- Employees are rarely tired of change itself. They are tired of change that feels arbitrary, disconnected from their work or unlikely to make a lasting difference.
- They’re likely to be wary of one-size-fits-all messaging, a focus on end states and mistaking new tech for change.
- Employees are already telling stories about transformation, in meetings, messages, team conversations and exit interviews. Pay attention to them.
- The question for any leader running a transformation isn’t whether their people will engage. It’s whether the story they’ve been given is one worth engaging with.
Most leaders don’t realise their workforce has already priced in the assumption that this transformation, like the last three, will quietly fade. Employees are rarely reacting to a single change programme in isolation. There is almost always another initiative underway, with a name, a senior leader behind it, a timeline and a promise that the organisation will work differently once the work is complete.
For leaders, these transformations feel necessary because markets shift, technology advances, customer expectations change and organisations need to respond. For employees, the experience can feel very different, as they hear the announcement, take on extra work and wait to see whether the latest effort creates meaningful progress.
When employees hold back from fully engaging with the transformation in question, this is often labelled resistance, but in many cases it’s a rational response to repeated change that has failed to instil belief. Employees are rarely tired of change itself. They are tired of change that feels arbitrary, disconnected from their work or unlikely to make a lasting difference.
This is where communication becomes essential. A strong change story explains where the organisation has come from, where it is going, why the journey matters and how people fit into that direction. People commit when they understand what the work is asking them to do and why it’s worth doing. Three mistakes tend to stop that from happening.
The one-size-fits-all message
Most change communication still follows a one-size-fits-all model, where a small group at the centre decides the message, packages it into presentations and expects the same explanation to work across the whole organisation.
The assumption is that if the strategy is explained clearly enough, people will understand it and act on it. This overlooks how people make sense of change, because employees interpret messages through their own context, history and concerns. A message that sounds energising at executive level may sound unrealistic to the teams expected to deliver it.
Leaders can create a shared narrative that teams can make their own. The core direction should stay consistent, but its explanation should reflect different roles, customers and working environments. A product team, finance team and operations team should all understand the same overall story, while being able to explain what that story means for their own work.
The destination fixation
Change programmes often focus heavily on end states, such as a platform migration, new operating model or target improvement by a specific date. This gives leaders a clean way to organise the work, but it can also train employees to treat change as a temporary disruption.
Once the deadline passes, the organisation moves on, whether the new way of working has taken hold or not. This is one reason people wait change programmes out, because they have seen initiatives end when the timeline ended, rather than when the organisation had genuinely changed.
Leaders can instead frame change as a continuing capability, with visible progress along the way. Leaders need to show progress in a rhythm that matches how work actually happens, so if teams work in regular releases or quarterly cycles, the change story should move with that cadence and show what has been learned, what has improved and what comes next.
When progress is visible, employees are less likely to see transformation as something imposed from above. They can see how the work is developing and how their contribution is shaping the next stage. That sense of movement is essential, because belief grows when people can connect effort to progress.
The spreadsheet story
The third mistake is mistaking the platform for the change. A new tool, operating model or technology stack is treated as if it will, by its arrival, produce the new behaviour the organisation needs. It won’t. The change is what people decide to do differently, and that decision is rarely made on the strength of a financial case alone.
Logic matters, but it rarely carries behaviour on its own. Change asks people to give up familiar routines, accept uncertainty and learn new ways of working, which requires emotional commitment as well as understanding. If leaders only explain the benefits and ignore what people may feel they are losing, the story will not be trusted.
Leaders can make people the centre of the change story. A new operating model becomes easier to understand when employees can see what it means for their decisions, capabilities and contribution. Telling someone that the company is reorganising around product teams gives them information, while helping them understand how their role will shift and create more value gives them a reason to engage.
Leaders should also look for stories already emerging in the organisation. A team that solved a customer problem in a new way, a group that changed how it made decisions, or a function that learned from a difficult release can all show the wider change in practical terms. These examples are often more powerful than another presentation because they make progress visible.
Moving from announcements to belief
Narrative is not a communications exercise that happens after the transformation plan has been written. It needs to be part of how change is designed, led and measured from the beginning, because the story people believe will shape the behaviour they bring to the work.
Employees are already telling stories about transformation, in meetings, messages, team conversations and exit interviews. The question is whether leaders are shaping those stories with clarity and honesty, or leaving people to conclude that this is another programme they simply need to wait out.
So the question for any leader running a transformation isn’t whether their people will engage. It’s whether the story they’ve been given is one worth engaging with. If it isn’t, no amount of communication will fix it, and the workforce will do what it has learned to do: wait.
Alex Adamopoulos is CEO of Emergn.
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