“At least I know [this challenge] isn’t just being felt by me.”
It is to the detriment of the industry that different C-suites and Boards meet rarely. The value of sharing insights and perspectives is hard to qualify, let alone quantify. It is also lonely at the top; sometimes, the value of a C-suite event is simply being able to look around a room—or the largest Studio in the world, at Abbey Road Studios, in this case—and know you’re fully amongst peers. It’s quite the feeling, I was told.
As regular Editor’s Letter readers will know, last week HotTopics took over that vaulted space in St John’s Wood, London, and dressed it for two days of C-suite debates, networking, interviews and, yes, dancing, for The Studio. One day was reserved for Chief Marketing Officers, the second, for the technology C-suite.
Now I have had the chance to reflect, one matter in particular sits at the intersection of a number of challenges that emerged from both events, ie, issues that both marketing and technology leaders are facing, independently. The challenges involved are the three Ts: transformation, talent and time.
The matter? Workers, including many of its leaders, have change fatigue. The data backs it up.
In 2022, the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes, up from two in 2016, according to Gartner. Changes include “a restructure to achieve efficiencies, a cultural transformation to unlock new ways of working or the replacement of a legacy technology system”.
That same report revealed employees’ willingness to support enterprise change has collapsed. In 2016, 74 percent were willing. In 2022, just 43 percent.
It is time for business leaders to build their change fatigue management muscles. Here’s how:
- Rest up
Rest can increase performance when it’s proactive. It may feel counterintuitive to our productivity-pressured systems, but leaders should consider embedding rest into the workflow to prevent burnout. Proactive rest has three characteristics: optionality so that different workers can choose the best options for themselves; accessibility, or ease of access for all levels of talent; and appropriateness.
Gartner research found that when proactive rest is available employee performance improves by 26 percent and the number of employees experiencing burnout reduces tenfold.
- Level out your change plans
What Harvard Business Review calls “open-source change management”, a levelling of your transformation strategies embraces employees as active participants in change planning and implementation. It requires leaders to involve more employees in more decision-making, to evolve implementation planning to those same employees and adjacent teams, and engage in two-way conversations throughout the timeline.
- Re-manage the managers
Managers are tired of the push-me-pull-me tension of organisational change. Caught between their leaders, their teams and their day jobs, burnout can be high for this level, too. It shouldn’t be the case that managers champion each and every change programme. Managers should instead focus on their teams’ resilience, at both the individual and collective level, to withstand and capitalise on future change. Teams have to be better as self-navigating organisational improvements and who better than managers to ensure skills, time and rest are built in?
The next Studio events will take place on October 4 and 5 later in the year. I would love to know some themes you think we should cover, once again within those iconic studios. Feel free to reply to this Editor’s Letter with your thoughts.
