How to navigate the five stages of pandemic grief

Around the world companies and organisations face challenges as their staff head back to the workplace.

The five stages of grief are built on the incredible work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who died in 2004.

As companies navigate a slow return to ordinary life and work routines after the coronavirus pandemic, they must understand and acknowledge that employees will need varying kinds of support. This is not a time to check the policy manual or to robotically “copy all” with messages about thoughts and prayers. This is a time to help each individual with his or her particular grief.

Putting that name — grief — on it has proved to be a powerful way to help anxious colleagues make progress toward normalcy. Grief is well understood, so we know of ways to deal with it. The five stages of grief are built on the incredible work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who died in 2004. They are adapted from her landmark work in the late 1960s on the five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance.

Together she and I applied them to grief. It is imperative to recognise that these stages are not linear; they don’t happen in predictable time frames; you may experience all or only some of them.

As people go back to work, or as those who’ve stayed on the job through the crisis begin to interact with returning workers, many will still be grieving. Not everyone will be at the same stage at the same time. Employees, leaders, managers and organisations need to recognise this.

Most important is to allow people to feel these stages. Allowing yourself to experience the stages of grief is how you get to that fifth stage: acceptance. There, unsurprisingly, is where the power is. In acceptance we regain control, because we are no longer fighting the truth.

Finding the right interventions

I’ve talked to many companies during this pandemic, including some very large ones. My primary message to them is: Avoid blanket policies; don’t think that all employees need the same support. And recognise that we grieve other losses as well as the loss of health or life.

Leaders should think about three groups of people all working together. First are the worried well. They’re healthy. They haven’t experienced sickness around them, but they are concerned. They may still be grieving losses of work, of normalcy, of opportunities and events.

The worried well are also experiencing anticipatory grief — deep anxiety in which the mind imagines future losses, of all the above and more, and the effect on loved ones. Within this group are minimisers and maximisers. Minimisers cope by denying the severity of the situation or hoping deeply, nervously, for the best. Maximisers imagine the sky is falling. The truth lies somewhere between the two points of view.

Second are the affected, who were sick themselves or know someone who was sick but has recovered or will recover. These people haven’t just imagined trauma — they’ve experienced it. They will benefit from accommodation and validation. Some may need counselling and other support mechanisms. The third group holds the bereaved. They have lost a loved one, are grieving a death and will be dealing directly with the five stages. Many of them will be far from acceptance.

Simply recognising these three groups and adjusting interventions specifically for each will go a long way toward helping workers heal. In the workplace, much talk is about how to engage employees. When I work with companies, I tell them that if someone is grieving a loss, that is a powerful opportunity to engage them. What keeps people in jobs and dedicated is not their compensation packages or a project they worked on. It’s “when my loved one died, my boss did this very thoughtful thing”. Or “they checked on me during a crisis”.

Finding meaning

Like any other framework, the five stages of grief are a distillation of complex ideas. It was always challenging for Kübler-Ross — one of the 20th century’s great thinkers and the author of dozens of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages — to see her life’s work reduced to those five words. People started viewing them as “five easy steps to grief”, but she and I would tell you there’s nothing easy about them. Late in her life, we talked about how acceptance had taken on a kind of finality in the grief process that neither of us had intended. Some people believed that if they reached acceptance, they were finished. We talked informally about stages beyond acceptance — hope, maybe, or finding meaning after grief. I started to write a little about what came after acceptance.

Then, in 2016, my younger son, David, died unexpectedly. I cancelled everything and stayed home for weeks. It felt as brutal as I could ever have imagined.

Eventually, I came across the writing I had done on meaning. It didn’t take the pain away, but it did provide a cushion. I did not want to stop at acceptance. I started to notice that people who felt stuck in grief were those who were unable to find meaning.

I began to see meaning as the sixth stage of grief. I was honoured when the Kübler-Ross family and foundation allowed me to add it to the grief stages.

I believe that many of us will be looking for this sixth stage in the wake of the pandemic. I’m not talking about finding meaning in a terrible event. Rather, meaning is what you find, and what you make, after it. That won’t make a loss seem worth the cost. It will never be worth the cost. But meaning can heal painful memories and help us keep moving forward.

Meaning comes in many forms. An effort to remember the joy that something or someone gave before the loss can bring meaning. Rituals of remembrance can bring meaning. Meaning comes in moments and actions that heal, even if just a little. I suspect that with the pandemic we’ll find meaning sooner than we do with many losses, because we’re all in this together over a relatively long time. I’ve found some meaning already. For me, writing articles like this one helps create meaning. Does it make experiencing a pandemic worth it? Absolutely not. But it is healing.

The pandemic is one season in our lives; it will end. It will be remembered as an extraordinarily difficult time. But the slow process of returning to a new normal — of naming our grief, helping one another reach acceptance and finding meaning — will continue. For leaders, that moment will be an opportunity.

David Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief His latest book is Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. He is the founder of Grief.com.

Harvard Business Review