Why Bereavement Leave Policies Are Stuck in the 1950s with Alex Seiler

Nick: Welcome to the Wellable Weekly Podcast, where we talk about key topics and trends at the intersection of wellbeing, technology, and HR. I have a very special guest today, Alex Seiler. He’s a Chief People Officer, keynote speaker, and startup advisor with 20 years of experience working with founders, CEOs, and executive teams around scaling organizations and navigating change. Those 20 years have been spread across a diverse set of companies — from legacy health plans like Blue Shield of California to growth companies like WeWork. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex: Thank you. I really appreciate being here. The only things I’ll add: you can probably tell I have a bit of a strange accent. I’m half British and half Swiss, born and raised in Hong Kong, and I’ve been in the US for 22 years — half my life. I’m a bit of a third culture kid and a traveling nomad with my cat. In the last couple of years I’ve started my own thing — fractional HR consulting, brand partnerships, advising HR tech startups, and being on the speaking and conference circuit. I’m a big believer in not putting all your eggs in one basket, especially in this market.

Nick: One of the topics I’m particularly interested in is caregiving and grief. I live in a multi-generational household — I have two young kids, my mother lives with me for most of the year, and my brother lives with me too. I’m very much in that in-between generation, feeling the caregiving needs of raising children and caring for a mother who is not always in perfectly good health. I’m excited to talk about this with you.

Alex: Very near and dear to my heart. Caregiving and grief are not rare events at the edge of the workforce — they really are majority experiences, and the cost is already being paid in missed deadlines, quiet attrition, and people operating at half capacity, just never as a line item anyone has approved. I’m personally invested because my mother battled different forms of cancer for 12 years and eventually passed away almost three years ago. My dad was her caregiver for those 12 years, and I saw the toll that took on him as well. It has completely reshaped how I look at things, including how I approach my work as an HR leader.

Nick: How did we get to where we are today with bereavement policy? There’s this standard three-day policy that seems to be the default for most of corporate America.

Alex: It came out of union contracts from the 1950s. The math was pretty literal: one day to drive there, a day for the funeral, a day to drive back. Nobody really consulted a grief expert because nobody was thinking about grief. They were thinking about attendance. Companies then started copying each other, and after 60-plus years of everyone matching everyone else, it hardened into something that feels intentional. But if you talk to grief experts today, they now say 20 days minimum for losing someone close is really important. The average company currently offers about 5.6 days. That is a pretty big delta.

Nick: What does the gold standard actually look like, and what’s a realistic path for a company that’s still at three days?

Alex: The gold standard is 20 days, and certain companies have already adopted that — Meta, Adobe, JP Morgan, Goldman, and Johnson & Johnson at 30. Some companies might say that’s a lot of time, but they ran the numbers and they’re competing for the same people everyone else is. If you’re starting from three or five days, you don’t need to get to 20 straight away. But how actively are you looking at your policies? How flexible are they? Could you go to ten to start? Could people spread those days out as needed? Grief isn’t linear — it hits at different points. If you allow mental health days to be used flexibly, why couldn’t grief leave work the same way? If your policy was designed to get someone to a funeral and back, no amount of empathy training or manager coaching fixes what it was built for. You have to change the thing itself.

Nick: How do you define who qualifies? Siblings, close friends, grandparents — grief doesn’t follow a list of approved relationships.

Alex: You’re not going to make everyone happy, so don’t try to. Just do what makes the most sense and will reflect the majority. Use benchmarking, focus groups with employees who are actually dealing with these things, and input from benefits brokers to build the policy. Commit to evolving it over time — it should not be a one-and-done. And preface any employee focus group honestly: we can’t do exactly what you ask, but we want to take your needs into account. The alternative is HR creating these policies in a vacuum with an employment lawyer, which is basically throwing spaghetti against the wall.

Nick: When you go to executives to make the case for better policies, what data is most compelling?

