As well as being true of our personal lives, the constancy of change is often the case in organisations, too. The risk associated with constant organisational change is that employees begin to experience change fatigue—a lingering sense of weariness and negative reactions to change such as frustration, burnout or apathy.
Why is change fatigue damaging to organisations? Because lack of employee support is one of the top reasons for failed change attempts. Since not making any changes is not an option for organisations, we need to look at increasing the capacity of employees to absorb and cope with changes.
“Change is the only constant in life.”
Greek philosopher Heraclitus
This article from the Australian HR Institute contains some excellent practical suggestions on how to combat change fatigue and is worth a full read, but I will summarise some of these below.
The first is to involve employees in the change process. Create an environment where people can speak openly about the changes, provide feedback and actively participate in shaping the decisions. Participation is useful for helping employees see the value behind the change and increasing their emotional motivation for supporting the change.
The other key suggestion is to start from seeing changes from the perspective of those who will be impacted by them. Does the organisation currently meet their needs and will the proposed changes help with this? This perspective contains five steps:
- Pause—yes, have your vision but start with ensuring this meets the end goal.
- Listen—listen to your team.
- Empower—involve, enable and empower your team.
- Co-create and collaborate—work together on a shared goal.
- Reiterate—seek and reflect on feedback.
To manage the underlying contributors to change fatigue, we need to focus on how employees experience those changes not just on the behavioural outcomes.
Photograph
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels.