There is a familiar moment in organisational change. A new system is introduced. A restructure is underway. Priorities have shifted again. Another process is being redesigned. And somewhere in the conversation, someone says: “People are resistant to change.” And look, sometimes they are. But I think we reach for that explanation too quickly.
Across qualitative feedback we’ve been analysing from Australian operational workforces, employees are not simply saying they want things to stay the same*. In fact, many seem perfectly comfortable with change when they can understand its purpose and see how it will improve the work. What frustrates them is something different – competing priorities, changes that arrive before earlier ones have settled, systems that don’t integrate properly, manual work created by supposed improvements, and/or unclear direction.
Decisions made without sufficient understanding of what they will mean on the ground. And perhaps most importantly, work that keeps being added without anything being taken away. That isn’t necessarily resistance. Sometimes it is change debt.
Employees experience the cumulative change, not the project plan
Organisations tend to manage change in discrete pieces: the technology transformation, the new operating model, the restructure, the safety initiative, the customer program, the new reporting process, and the leadership restructure. Each one has a business case, a sponsor, milestones and probably a project plan. But employees don’t experience those initiatives separately.
They experience the new system while still using part of the old one. They experience the restructure while vacancies remain unfilled. They attend training while trying to maintain normal output. They learn a new process while another team is changing an adjacent process. They respond to a new strategic priority while last quarter’s priority hasn’t disappeared.
From the employee’s point of view, the relevant unit of analysis isn’t the project. It is the total amount of change landing in the job. And that distinction matters. Research on change fatigue has described it as a response to repeated organisational change rather than a dislike of any particular change. Early research developing a measure of change fatigue found relationships with employee exhaustion, organisational commitment and intentions to leave.
Australian psychosocial safety guidance now makes a related distinction. Safe Work Australia explicitly states that poor organisational change management is more than employees simply disliking a change. It becomes a psychosocial hazard when change is poorly planned, communicated, supported or managed, particularly when exposure is severe, prolonged or frequent. That should change the conversation. Instead of asking only whether employees are ready for the next change, we should also be asking: What are they already carrying?
Sometimes the resistance makes sense
“Resistance” is a useful concept, but it can also become a convenient label. It locates the problem inside the employee. They aren’t agile enough. They don’t understand the strategy. They prefer the old way. They need to develop a change mindset. Again, sometimes those things are true. But imagine an employee who has experienced several changes intended to make work easier. The first creates an additional reporting requirement. The second introduces a system that doesn’t talk properly to another system. The third changes accountabilities, but confusion remains about who owns particular decisions. The fourth asks the employee to adopt a new process while maintaining the same output expectations. By the fifth change, that employee may be sceptical.
Calling that scepticism “resistance” misses something important. They have learnt from experience. What looks like resistance may actually be a judgement about the organisation’s capacity to execute change well. That doesn’t mean leaders should abandon the change. It means scepticism can contain useful information.
Change creates work
One of the most under-appreciated facts about transformation is that change itself creates work. Someone has to learn the new system. Someone has to transfer the data. Someone has to attend the briefing. Someone has to explain the new process. Someone has to work out what happens when the new procedure meets an exception nobody anticipated. Someone has to keep the operation functioning while all of this occurs. Yet organisations regularly plan for the outcome of change without adequately accounting for the workload of getting there.
Safe Work Australia’s current guidance specifically recommends allowing a change period in work plans—for example, providing additional time while workers learn new tasks—as well as ensuring workload is distributed fairly, providing training and equipment, communicating clearly and consulting employees affected by the change.
That sounds obvious. In practice, it requires leaders to make a decision that can be surprisingly difficult: Something may need to give. You cannot repeatedly add transformation activity to a job and assume that business-as-usual capacity remains untouched.
The hidden problem is often subtraction
This is where I think People leaders can make a much stronger contribution to organisational change. We spend considerable time asking: What needs to start? What capability do people need? What should leaders communicate? What new behaviour are we trying to embed? We spend much less time asking: What will stop?
