Re-orgs, leadership transitions, new technologies. Pre-Covid, many employees already were experiencing change fatigue, defined as feeling apathetic towards or overwhelmed by too many organizational changes in a row.
When Covid hit, everything changed. We remember a tweet from digital health consultant Simon Terry that resonated with us: “Change fatigue. Resilience fatigue. Agility fatigue. WFH fatigue. Video-conference fatigue. Online schooling fatigue. Restriction fatigue. Conflict fatigue. Fatigue fatigue. 2020 – the international year of fatigue.” The heightened level of uncertainty in both our work and home lives pushed many of us into change exhaustion. Gartner found that employees’ ability to cope with change in 2020 was at 50% of pre-pandemic levels.
How can leaders help their teams combat change exhaustion — or step out of its clutches? Too often, organizations simply encourage their employees to be resilient, placing the burden of finding ways to feel better solely on individuals. Leaders need to recognize that change exhaustion is not an individual issue, but a collective one that needs to be addressed at the team or organization level.
Based on research we did for our book Big Feelings, here are four practices leaders can use to help their team or organization collectively combat change exhaustion.
Pause to acknowledge change, and the discomfort that comes with it.
Navigating uncertainty requires that we push back against our natural impulse to run from discomfort. When faced with anxiety, we tend to immediately jump into action-mode. Psychologists call this “anxious fixing,” and it doesn’t help us, or the people around us. Rather than addressing the root cause of our anxiety, we work ourselves into exhaustion trying to find immediate relief.
Say a team is changing its return-to-office plan. If you’re a leader, you may react by trying to drum up excitement and send a flurry of emails with new dates and timelines, without stopping to acknowledge the emotional toll the shift might be taking on your people. Chances are your team is weary of new announcements and another plan for coming back to the office. Make it a priority to set aside time in an upcoming meeting for people to share their feelings, voice concerns, and ask questions.
This practice can be helpful outside of Covid-related uncertainty, like when someone joins the team. Gartner’s study found that smaller scale, personal changes — getting assigned to a new manager or moving to a new team — were 2.5 times more fatiguing than larger transformational changes like mergers or acquisitions. But how often do leaders pause when changing team assignments and give voice to the discomfort that employees may feel from these changes? We recommend having an employee’s former manager meet with both the employee and the employee’s new manager to talk through the details of the change, acknowledge the anxiety the employee may be feeling, and create space for the employee to share their emotions and ask questions.
Adopt the mantra, “I am a person who is learning _______.”
Sitting with uncertainty helps us confront the fact that we don’t have all the answers. Of course, that can be frightening, especially if you’re someone who likes to feel in control. To help yourself and your team shift from anxiety to a growth mindset, reframe the situation. When we tell ourselves, “I am a person learning to ______” versus “I can’t do this” or “I need to have this all figured out already,” we start to see ourselves as empowered agents of change.
Here are a few examples of how you can reframe the not knowing:
Instead of “I don’t know enough to manage people in a remote environment. I can’t do this,” tell yourself, “I’m learning to be a great manager in a remote environment.”
Instead of “I’m a nervous wreck about doing in-person presentations again” tell yourself, “I’m learning how to present in front of live audiences again.”
We recommend doing this as an exercise with your team by asking them to fill in the phrase, “I am a person learning to____” or “We are a team learning to _____.” It can be helpful to hear what others are navigating, so individual team members feel less alone and can more easily support each other. It can also be useful to better understand each person’s comfort level with uncertainty. (You can take our uncertainty tolerance assessment here.) If you know everyone on your team prefers to avoid uncertainty, for example, you can take extra steps to ensure that everyone understands the path forward. READ MORE
by Mollie West Duffy and Liz Fosslien
Source: hbr.org
Trust and emotional connection play a key role in attracting and retaining workers, particularly as the nature of work continues to change, according to a Sept. 20 report based on HP’s first Work Relationship Index. The report showed that employees want to work for an employer with empathetic and emotionally intelligent leaders, and they’d even be willing to take a pay cut for such a job.
To drive greater internal employee mobility, companies may need to address talent “hoarding,” according to the report, if managers attempt to retain their best people. Leaders may need to consider incentives to encourage internal hiring and cooperation across the organization.
AESC is currently collecting responses to their Global Research: “Leadership, Opportunities and Transformation”. We encourage you to share your views on issues related to uncertainty, Artificial Intelligence, DEI and more by completing the survey.
