How to Recognize Change Fatigue in Your People

What happens when too many project changes begin to take a physical and emotional toll on your people? How can you help them when the changes just keep coming? Continuous change is almost expected today, but you don't have to simply accept the negative effects. Here's how to recognize fatigue, assess the impacts, and find solutions. 

Change saturation vs. change fatigue

Change saturation occurs in organizations when disruptive changes exceed your capacity to adopt them. Your organization is likely saturated when turmoil becomes the norm, projects can’t be prioritized easily, bottlenecks begin to slow progress, and project outcomes begin to suffer.

When the organization experiences change saturation, employees begin to exhibit signs of change fatigue on both personal and professional levels. It’s easy to see why. In recent years, people have been asked to adopt changes associated with remote work, new business models, new technologies, organizational restructuring, political and regulatory changes, culture initiatives, ongoing digitalization, and more. On top of that, virtual engagements and workplaces are creating an always-on mentality that can wear people down.

Changes pressuring your mission and strategy today

Balancing a portfolio of strategic changes is easier with an experienced partner. 
The Prosci Advisory team can help.

Roles most affected by change

Although everyone feels the impacts of change, Prosci Best Practices in Change Management benchmarking research shows that individuals in certain functional areas experience more change saturation than others. For example, roles in operations, customer service, sales, human resources and, of course, the change management office see more than their fair share of change initiatives.

Of these roles, people managers and front-line employees experience the greatest levels of change saturation. People managers often implement changes and tend to feel the impacts first. And because changes cascade through organizations from the top down, front-line employees tend to bear the cumulative effects of ongoing change more than any other role.

Symptoms and signs of change fatigue

How will you know when your people are fatigued? The ADKAR Model shows us that individuals react to change in predictable ways, including how they exhibit fatigue from change saturation.

Here’s what to look for:

• Noise – More frequent and louder complaints about changes
• Apathy – Growing indifference about project changes, with some completely disengaging; employees stop asking questions 
• Burnout – Employees are visibly tired
• Stress – People seem anxious about changes
• Resistance – Some push back on change with more energy while others don't resist at all
• Negativity – Cynicism prevails
• Skepticism – Individuals express doubt about change success

When people show these symptoms and signs, organizations also suffer consequences. For example, change-fatigued employees tend to produce less, take more time off, and even quit their jobs more frequently. Morale begins to erode across the organization, and employees lose their focus on business basics.