Why Change Saturation Is Making Your Employees Resist Your Plans
The following is adapted from No One’s Listening and It’s Your Fault
— by Pam Marmon
Imagine, you’ve presented your brilliant, grand idea for transforming your company to your employees, but to your disappointment, all you hear in return is “But what about…?”, “That won’t work…”, and “I don’t want…” The response consists of complaints, negativity, and objections instead of the support and excitement that you expected.
If your employees are resisting your plans, the idea itself might not be the problem—change saturation could be to blame.
Too much change overwhelms and confuses people. It can make a solid plan fall apart or never take off to begin with, and as I’ll explain, as a leader, you must be mindful about how you structure organizational transformations so you can avoid change saturation in your people.
Here’s what change saturation is and how you can fight it.
Understanding Change Saturation
Have you ever experienced a season in your personal and professional life when it felt as if everything around you was changing?
Most of us have felt that way and can relate to a similar experience when relocating to a new city, starting a new job, settling into a new home, or establishing yourself in a new community. It takes a significant amount of energy to make progress on multiple fronts.
This is known as change saturation. When we become change saturated, it’s normal to feel like giving up or intentionally focusing your efforts only on your top priorities. You may have learned to cope with the stress by exercising, managing your thoughts to focus on the present rather than the unknown future, talking to friends and family, asking for help, or processing your emotions. You may pray or meditate, practice deep breathing, or listen to soothing music to relax your body and mind.
At work, you may unknowingly ignore the bustle of busyness and listen only for the relevant messages to help you cope and survive. These are normal responses when we face change saturation.
An abundance of change and the exhaustion that comes with it is common in most of the organizations I work with. As leaders, we are responsible for mindfully structuring the upcoming transformations and adjusting our expectations for how our people will experience the constant shifts. We must pay attention to the change curve and how it can help people cope with change saturation.
What Is the Change Curve?
Perhaps you are familiar with the change curve, which is an adaptation of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief curve. At the moment a change is introduced, like a company merger, for example, most people have no prior awareness of it.
The immediate reaction after the news becomes public is to think about how the change will personally impact them, regardless of whether the change is positive or negative. Will they lose their job? What will happen to their responsibilities?
Soon after, they dip into what is often described as “the valley of despair,” where productivity is at its lowest. This stage of coping with change requires people to dig deep to find their own motivations and the amount of effort they are willing to invest to move forward with the transition.
They may experience grief, but eventually emerge with hope, which takes them to engagement and, ultimately, ownership of the change. They may even be excited about the merger and the opportunities it brings.
The path may look different for those who resist the change. They may find themselves parting ways with the organization and beginning a new journey with another company.
However, it’s likely that another change will emerge, it will throw them off equilibrium, and the cycle begins again. To prevent becoming victims of change and experiencing change saturation, it’s important for your employees to learn how to live with change and adapt.
Empowering Your Employees to Cope with Change
Throughout our careers, we embrace change because we have to adapt to our new environment, and we manage change, so we don’t become obsolete and irrelevant.
While they’re more complex at an organizational level than at a personal level, the emotions associated with change stay consistent. We become anxious, unfocused, scattered, and unproductive. That triggers a set of unfortunate consequences. Key employees leave, engagement plummets, customers complain, and profits suffer.
As a leader, you must speak to people’s feelings so that you can transform their behavior. If you throw too much change at your employees without ensuring that the overall picture is cohesive, your employees will tune out instead of in.
Honoring your employees’ emotions, accepting that they’ll react to change by going through the change curve, and making sure they feel heard and supported will minimize downtime and improve your team’s reception to major changes, both good and bad.
For more advice on improving organizational communication, you can find No One’s Listening and It’s Your Fault on Amazon.
PAM MARMON is the CEO of Marmon Consulting, a change management consulting firm that provides strategy and execution services to help companies transform.
Related articles
——
[ Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash ]
Workplaces that eliminate email notifications, discourage out-of-hours communication and reduce email volume, save money and improve efficiency. When individual workers process their inbox less often, rather than continuously, they experience less stress without losing responsiveness.