Q: Two of the employees in the machine shop I own were recently killed in an accident.
The rest of us are depressed and lost and don’t know what to do with ourselves.
What do you think might help all of us in the shop?
A: I do not know what either you or your staff have done to try to come to terms with the sudden loss of two obviously valued employees, friends and perhaps even family.
Obviously, all of you are trying to do something. Let me just talk around this for a bit. Something might strike you that makes sense.
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What is happening in your shop is somewhat like those old, wooden wagon wheels that carried our ancestors over prairie trails. You might remember that the wheels were made with large, wooden spokes.
Of course, the wagons were still used when one or two of the spokes broke but the wheel itself was not the same afterward.
To repair it properly you had to get the blacksmith in to do his stuff, removing the outer metal rim, reheating it, and repositioning it once the broken spokes had been replaced. The whole wheel had to be rebuilt.
The same is true for your shop. You can probably get along for the next short while without the two guys you lost in the accident and you might even be able to hire more workers to replace them. But it will never be the same.
It is best not to pretend that it will be.
The feelings, the sadness, the grieving, loneliness, guilt and anger get in the way and that normal kibitzing you find in many shops, the joshing back and forth, is not the same. It is probably best to not pretend that it is.
You need to start over. For openers, if you are working in a machine shop, you likely have tools there that are risky. Make sure that your shop is safe, and make sure that the people using those machines are safe. If they are into some intense moments, likely to get easily distracted, then perhaps they need to be reassigned for a while. You do not need an accident to complicate things.
But you will only be able to pull that off if all of you are talking about the incident in which two people died. The tendency in a great many shops, especially in those dominated by guys, is to not talk about death and dying, to push it under the carpet and somehow try to deny that it happened.
Hard as it is for all of you, the more that you talk about the people who died, the better it will be in the long run.
Let your staff know that you understand that they miss their friends and colleagues, that they are going to feel sad, that they are going to struggle with guilt and anger, and that all of that is just how we deal with death. Hard as it is, it is the natural thing to do and the more you talk, the more likely it is that the pressure will ease somewhere along the way.
It also does not hurt to show that you care, or that you are going to support your staff when they show that they too care.
You obviously have two families in your community who are struggling with this thing too. I do not know what works for them or what your staff are inclined to do to help people but the more you can encourage them to help and support the surviving families the more likely it is that all of you will find a sense of goodness when the storm clouds break.
Remember, there are no bad guys here, just a number of good people trying to make sense out of that which is senseless.