That question matters because every organisation has accumulated ways of working that once made sense. Reports. Meetings. Approval steps. Spreadsheets. Legacy systems. Temporary processes that became permanent. Checks introduced after an incident years ago. Workarounds created because another workaround didn’t work. Add enough of them together, and you create organisational sediment. Then transformation arrives on top. The result is not simply change fatigue.
It is design debt
Employees are being asked to operate tomorrow’s organisation while still carrying yesterday’s processes. This is a psychosocial issue as well as a transformation issue. Poorly managed organisational change is now explicitly recognised in Australian guidance as a psychosocial hazard. And importantly, it does not operate in isolation. Change can alter workload. It can reduce job control. It can create role ambiguity. It can weaken support while reporting relationships shift. It can create uncertainty about employment, responsibilities or future expectations. Safe Work Australia specifically advises organisations to consider these interacting hazards together rather than treating poor change management as a standalone issue.
That has significant implications for HR Directors and Chief People Officers. Change management cannot sit only inside a transformation methodology. It also needs to be considered through the lens of work design and psychosocial risk.
Five things I would do differently
- Measure cumulative change load*
Don’t assess transformations only project by project. Map what is simultaneously landing on particular functions, locations, occupations and frontline teams. The relevant question is not “How many transformation projects do we have?” It is “How much change is this group being required to absorb?” - Put subtraction into the business case
Every significant change should answer: what work will stop, reduce or become easier as a consequence? If the answer is “nothing”, be explicit that you are increasing demands and assess whether there is sufficient capacity to absorb them. - Consult where employees can still influence implementation
Consultation does not mean asking employees to determine organisational strategy. It means using their knowledge to understand how a proposed change will affect actual work. Australian WHS guidance requires consultation on changes that may affect health and safety, including changes to staffing, workloads, rosters, systems, technology and ways of working. - Track implementation friction, not just adoption
A system can have a high login rate and still make work worse. Ask what additional steps have appeared. What is taking longer? Where are employees double-handling? What workarounds have emerged? What new demand has been pushed somewhere else in the system? - Use employee research during change, not simply after it
Alignment and engagement data can show whether confidence in direction, leadership, clarity or organisational effectiveness is deteriorating. Qualitative feedback can help explain why. Psychosocial assessment can identify where changing demands, control, support or role clarity may be creating risk. Used together, these are not retrospective measures of whether employees “liked” the change. They are information leaders can use to improve implementation as it happens.
Good change management is not about making change comfortable
Some organisational changes will be difficult. Roles will change. Technology will replace established ways of working. Priorities will shift. Sometimes organisations will need to restructure, reduce costs or make decisions employees would not choose themselves. Good change management cannot remove that reality. Nor should employee consultation be confused with giving everyone veto power.
The standard should be higher—and more practical. Have we been clear about why the change is necessary? Do people understand what it means for their work? Have we involved those who understand the operational consequences? Have we allowed enough capacity for people to learn and adapt? Have we removed work that is no longer necessary? And are we listening when employees tell us the new system is creating problems we did not anticipate?
Because when people say they are tired of change, they may not be asking the organisation to stop changing. They may be telling us something far more useful. We haven’t finished absorbing the last one.
Before calling that resistance, it is worth finding out why.
*Method: Thematic analysis of 4,222 open-text survey responses collected across Australian transport, logistics and infrastructure organisations during the last twelve months. Coded data were weighted equally across all employer data so no single employer drives the results.
About Insync
Insync is a survey research and advisory firm specialising in employee experience, organisational culture and engagement. We help organisations understand what their people are experiencing at work, why it matters, and where leaders can make practical changes that improve both employee outcomes and organisational performance.
Our work combines employee research with organisational psychology and advisory expertise, with a particular interest in how work design, leadership, culture and psychosocial risk shape the experience of frontline and operational workforces.