Alex: First, the bigger problem is that almost nobody tells HR. Only 8% of employees feel comfortable raising caregiving needs with HR. Nineteen percent feel their caregiving needs are recognized at all. Only 29% say their manager is well prepared to help. This creates a self-sealing cycle: people don’t disclose, so nothing shows up in the data. The data shows no demand, so the benefit doesn’t get funded or gets cut. The cut proves to employees that speaking up was pointless, so they disclose even less. When an HR leader tells me they don’t see demand for this, I treat that sentence as a finding about their culture, not their workforce. The absence of requests in a place where requesting is risky tells you nothing about need. Stop waiting to be asked. Reach out with resources when you hear about a loss. Drop requirements for death certificates or obituaries to qualify for a policy. It costs nothing to change. For the executive pitch, you connect it to the business: retention, regrettable departures, productivity, employer brand. The data is there — you just have to look for it in the right places.

Nick: Gen X is increasingly the sandwich generation, carrying caregiving demands for both aging parents and children. How does that show up in the workforce?

Alex: It bleeds into everything. People come home exhausted from work, then face laundry, dinners, bedtime routines, doctor appointments, estate administration. None of it is visible at work. It’s easy to forget about because it lives in the shadows, but there’s plenty of data without even polling your population to know this is serious. It reminds me of your smoking analogy — tobacco use appears low because the behavior has moved into the shadows through vaping. Caregiving stress operates the same way. The absence of visibility is not evidence of absence. It’s evidence that the culture hasn’t made it safe to be seen.

Nick: If you’re listening to this podcast and you go back to work on Monday, what’s the first step?

Alex: Start building the business case before you start changing anything. Benchmarking competitors, employee focus groups, exit interview analysis for caregiving-related departures — compile that into something that makes sense and tells the right story for your C-suite. Data means everything in the executive suite. They want to understand how this connects to retention, productivity, and the P&L. If you get sign-off, then work with internal or external employment counsel to update the policy and communicate it clearly. You don’t have to change the world next week. But you should be starting to ask these questions if you haven’t already, and you should be thinking about it as an employee yourself, not just as an HR professional.

Nick: Predictions — what’s coming in the next few years that people aren’t thinking about?

Alex: Two. First: the three-day bereavement policy is going to come to sound as dated as no maternity leave within the next five to ten years. The pattern is already visible. Six states currently mandate bereavement leave. Washington just went from three paid days to seven. Illinois allows up to 12 weeks when a child dies by homicide or suicide. California and Illinois now cover miscarriage and stillbirth — none of that existed a decade ago. As state mandates accumulate, multi-state employers will stop maintaining 50 different rules and set one policy well above the current floor. Companies that move early get credit for values. Companies that move in 2030 get credit for compliance. Same money, completely different story. Parental leave went from rare to expected in about 10 to 15 years and nobody argues we should go back. The end of life is going to follow the beginning of life — we’re just earlier in the curve.

Second: in an AI world where technology equalizes output, the remaining differentiator between employers will be how they behave when something goes wrong in someone’s life. As AI absorbs more task work, what distinguishes one employer from another stops being tools and speed and becomes the human moments — caregiving, illness, grief, the return to work afterward. I’ve seen Gallup data that quietly supports this: what protected people from AI anxiety was whether they believed their organization cared about them. That belief is never built during a crisis. It’s built by what people watched happen to a colleague two years earlier. In an AI world, every company will claim to be human-centered. The test will be embarrassingly simple: what did you actually do when someone’s mother passed away?

Nick: I can see the bereavement leave prediction clearly — parental leave followed exactly that trajectory, starting with a few leading states and then spreading through multi-state employer standardization. Thank you for joining us today, Alex. How can listeners find and follow your work?

Alex: The best place is LinkedIn — www.linkedin.com/in/alexseiler. That’s A-L-E-X-S-E-I-L-E-R. I cover a lot more than caregiving and grief, so if you like spicy HR takes, follow along.

Nick: For all our listeners, Alex has a range of podcasts on different HR topics that I personally found fascinating — just search his name to find them. Thank you all for joining us. Please like and subscribe to Wellable Weekly wherever you get your podcasts, and have a great week.