Is your organisation change-vulnerable or change-smart?

Blog posts

23 Jul 2025

Alison Carter, Principal Research Fellow

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A history of not ‘doing change’ very well can be an organisational albatross. I’m getting a lot more calls than usual expressing concern about the amount of change going on and a feeling that changes are speeding up. So, it is important that our organisations are responding effectively to expected and unexpected change. Change-smart organisations act swiftly, consistently and reliably in response to a complex and unpredictable operating environment. To be smart at ‘doing change’ is a great organisational asset and well worth people managers reflecting on how to increase its value.

A clue that your organisation may be vulnerable is a history of consistently low scores in your employee attitude surveys for ‘managing change well.’ Be concerned if managing change scores nose-dived recently, especially if that was from a low starting point. It is all too easy for individuals to feel change is being foisted on them and suffer change fatigue at the thought of yet more changes. Why do we struggle so much to become, or remain, organisations ready and capable of change in a complex operating environment? The failure rate of organisational change has remained constant for many years suggesting organisations have not been learning from past mistakes.

IES has previously distilled evidence about what makes an organisation change-ready and change-capable. This has resonance today given the current political and financial complexity and uncertainty. Feedback from employees and employers consistently reinforces that making the human aspects of change, rather than the organisational impacts, a particular target for attention is crucial to the success of change initiatives.

I recently spoke about how to become a change-smart organisation at an employee voice hub event run by IPA, our partner organisation. It was attended by thoughtful and collaboratively minded employee representatives from staff forums, works councils, trade union reps and HR and employee engagement professionals keen to exchange ideas, share knowledge and experience. We talked a lot about the central role of teams, having a moral responsibility to support colleagues and that learning organisations must take the time to learn lessons from previous changes.

I was reminded of an Institute for Employment Studies and Henley Forum action research project conducted in collaboration with 11 employers back in 2018/19. Our findings have even greater relevance in today’s context of ever shifting sands. The research aimed to improve the employers’ ability to ‘do change better’. Through an evidence-based survey with 228 team members responding from nine teams across five large organisations in four countries, plus follow-up interviews, the project sought to uncover what helps and what hinders their teams becoming more able for change. You can find project infographic here.

Our study found what helps teams in times of change is:

• A sense of community-ship within the team and between their team and others.
• Some knowledge of change and confidence in the team’s collective ability to self-manage through change.
• A positive experience of previous change (or a belief that lessons were learned).

The study also found that what teams do for themselves in support of each other was a powerful enabler of individual and collective well-being. What improvement actions organisations can take includes:

• Listening – collect feedback and reflections from teams on the previous change so lessons can be learned from what worked well or not so well.
• Visioning – offer a compelling vision explaining why the future changed state will be better than the status quo for both customers and staff. Focus the vision at an emotional level: it is not sufficient to describe change only in terms of its rationality.
• Embracing the grit in the oyster – do not silence those who express doubts early in the change process. Let these contributors identify the pitfalls to be avoided.
• Reframing – enable teams to reframe the purpose to something that makes sense to them and their context.
• Finally, and on a practical note, a set of five change tools for teams were co-developed as part of the project which were thoroughly tested by participating employers and successfully implemented in a range of contexts with other employers ever since. Using these tools will help you prioritise the human aspects of change to improve change-capability: both having adaptable, responsive teams and a longer-term ability to anticipate when change is needed and, when necessary, to carry it out.

We will be discussing more about what practices work in moving our organisations from change-vulnerable to change-smart at an IES open seminar on 1^st October 2025. Do save the date and join us if you can.

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Any views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Institute as a whole.