An expert guide to why your business struggles to turn change into results

Is your organisation about to embark on a change, or perhaps you are in the middle of one? It can be a complicated process and communication is key. Alison Mills, Communications Managing Director and Pippa Halley, Organisation Behaviour Managing Director of change communications agency, Papillo, share with Fiona Alston how businesses can improve their change management with better communication and not cutting the budget at the critical point.

Unless an organisation is moving forward, it’s dying on its feet. Hundreds of millions are spent every year on strategy, transformation and structural change. There’s usually a launch and everyone walks away happy. Job done! The logic is flawless. The system is built, the merger is complete, or the new op-model is launched. Except that none of these things create value on their own. That only happens when behaviours shift. People use the new system or adopt new ways of working, letting go of old habits and doing things differently.

Too often, at this point, funding, leadership focus and attention move on. This is where a corporate blind spot tends to sit. Organisations are set up to fund and manage delivery, but not the messy, slower work that happens afterwards. Culturally, walking away teaches people that change is something leaders start, not something they stick with.

What the data says

We asked 70 businesses in Ireland and the UK a few questions about how they’re experiencing change and found that just 17% believe employees fully understand or feel motivated to support changes being introduced. Only one-fifth agree that communications relating to change are timely, relevant and engaging.

This is in an environment where 85% said change is happening more quickly than before. Nearly six out of ten are communicating several change programmes at the same time and nearly half are managing three or more major transformations at once.

The research is telling us that while the pace and volume of change are on the up, workforce capacity to absorb it doesn’t necessarily keep pace. Employers aren’t going to stop evolving, nor should they, but if they want a return on investment, their people need to change their behaviours and ways of working, and that means communicating differently.

How it plays out in the workplace

What does all this look like in a workplace? Imagine being a mid-level finance manager where a restructure is underway, a new AI system is being introduced, and a large corporate transaction is closing – all at the same time. Let’s call our manager, Kara. All of these changes are important. But each comes with its own messages, milestones and sense of urgency. Emails arrive daily from different teams, all marked critical. Every week, something different is the most important. Alongside learning new tools and processes, Kara is expected to keep performance steady and support anxious team members.

None of the changes is unreasonable on its own, but together, they overload Kara because there is no space to properly absorb one demand before the next arrives. Kara does what humans naturally do under sustained pressure: she clings to certainty. She looks for workarounds and ways to stick with the old, familiar ways instead of adopting the new. Meanwhile, her team is looking to see how she behaves and mirror her actions instead of doing what’s being asked. At the same time, Kara attends training to equip her to use the new systems, so her leaders’ assumption is that she’s being supported to effect the changes.

What is commonly diagnosed by leadership as resistance is often fatigue and self-protection. People are having a natural human response to overload, uncertainty, and inconsistency. Now imagine that replicated across an entire management layer and you can easily see how large-scale transformations that cost millions stall at this critical stage. If you want to embed change, you need to engage that vital layer: people managers. They need to be motivated to embrace it and to understand their role in it, so they become the engine instead of the blocker of transformation. This is often where investment falls off.

Addressing the challenge

First up, you need to look at all the changes that are going on and link it to your overarching strategy. Help your stakeholders make sense of what’s happening, how it will help deliver on future goals and their role in making that happen.

Triage, pace and curate communication. The reality of a modern workplace is that something’s always happening, about to happen or just happened. Be mindful of what else is going on for your people. In an environment where people are at different stages of awareness and readiness, a single approach to communications won’t cut it.

Map all the changes to see where it’s impacting most. If you can see, for example, that finance and IT middle managers and are going to carry the most load, put resources into supporting them. One size doesn’t fit all.

Look at change through the eyes of an employee. Check that you’re explaining what’s going on in a way that makes them feel that they are part of moving the organisation forward and that this isn’t just something being done to them. If you don’t, resistance starts to show up.

Be alive to how resistance shows up. Resistance to change rarely looks like outright refusal. More often, it’s hesitation, people slowing down, waiting for clarity, or deferring decisions until they feel safe to move. With change comes uncertainty. And with uncertainty comes inertia.

The result

Taking a step back, analysing who needs to know what and when, and planning how you engage people in a way that helps make sense of what’s changing and what their priorities are, will help the change take root quicker.

If the pace and volume of change continue to rise, and they will, organisations cannot afford to keep confusing delivery with value. Systems do not create returns. Strategies do not change outcomes. People do.

The organisations that realise value fastest are not those that build the smartest solutions, but those that invest in helping people understand why change is happening, what is expected of them, and how success will be measured.