- Successful change management depends on employee adoption, not just the implementation of new technology, processes or systems.
- Prosci’s 2023 research found that 88% of participants with excellent change management programmes met or exceeded project objectives, compared with 13% of those with poor programmes.
- Trust is essential to organisational transformation. Leaders must communicate honestly, listen to employee concerns and ensure their actions align with their messages.
- Employee engagement is linked to business outcomes including profitability, productivity, customer loyalty, staff retention, safety and quality, according to Gallup’s 2024 Q12 meta-analysis.
- Organisations can achieve sustainable growth by embedding change capability into workplace culture, improving employee experience, equipping managers to lead change and involving employees in shaping transformation. *
Companies that outperform will not be those that avoid change, but those that convert it into trust, adoption, engagement and growth amongst workforces
Never has change been more certain, frequent and… exhausting. Employees are required to learn something new, do something differently, innovate against something just launched (or not yet launched) almost daily.
Leaders must pivot even faster. While a culture of innovation is critical for future-proofing businesses, the destabilising and fatiguing effect on an organisation’s workforce can have the opposite effect: grinding innovation, effectiveness and energy to a halt; igniting a culture of ‘quiet quitting’; and crippling a company’s bottom-line despite stellar strategy and all of the best intentions.
Powerful growth lever
Transformation is too often treated as a programme to be delivered to people. But when you build change with your employees – making internal communication and employee experience foundations of the value-creation model from the start – you can turn change into a powerful growth lever.
In a 2023 study, Prosci reported that 88% of participants with excellent change management programmes met or exceeded project objectives, compared with 13% of those with poor programmes.
McKinsey, meanwhile, found that fewer than one-third of surveyed transformations improved performance and sustained those improvements, while even successful transformations captured an estimated 67% of their maximum potential financial benefit on average (2021).
The lesson is clear: change creates growth when it is designed around adoption, and it creates good when employees have voice, agency, clarity and the opportunity to benefit from the future they are helping to build.
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Stop managing change. Start designing adoption
Most transformation plans are strong on technical delivery and thin on the people system required to make the change stick. They specify the platform, process, structure and launch date, but give less attention to the employee behaviours that will release the promised value. Technology creates potential. Adoption converts that potential into value.
A stronger approach begins with the adoption outcome. What must people understand, believe, do differently and sustain? At its simplest: why are we doing this, and what impact does this have on people’s day-to-day? Internal communication, learning, manager enablement and employee experience can then be designed against those outcomes, rather than added shortly before launch.
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Treat trust as transformation infrastructure
Trust is not a soft backdrop to change. It determines whether employees believe the case for change, share concerns early, experiment with new behaviours and advocate for the organisation when the transformation becomes difficult.
Edelman’s 2024 Trust at Work research identified a 32-point gap between associates and executives in average trust across major institutions. Only 19% of associates trusted their CEO to tell the truth about the organisation, compared with 52% of executives. This is a warning against assuming that executive confidence in a change is shared throughout the organisation.
Microsoft’s transformation is frequently framed as a shift from a ‘know-it-all’ culture to a ‘learn-it-all’ culture. The culture-change emphasised growth mindset, collaboration and learning, helping create the organisational conditions for the company’s strategic shift towards cloud and AI.
Microsoft’s internal communications team has also described two-way communication, employee dialogue and trust-building as central to supporting continued cultural and technological change.
For communicators, the answer is not more messaging. It is visible leadership, honest trade-offs, credible manager conversations and feedback loops that lead to action. The trust measure is not whether employees heard the announcement. It is whether they believe they can participate safely and meaningfully in what happens next.
People do not only assess the message. They assess whether leaders listen, whether actions match words, and whether their reality is recognised.
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Make employee experience a growth strategy
Employee experience is often discussed as engagement, wellbeing or employer brand. Those are important, but the commercial argument is more direct: the experience of work shapes the quality, pace and consistency with which strategy is executed.
Gallup’s 2024 Q12 meta-analysis covered 736 studies, 347 organisations, 53 industries, 90 countries and more than 3.3 million employees. It found that employee engagement was related to all 11 performance outcomes studied, including profitability, productivity, customer loyalty, turnover, safety, quality and wellbeing.
Business units in the top half of engagement more than doubled their odds of success compared with those in the bottom half.
As one example of this, high-friction employee rituals (like how they undergo performance reviews, experience payroll or their IT frustrations) can quietly undermine the behaviours a growth strategy needs. Performance systems, leadership habits, workflows, tools and communication channels all teach employees what the organisation genuinely values.
Change leaders should therefore map the moments that matter in the employee journey and remove the points of friction that block the future state. Ask not only ‘What do employees need to know?’ but also ‘What will make the new behaviour easier, more meaningful and more rewarding than the old one?’
Don’t underestimate the damage being done to your organisation’s trust gap when you tell your workforce to be agile and solutions-orientated, but then provide them with technology, support functions or ways of working that are incongruous to this.
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Build the capability to change continuously and responsibly
The final shift is from treating change as a once-off intervention to building organisational change capability. This means developing leaders, managers and employees who can make sense of change, test new approaches, learn quickly and adapt without losing connection to purpose.
McKinsey’s 2025 research describes an environment in which the average employee experiences ten planned change programmes a year, five times the level reported a decade earlier. It argues that organisations need to match change methods to different levels of transformation and reinvention, rather than applying one standard toolkit to every initiative.
Growth does not come from a single announcement. It involves changes to organisational habits: how leaders behave, how employees receive and discuss information, how teams collaborate, how performance is managed and how technology becomes embedded in work.
This is also where growth and good meet. Responsible change does not avoid hard decisions, but it makes impact visible, involves affected people where possible, builds capability and distributes the benefits of transformation more deliberately. It recognises that sustainable growth depends on the health and agency of the human system producing it.
Change is a human growth system
The future belongs to organisations that understand a simple truth: transformation is not only a technology challenge, a process challenge or a strategy challenge. It is a human challenge.
Change becomes a force for growth when employees adopt it. It becomes a force for good when employees can help shape it, build capability through it and see a credible place for themselves in the future it creates. Organisations that can do both will be better placed to turn uncertainty into resilience, innovation and sustainable performance.
* Summary created by AI
Sarah Browning-de Villiers is a B2B, EX, internal comms and change strategist at Publicis Groupe Africa.
