Field notes · 5 min read
Change on top of change
Ask a leadership team how much change their people are dealing with, and you will often hear about one programme. The one on the slide. Ask the people, and you tend to hear a list: the new system, the restructure that is still settling, the new reporting line, the process that changed last month and is changing again next month.
The research suggests the list is what matters. The risk often sits less in any single change and more in how many land at once, and how often they come back.
What the research counts
When researchers asked employees about change, they found people noticed three separate things: how often change happened, how big its impact was, and how well it was planned. Those three were related, but each had its own link to how uncertain people felt, how satisfied they were with their job, and whether they were thinking of leaving (Rafferty and Griffin, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2006).
That matters for leaders, because a change plan usually only describes one of those things: the impact of this particular change. How often people have been through something similar, and how well the last one was handled, rarely appear on the page. People remember both.
Repetition shows up in health
We wrote in an earlier Field Note about the Norwegian study that followed thousands of employees for two years. Every kind of change it looked at (reorganisation, downsizing, layoffs) was linked to a higher risk of serious mental distress later. Several changes at once raised the odds by about 75 percent. Repeated change raised them the most, by 84 percent (Fløvik, Knardahl and Christensen, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health, 2019).
There was a useful detail in that study. At the level of whole work units, the link with reorganisation weakened once the researchers took account of how much control people had, how heavy their workload was and how much support they got. In other words, a good part of the harm seems to travel through what the change does to the job.
Change fatigue is real, and measurable
"Change fatigue" can sound like a complaint. Researchers in the United States treated it as something to measure. They built a short six-question scale and tested it in a manufacturing company that had been through several changes in three years. Higher change fatigue went with more exhaustion, and exhaustion went with lower commitment to the organisation and stronger plans to leave (Bernerth, Walker and Harris, Work and Stress, 2011).
Industry surveys point the same way. Gartner reported that the average employee went through 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016 (Harvard Business Review, 2023). Over the same years, the share of employees willing to support change fell from 74 percent to somewhere between 38 and 43 percent, depending on which Gartner publication you read (Gartner). Two caveats. These figures describe 2022, and they show two trends moving at the same time. They do not prove that more change caused less willingness, especially across years that included a pandemic.
Confidence carries more weight when change piles up
One study looked at 25 different changes across several organisations. The more other change was going on around people, the more their support for any single change depended on their own confidence that they could cope with it (Herold, Fedor and Caldwell, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2007).
So in a quiet year, a less confident team may still get behind a change. In a crowded year, the people who feel stretched are the ones most likely to drop off. That is a leadership problem before it is a personal one.
And the things that help are fairly ordinary. In a reorganising workplace, people were more open to change when they got clear information about it, felt able to cope, and had a say in the decisions. People who accepted the change less were less satisfied, more irritated at work and more likely to want to leave (Wanberg and Banas, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2000).
What we suggest instead
Keep one list.
Write down every change landing on each team this year, whoever owns it. HR, finance, IT and operations each tend to see only their own. The team sees all of them.
Sequence on purpose.
If two changes hit the same people in the same quarter, decide which goes first. "Both, in parallel" is a decision too, and it should be made openly.
Stop something.
Before a new initiative starts, ask what it replaces or what can be paused. If the answer is nothing, that is useful information.
Protect a recovery period.
After a big change goes live, give the team time where nothing new arrives. Gartner's own advice includes building in periods of rest (Harvard Business Review, 2023).
Build confidence, not just awareness.
Practice, coaching and early small wins build people's sense that they can cope. That sense matters most when the load is heaviest.
Ask the people carrying it.
A short, regular check on how much change people feel they are handling tells you more than a programme dashboard.
The short version
People do not experience your change portfolio one project at a time. They experience the pile. The evidence suggests frequency and repetition carry their own risk, to commitment, to retention and to health. Resilience training can help, but sequencing, pausing and stopping are the bigger levers, and they sit with leaders.
So, before the next initiative is approved: what are we taking off the pile?
Sources and further reading
- Rafferty, A. E. and Griffin, M. A. (2006). Perceptions of organizational change: A stress and coping perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology.
- Fløvik, L., Knardahl, S. and Christensen, J. O. (2019). Organizational change and employee mental health. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health.
- Bernerth, J. B., Walker, H. J. and Harris, S. G. (2011). Change fatigue: Development and initial validation of a new measure. Work and Stress.
- Herold, D. M., Fedor, D. B. and Caldwell, S. D. (2007). Beyond change management. Journal of Applied Psychology.
- Wanberg, C. R. and Banas, J. T. (2000). Predictors and outcomes of openness to changes in a reorganizing workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology.
- Ó Morain, C. and Aykens, P. (2023). Employees are losing patience with change initiatives. Harvard Business Review.
Sources are cited from published research and industry reporting. Copies are held on file and available on request.