When people go through a divorce, it can negatively affect every aspect of their life, including their work life. Even people who usually keep their work and home life quite separate will usually find that going through the emotional stress and the upheaval of separating will impact their concentration and motivation at work.
As a manager, the support you are able to provide employees who are going through divorce can be essential in helping them to cope emotionally, as well as being able to perform the job to the best of their ability. It can also prevent them from potentially going off with stress, if you can help to keep their stress levels down.
If a member of your team is going through a divorce, you can support them by doing the following:
Have confidential discussions
Make sure that you give the person plenty of opportunities to have a confidential discussion, as they probably won’t want the rest of the team to know everything about their private life and what they are going through.
If you do not have the type of relationship where they would talk about their emotions to you, if there is a counselling service available through an employee assistance programme, this might be a better option. If this is not available, you could talk to someone else on the team who they are close to and ask them to talk to them to keep checking how they are feeling and if they need any support.
Provide flexible working
If you can see that the person is struggling in work, think of ways that you can make their life easier for a while. For example, you could offer more flexibility regarding working hours to help them to make arrangements if they are moving home or adapting to new child custody arrangements.
You may also be able to help by reducing their workload, or extending deadlines on projects, if that is a possibility. Anything you can do to take some additional pressure away from them should help.
Recommend mediation
The longer that a divorce takes, the more stress that is likely to be involved and the more expensive it will turn out to be due to paying more solicitors’ fees. Only 1% of divorcing couples
will seek mediation to help them to work through their divorce more amicably. If the person is finding that their divorce is taking a long time due to conflicting opinions, a mediator should help to work through some of the issues and speed the process up.
Alternatively, you can recommend that the employee speaks to a specialist divorce lawyer such as www.brookman.co.uk to help to resolve some of the disagreements on how aspects of the divorce should be settled. For example, a family lawyer will be able to give you advice on what is the best solution for ensuring children are given the best support and suffer the least disruption.
Children can go through a very difficult time when their parents divorce, especially if they are seeing one parent much less than they did, so it is important divorcing couples prioritise their children’s emotions when trying to agree on details such as custody arrangements. A family lawyer will help the family to come to an agreement based on what the best outcome is for the children, for the short term and the long term.
People going through divorce require support from all areas of their life and they spend a lot of time in work, so it is important that they receive a good level of support in their work, which you can help to do by following these tips.
