Sonder is a workplace wellbeing platform helping organisations support their people through health, safety and mental health challenges. When they decided to produce a comprehensive guide on grief and loss at work, they had the right instincts: expert voices, real research, practical guidance for leaders. What they needed was someone to take all of that and make it readable.
The topic brief and a rough outline were already in place when I came on board. My job was to take insights from a range of contributors — psychologists, grief researchers, founders of grief-focused organisations — and shape them into a single, cohesive guide that felt human rather than clinical.
That meant handling expert quotes carefully, knowing what to expand and what to let breathe, and writing in a way that was genuinely useful to someone who'd just had a hard conversation with a grieving team member and didn't know what to do next.
Grief content is easy to get wrong. The generic version — five stages, platitudes, tick-the-box advice — is everywhere and almost nobody finds it useful. The brief called for something more grounded: content that acknowledged how complicated grief actually is at work, and gave leaders specific, actionable language to use.
I also provided light design direction alongside the copy, working with Sonder's designer to ensure the structure of the guide supported how readers would actually move through it — not just front to back, but jumping to the section they needed in the moment.
The finished guide runs to 34 pages across ten sections, covering everything from how grief shows up at work to what leaders should say (and skip), return-to-work support, cultural sensitivity, specific situations like sudden loss and remote teams, and legal considerations across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It includes expert contributions from the Australian Psychological Society, Good Mourning, Grief Australia, Canva's people team, and others.
It's the kind of resource a people leader could pick up on a hard day and actually use.
