Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist who detailed the five stages of grief in her book On Death & Dying. It may seem odd to mention that in this list, but the Kübler-Ross model based on those five stages fulfils a specific niche in change management – allowing you to focus on and deal with the emotional response of those affected by the change.

Your employees are (ultimately) entirely responsible for carrying out your changes after all. Sure, you can give them systems to follow and training to fill in the gaps, but all the help in the world won’t save your change if the employee is opposed to it emotionally.

No matter how hard we try to remain consistent, emotions play a massive role in our productivity, and by knowing the following the five stages of grief you can anticipate your employees’ reactions and plan your response (and schedule) well ahead of time.

The stages are:

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

It’s quickly worth noting that people can move through the stages in a random order, and they can jump backward or repeat stages too. As such, it’s important to know how to deal with each step and encourage progression to the next smoothly.

The method

Guide them through denial
Denial is usually short-lived and involves team members dismissing that the change needs to happen, why it will happen, what will happen if it occurs, and even that it will happen at all. Employees, therefore, need to be allowed to take things gradually and not be swamped with too much information or too severe a change – if you change too much at once then they will naturally rebel against the thought.

If your employee is going through denial about your changes, you need to focus on open communication and taking the transition slowly in order to bring them around.

Prepare in advance for anger
Denial can often pave the way for fear to settle in, which in turn can lead to anger. This could be anger at the changes, anger at your decision to make the change, anger at their colleagues for accepting it, and so on.

Anger can also manifest either as general curtness towards the rest of the team or full-on outbursts at the slightest provocation.

While awkward and destructive, their anger is understandable. Change takes people out of their comfort zone, and doing so puts them on the defensive (often making us lash out in the process).

The key here is to realize that this is natural and to plan in advance for it. If you know that a particular employee is more likely to get angry (either by having the brunt of the changes or because of their nature), take extra care to provide communication and support so as to limit their anger.

If they blow up, continue to provide support to stop things getting out of hand.

Be firm, but listen to bargaining
Bargaining may show in the form of the employee trying to alter the change so that most things remain the same. This could be through feedback and conversations with you directly or even by convincing themselves that parts of the change are unnecessary and trying to spread that belief to their team.

This can lead to team members failing to carry out your changes in their entirety, which is almost worse than if they weren’t carried out at all.

Although they can give useful feedback you should listen to, be aware of when employees are trying to bargain for the sake of reducing the changes, and remain firm on the parts that matter. If you have up-to-date processes for your changes then make sure they are being followed fully, since any shortcuts taken now can lead to long-term inaccuracy.

Try to ease them through any depression
Change can be difficult, and it’s unrealistic to expect an employee’s mood not to affect their output. Upon reaching the depression stage, productivity will take a dive while the changes are prepared for and adjusted to. The best you can do is to limit the friction in their activities and try to make the new process rewarding or interesting in some way.

Admittedly, it’s rare that a change in your business will result in your teams coming down with full-blown depression. Even so, a minor mood dip can harshly affect their productivity, so don’t underestimate the importance of keeping spirits up.

Celebrate acceptance
Once changes are accepted then people can start building new goals around it. If they fully subscribe to (and understand) the change itself they might even experience a boost in productivity when it comes to this stage, since they might be able to build ambitious new goals with the new changes in action.

The best way to promote this productivity burst is to celebrate once the changes have been successfully upheld for a while, whether that means messaging your core promoters or rewarding particularly helpful team members.