that their employer didn't forget about the worker because of this tragedy.”
The key for employers is to show compassion in a difficult situation and stay in touch with victims' families, Hickman says.
“No employer wakes up today and says I’m going to kill a worker,” she says. “I think that family members feel best — if there's such a word — about the employer in years to come where the employer has tried to main contact. Otherwise the families just feel forgotten and that it was just a life thrown away.”
