❔Is Your Company’s Culture Contributing to Change Fatigue?

One of the surest signs of a thriving enterprise is robust and consistent revenue growth. Growth is what drives company performance, creates shareholder value, attracts talent, fosters innovation, and creates jobs. However, companies that continually push for growth often do so at the expense of worker well-being, which has taken a hit the last few years due to the pandemic and unrelenting pace of change.

Change is a powerful driver of business growth and unfortunately, many workers are tired of it. According to research from Gartner, the average employee experienced ten planned business transformations in 2022, compared to just two in 2016. The impact of so much change on the employee experience led HR leaders in the same study to rank employee burnout and fatigue as their top change management concerns for this year.

It doesn’t help that many employees also struggle to take time off from work. In the 2023 Work in America Survey, only 40 percent of workers reported that their employer offered a culture where time off and personal boundaries were respected, and nearly 50 percent of employees do not take all their available paid time off.

Corporate culture also plays a key role in whether employees feel confident taking all their paid leave. It’s important that managers encourage their employees to take regular breaks from work, and for employees to prioritize taking breaks throughout the workday for their own physical and mental health. These momentary pauses can help people be more resilient when stressors arise, and better deal with the daily grind.

Author, coach, and mental health expert Brad Stulberg, reinforces the importance of breaks using exercise science as an example. In his article, Peak Performance: Exercise Science Shows Why We Should Never Feel Guilty About Taking a Break, Stulberg writes that the best way to grow a muscle, whether it’s a physical, psychological, or organizational one, and to sustain high performance isn’t to work hard constantly. Instead, he says, people need to commit to cycles of intense effort, followed by periods of rest and recovery. 

For most growth-driven organizations, rest and recovery remains an individual responsibility, versus a corporate one. This is problematic considering workplaces are among the most influential networks in people’s lives, and the repercussions of having overworked and overwhelmed employees can be severe.
Striking the right balance between worker well-being and business growth is key and change management can help. Change management is both a multi-disciplinary practice that recognizes the vital role people play in successful strategy execution, and an operating model for business transformation success.

The first step leaders can take is to figure out the full picture as it relates to the landscape of initiatives that are happening across the organization. The reality is that many business units operate in silos and proceed with strategy execution without regard for the initiatives originating from other departments or lanes. This will require in-depth conversations with business unit leaders to understand what each team is working on and who will be impacted by the changes.

The next step is to develop a system and structure to help pace and prioritize strategic initiatives according to their business value and impact on employees specific to the degree of behavior change required for the initiative to succeed. Operationalizing the change process creates a predictable cadence, making it easier for employees to plan their schedules around initiatives and take time for breaks. Operationalizing the change process also establishes the norms for how the organization works, which in turn becomes a tenet of the culture.

The last step in recalibrating company culture to prevent burnout and fatigue is to incorporate planned downtime between planned changes, which will require a concerted effort across leaders and teams. It will also require oversight at the organization level to ensure the new ways of working are maintained. A committee of cross-functional leaders can handle this, ideally each of whom understands the business needs, values employee well-being, and knows how to leverage change management as a filter for decision making.

Transforming a company's culture doesn't happen overnight. However, growth-driven organizations that commit to using change management as a lever to alleviate fatigue will not only improve strategy execution and the employee experience, but, thanks to the integration of much-needed breaks, will position themselves for future breakthrough performance.