Change was constantly emerging as a key topic during the last two years. While businesses must innovate and drive positive changes to grow, the people behind those new projects are often overwhelmed. According to a survey by Limeade, 59% of managers say they feel overworked, with 72% saying they have felt more pressure to deliver during the pandemic.

In 2020, Jessica Knight, Vice President at Gartner, said that the amount of change the average employee can absorb without becoming fatigued is 50%  less than the year before. We can only imagine the stress that people have experienced over the past three years – caused by the hybrid working models, job insecurities, the war in Ukraine, and increasing inflation.

Many organisations still lack the structure and strategies to help their employees manage change successfully. Luckily, simple yet efficient management tools can help you lead people through changes with confidence, clarity, and vision. But first, let’s walk you through the concept of organisational change fatigue.

What is organisational change fatigue?

Remember Zoom fatigue? The feeling of tiredness, disengagement, and apathy whenever we had to join just another meeting or webinar? Well, organisational change fatigue is similar to that level of frustration. It can be defined as a lack of engagement or passive reaction toward suggested organisational changes.

These changes are often small disruptions on the team level – such as frequent turnover in one team or even a new CRM software which could sometimes take ages for everyone to understand and master. We asked Vuk Vukanovic, the regional manager at Awards International, to share his perspective on change management. This is what he told us:

Accumulation of these ‘micro’ disruptions, when not addressed appropriately, often leads to organisational change fatigue. This further negatively impacts employee engagement, satisfaction, and general productivity. How should this concern leaders and CEOs?

In June 2022, McKinsey suggested that companies which can ‘effectively organise and manage CX’ see a 20% uplift in customer satisfaction, a 15% increase in sales conversion, a 30% growth in employee engagement and a 30% drop in cost-to-serve. What this analysis says is that there is a direct link between CX and EX. Therefore, the more leaders ignore organisational change fatigue and avoid investing in people, the more they lose.

Change assessment: force field analysis

In 2021, Gallup published research showing that almost 85% of employees worldwide are still not engaged at work. Furthermore, they said that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined by the manager. With that in mind, here are tools for organisational change management. This is to help team leaders gain the needed clarity and vision of change.

Before exposing your employees to another change, consider conducting Lewin’s force field analysis– a simple tool that will help you assess factors influencing your change initiative. It will take five steps to conduct force field analysis:  

• Define desired change: brainstorm as a team the change you want to see in three to six months.

• Identify the driving forces: define supporting factors that will push the change forward.  

• Identify the restraining forces: talk to stakeholders who can share honest feedback on potential threats and setbacks of your initiative.

• Evaluate the forces: for a change to happen, driving forces must dominate.

• Build your action plan: make a step-by-step action plan and share it with all team members.

Doing this exercise with your team might help you build expectations and predict factors for people to reject or embrace the change initiative. For any change to happen, driving forces must be dominant and strong enough for people to stay engaged and motivated.

For instance, regulatory laws and policies regarding first-party cookies are a driving force for marketers to rethink their strategies. On the other hand, fear of leaving the comfort zone and facing a failure with the new business model might be a restraining force in your team.

Four prerequisites for successful organisational change

According to the book ‘The five dysfunctions of a team‘ by Patrick Lencioni, there are five elements signalling misalignments within one team:

• Absence of trust
• Fear of conflict
• Lack of commitment
• Avoidance of accountability
• Inattention to results

While this article doesn’t intend to explain in detail what each of these elements means, it will serve as guidelines and a checklist for creating the environment for successful change in management.

1. Trust and team cohesion

Trust relationships are prerequisites for running a successful business. The strength of relationships with your employees and customers determines your long-term success and revenue. According to Gartner, employees who report high trust have an average capacity for change that is 2.6 times greater than those with low trust. Furthermore, their research says that employees with strong team cohesion have a capacity for change 1.8 times greater than the capacity of those with low team cohesion.

While strategies for building trust should be discussed in a separate article, we can say that trust comes with vulnerability, safe space for honest conversations, and regular coaching sessions. Additionally, bringing everyone together across teams will help you break silos, the greatest risk of missing out an important customer or employee perspective.

2. Setting realistic goals

To commit to a change, people need to know the end goal is realistic. Furthermore, setting a clear goal helps explain what’s in it for your employees. How will they achieve their personal goals while going through a specific organisational transition?

In her latest book ‘Built to Win’, Annette Franz shares another useful checklist for assessing change. Here is a list of questions your employees might want to have answered before accepting to be part of another change:

• What’s the business change we want to see?
• Why is it changing?
• How long will it take?
• What’s the impact on the business?
• What does it mean for me?
• What’s my role?
• What happens if I don’t get involved?
• What happens if the company doesn’t change?

3. Assess your team’s skills and feelings

“Can I really do it?” This is the question you surely asked yourself at least a few times throughout your career. According to a Harward Business Review article, one of the most common reasons people resist change is the concern about their competencies.

Fear of failure and additional workload is common in fast-paced companies. Therefore, assessing individual and team skills helps managers distribute tasks in line with individuals’s strengths and weaknesses.

We suggest taking the time for one-on-one coaching sessions with each team member and discovering more about what’s on their plates. This includes conversations about their feelings.

‘People want to talk about their feelings, but most people haven’t been given permission. Unfortunately, most leaders underestimate the impact emotions have on their teams. They typically use cognitive values and behaviours to shape their workplace culture,’ shared Jeremy Dean for Customer Experience Magazine.

4. Embrace agile thinking

Reflecting on the past three years of constant uncertainties and tapping into the unknown, I hope there is at least one thing we have learned: to pivot. The change you have in mind might be impacted by socio-economic factors overnight and force you to postpone some initiatives for a later moment.

Embracing an agile mindset might save you some stress and money. And if you practice agility on the team level, accepting change as something new to be explored and learned from might keep your team stable and cohesive.

In her article on how agile management can prevent burnout and organisational change fatigue, Olga Potaptseva shares three effective agile methodologies:

• set a clear action focused task
• use technology
• get used to skill-based allocation of tasks

Include your staff members in decisions related to their work, keep team tasks accessible and visible, and ensure consistent progress assessment. Keeping people in the loop will allow them to manage independently, avoiding the need for you to micro-manage, shares Potaptseva.

Organisational change fatigue is real, and your employees might be facing it today. What are you going to do about it?