← MORTL for Employers

An employee died.
The first 48 hours.

For HR and the manager who just got the call. Keep it printed. You will not want to read a screen that day. More at mortl.com/for-employers

Hour one

Confirm and contain

  • Confirm the death with the family or emergency contact, never through rumor. One HR person owns all family contact from now on.
  • Say the words plainly inside HR: the employee died. No euphemisms in official communication; they read as evasive.
  • Lock the employee’s system access quietly. This is security, not erasure, and it protects the family too.
  • Pull the personnel file: emergency contacts, beneficiaries, benefits elections. You will need all of it this week.

Day one

Tell the team like people

  • The direct manager tells the immediate team in person or live on a call, before any company-wide email. Nobody learns from a newsletter.
  • Script the announcement in plain words: name, that they died, and what happens next for the team. Ask the family first what may be shared about the cause.
  • Cancel the deceased’s meetings and auto-replies before Monday. A calendar invite from the person who died is a preventable wound.
  • Name one workplace contact for the family and give the family that one name and number.

Day two

The paperwork the family needs

  • Final pay: check your state’s deadline for paying a deceased employee’s wages, and to whom they may legally be paid. States differ; ask counsel or your payroll provider today, not next month.
  • Life insurance and retirement: notify carriers and plan administrators, and send the family the claim forms with a named human they can call.
  • Health coverage: tell dependents in writing what happens to their coverage and their continuation options, with dates.
  • Tell the family what to expect from you in one page: what you will send, when, and who to call. Grieving people cannot chase paperwork.

The first two weeks

The team that keeps working

  • Let people attend the funeral without spending leave. The hour of a funeral is never the hour to enforce policy.
  • Redistribute the workload explicitly. Silence assigns the dead person’s job to their closest teammate by default.
  • Managers check in with the closest coworkers individually. Two minutes, plain words, no script needed beyond "this is hard, how are you doing."
  • Point people at real support: your EAP if you have one, and grief resources that talk straight. That is what MORTL is for.

This is practical guidance, not legal advice. Final pay and benefits rules are state and plan specific; confirm them with counsel or your payroll provider.

Print it now. File it. Hope the drawer stays shut.

MORTL. Straight talk, no euphemisms. mortl.com

Send this to your HR team

Every company will need this page eventually. Better in a drawer than searched for in a panic.