The change of fatigue can reduce employees and organizations, and this is getting worse. To reduce damage, companies turn to more thoughtful and progressive strategies.
The idea that “change is the only constant” goes back to the Héraclitus Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, about 2,500 years ago. But the pace of change in today’s business world often seems to go beyond the capacity of executives and their teams to adapt.
Barely a fashion driven by human resources, the phenomenon known as “fatigue of change” can affect results thanks to the unsubscribe of the workforce, a reduced capacity of workers to adapt to changes additional and lower productivity.
Managers should “treat fatigue of change as a commercial risk”, explains Hilary Richards, vice-president Advisory in Finance Practice in Stamford, consultant based in Connecticut, Gartner.
Whether it is to adopt new technologies or react to external changes, many, if not most companies, seem to be in a constant state of flow. More than 75% of companies reorganize their business model every two to five years, according to a study by Walkme, a software company based in San Franciso as a service.
Nowhere will change the tired ring more true than in business financing. Financial departments play a myriad of new strategic roles when a company implements digital transformations, business resources planning and artificial intelligence (AI).
“Financial directors have quite important mandates to support growth, manage species and change of process,” notes Richards. However, only a third of business change projects are deemed successful, according to the Walkme report. Two-thirds of workers declare professional exhaustion during transformation disks and stress at work represents 8% of national health expenses in the United States.
Another recent report by Orgvue, a London-based organizational design and organizational planning platform, revealed that 38% of CEOs would prefer that directing a major transformation.
“ Things cannot be improved ”
Its capacity of customers to adapt to change began to decline around 2017, recalls Jenny Magic, founder and CEO of Build Better Change, a advice based in Austin, Texas, and co-author of “Change Fatigue: Flip Team From Burnout to Adaching. “”
“Higher leadership was interested, but intermediate managers and people who do the work were less able to do it,” she recalls. A recently published report by his cabinet “validates that things are not improving”.
Some evidence show them getting worse.
“The average employee knew 10 changes of business planned in 2022, against two in 2016,” notes a Gartner report, “and there is no reason to expect the pace to slow down. But the labor hit the wall; the share of employees wishing to support the change of business collapsed at only 38% in 2022, against 74% in 2016. ”
In response, some organizations become creative; Examples can be found among the two company giants – Danone, Liberty Mutual – and by relative purposes. Companies opt for changes in change managed by consultants with large names or specialized emerging competitors. In addition to advising managers, these increasingly publicized professionals hold conferences, provide training and write articles with titles such as “three ways to minimize fatigue of change among financial teams”.
Large -scale transformation, done better
The solutions according to which the promoting consultants tackle two types of distinct changes – transformation on a scale and accumulative changes.
Major initiatives tend to promote faster speed and greater range. However, there are signs that more progressive solutions could be more effective and less traumatic.
These discs tend to be implemented in response to large external events, such as a severe economic slowdown, the cocovio pandemic and its repercussions, or important trends in technology such as artificial intelligence. But that could reflect an obsolete thought, supports Oliver Shaw, CEO of Orgvue.
“Change came much less frequently” a few decades ago, he said. Executives “have developed pulses [to act]: “Change is necessary now!” “As a banker who experienced the 2008 financial crisis,” I thought that at the end of this, I would not see anything like this anymore. “”
Now, so-called unique events seem a bit of end.
The complete transformation, often involving cuts, could be too frank in a constantly evolving world, maintains Shaw. Risks include high starting indemnity and other costs related to large -scale layoffs. Fortune companies 500 which underwent a significant restructuring of the workforce in 2023 carried 32.7 billion dollars in departure compensation that year and carried more than $ 10.9 billion in 2024 in As long as charges or liabilities, according to data compiled by Orgvue.
According to a Bloomberg study in 2024, the costs of Bloomberg employees on lists of securities and the trade commission include a reduction in productivity (about six months); an increase in voluntary departures; increase in unemployment insurance tax; and higher legal costs, mainly to avoid prosecution for alleged discrimination.
Danone has taken a different path when he considered a large -scale change; He used what an Orgvue case study calls for a “continuous design approach to organizational development to remove the need for expensive, reactive and high -risk transformation projects”. Instead of reducing jobs, the multinational food and drinking company based in Paris has revised its human resources processes and has shortened its annual period planning period to a quarter to better follow the demand and supply of work. They were able to “understand how [to make adjustments] Through time, ”says Shaw.
As with any disease, the best “remedy” is sometimes preventive medicine. When Swedish Payments Fintech Klarna wanted to reduce the general costs in 2023, it reduced trauma via layoffs by outsourcing approximately 500 jobs in two partner companies. Internally, he implemented a job freeze and embarked on an economic AI adoption campaign. “They take advantage of their margins by pulling an AI,” notes Shaw.
Danone and Klarna are examples of companies where managers “include organizations and systems”. If the average company has an attrition rate of 15%, according to Shaw, it should be able to milk this in tandem with internal reallocations to make significant reductions without excessive trauma.
“Slow down now, accelerate later”
After a merger, the risk and insurance services based in San Diego borrowed what seemed to be a process of integration of hell. Employees worried about their future with the company. No one could agree on the technology to adopt.
“People presented themselves against each other during meetings when there was no need,” recalls Eric Brown, founder and CEO of Imperio Consulting, based in Florida, who was brought to help facilitate the process.
A veteran of American special forces, Brown relies on this context of his practice. Instead of changing fatigue, the American army calls it “operator syndrome”. Constant pressure and uncertainty can exhaust people.
“The business world reflects this experience of many respects,” he says, “in particular in finance, with its technological overload, its unpredictable markets and its constantly evolving regulations. It’s like trying to stay stable on the exchange sand, and it can be exhausting. »»
Brown remembers saying a client, “Let’s slow down now so that we can accelerate later.” The soldiers consider him a sequence “crawling, walking, running”. With the membership of the best C3 brass, Brown was able to help integrate this approach into the integration plan largely using exercises and team consolidation tools.
“They took it to heart,” he said, investing in training and dialogue with employees. In 2023 and 2024, C3 was tabuated as the first place of work by commercial insurance and the San Diego Business Journal. “C3 are rock stars,” adds Brown.
C3’s experience also highlights the need to meet the second of the two types of fatigue of changes that consultants identify: the accumulation of small changes. Like the water that is based behind the grinning proverbial dam, they can ultimately threaten the structural integrity of an organization.
Employees feel more and more harassed by the almost non-stop accumulation of relatively minor changes affecting management strategies, the team composition and the post description, Gartner revealed. The employees feel without power by a descending change which comes without debate or discussion. The professional exhaustion of the old school and the increase in turnover if the employees cannot recover and recharge a disruptive event before the next one.
Hoping to ward off the death cycle of fatigue by 1,000 cuts, Liberty Mutual has designed a process to identify the fears and hypotheses of employees. It started with questions to help workers make peace with change. The tools included change workshops as well as the commitment and comments of employees. Such initiatives can help solve the problems hiding below the surface.
“Most of the senior C-Suite focuses on the tip of the iceberg,” explains Richards. “This is what they paid. But your team will meet this iceberg. »»