What we should learn from the sad story of Denise Prudhomme

I was chatting to somebody last week about the person in the US who died, alone and ignored at a desk, unnoticed for over four days. Their instinctive and understandable response was to ask whether the story was apocryphal. Sadly, not. Sixty-year-old Denise Prudhomme had clocked into work at the Arizona office of Wells Fargo at 7 am on Friday, August the 16th. Her death some time that day went unnoticed until the following Tuesday afternoon, when a colleague discovered her body slumped over her desk in a cubicle.

The news prompted a characteristically misjudged comment piece in Forbes which used the story to suggest that corporate indifference, incompetence and – inevitably – back to office mandates – were culpable. To imply that if only she had been working from home, then her passing would have been marked by others.

Apart from the tasteless opportunism of this viewpoint, it ignores a much larger issue about the way many people live. Should managers, colleagues, security and cleaning staff have picked up that something was wrong? Obviously.

But nobody else noticed either. There is no reasonable assumption that Denise Prudhomme had anybody anywhere who thought something was wrong over those four days. Nothing at the weekend from which her absence would have been noted. Nobody at home to worry about her.

In which case, her place of work is irrelevant. If she’d died at home on that Friday, it may even have taken longer for the fact to be discovered.

Too many people who comment on these stories do so on the basis that everybody is like them. That others must want to work from home because that is where there are other people who will miss them. That home is where they are most happy.

We know this is not true. Can’t be, in fact, for many people. The office is unlikely to be their happy place, but it’s also very possible that home might be worse.

This tragic story highlights some very uncomfortable truths about the working culture at this office, which should prompt some soul-searching and change.

But, more importantly, it highlights how disconnected many people are from the rest of the world. It wasn’t just her colleagues who missed the lonely passing of Denise Prudhomme. It was all of us.

Mark Eltringham

Mark is the publisher of Workplace Insight, IN magazine, Works magazine and is the European Director of Work&Place journal. He has worked in the office design and management sector for over thirty years as a journalist, marketing professional, editor and consultant.