Fear, anger, anxiety, sadness, shock – these are the emotions that tend to characterise big change.  

In a study by the American Psychological Association, workers who reported being affected by organisation change either currently or in the last year were twice as likely to report chronic stress, four times more likely to report negative physical health symptoms, three times more likely to say they don’t trust their employer and three times more likely to feel cynical and negative towards their colleagues.  

Whether you approach this from the perspective of the CEO or the frontline employee, these are some pretty awful and damaging outcomes.  

For me, change management is fundamentally broken – at least how it’s still practiced inside many large organisations. For all the clever branding, top-down dictats, ‘war rooms’ filled with clever people armed with Gantt charts, and full-on change communication campaigns, may organisational change programmes simply fail to deliver (the hard science on this is admittedly sketchy, but we often see failure rates in the region of 60-80% cited). If, like me, you’ve seen this sort of thing up close, then you’ll know this isn’t far from the truth.

According to many commentators, we’re about to see more disruption and change in the workplace than ever before as organisations begin to grapple with the transformative impact of Gen AI.  According to a recent Gallup poll, 85% of senior leaders predict an ‘explosive increase’ in organisational change projects in the next five years.  

So this is our opportunity. This is our time. If we’re serious about creating a positive experience for employees, then change is the place to start.    

Humans thrive on change. We relish it. In the words of William Bridges, ‘it is when we are in transition that we are most alive’.  Change should be and can be a positive, uplifting experience – an opportunity for employees to grow, thrive, learn new things, meet new people and so much more.  But, to make this a reality, we need to do change differently – we need to use the tools and techniques of employee experience to internationally design and co-create a better change experience.