How do you show compassion and sympathy and understanding and still be firm and run a business? This will be a busy weekend, and we are open every day. This is also Easter weekend, and now there will be a viewing and funeral, and I will have only a handful of very new employees incapable of holding a shift together on their own for the day of the funeral. Closing our store is not an option, as we're part of a (small) corporation. We've called other stores to try to find employees that would be willing to fill in, but we're over an hour away from most of them (several hours for some), and it's a holiday weekend. Whoever isn't working has plans, and no-one is keen to drive and drive just to fill in for us. Hell, I hate the drive myself.

I would try to create an atmosphere where you set aside a little part of the place, some icon, some tiny thing where they can look and think for a moment and reflect on this person.

Sometimes a hug, a sigh, a look, can be enough. But they need to know its an important weekend and that this person would want them to carry on and help all the other people who will be counting on them this weekend. Try to make them honor his memory by continuing as normal, but dont alienate them. The idea of something like a ribbon or a picture and something like that can be helpful.

I was recently in a Wal-Mart and the store had lost a former employee in the Iraq war and they had a little table with the man's picture and a ribbon and this noteboard with a pen allowing people to sign and show their respect for this person.


I'm not really looking for people to solve this problem, I want to say. It's not really going to be solved as much as it is going to be endured. Eventually, life will return to some form of normalcy, and everyone will grieve after their own fashion, but until then, each shift is a mess of crying employees hiding in the break room, chain-smoking and insisting they can't do their job, they just can't. I ache for them, but I have to run the business. It's advice or words of wisdom (or even encouragement!) from anyone who's been there, on one side of the fence or the other, that I'm looking for.

And thanks, folks.
You're welcome
~Erica