Research Highlight #001
The Change Fatigue Curve
Organisations are asking people to change more often than ever. Gartner's data suggests people's capacity to absorb that change has not kept pace.
What the research found
Between 2016 and 2022, the pace of organisational change rose sharply. The average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016. These include restructures, culture transformations and replacements of core technology systems.
Over the same period, people's willingness to go along with change fell. In 2016, the Gartner Workforce Change Survey showed 74% of employees were willing to change work behaviours to support organisational changes; by 2022 that number had dropped to 38%. In other words, the number of changes quintupled while willingness to support them was cut nearly in half.
HR leaders see the same pattern. In a Gartner survey from July 2023, 77% reported that their employees are fatigued from all the change. Gartner defines this state as negative employee responses to change — apathy, burnout and frustration — that harm organisational outcomes. The consequences show up in the numbers: change fatigue causes employees' intent to stay with their employer to decline by as much as 42%, while employee performance can decline by as much as 27%.
Why this is a human performance question
At SALUZ, we read this data as a question of capacity rather than resistance. Every change asks people to let go of established routines, learn new ones and work through a period of uncertainty. Those demands draw on attention, memory and emotional regulation — limited resources that people also need for their day-to-day work.
When changes pile up with no time to consolidate them, a drop in willingness may reflect depleted capacity rather than opposition. Gartner's data shows an association, not a cause. But it points to something organisations rarely plan for: the human cost of each additional change.
What organisations can do
Gartner's recommendations are organisational rather than individual. Leaders should prioritise change initiatives, showing employees where to invest their energies, and manage change fatigue by building in periods of proactive rest, involving employees in change plans, and challenging managers to help build team resilience.
Involving employees appears to be one of the most effective levers. Organisations that use open-source change strategies — involving employees throughout the process — can decrease the risk of change fatigue by 29 percentage points and increase intent to stay by as much as 19 percentage points. Team climate matters as well: when managers create a psychologically safe environment for their team, change fatigue can fall by 46%.
The practical implication is that a transformation plan should count the demands it places on people, and not only the milestones it has to hit.
A note on the evidence
These figures come from Gartner's proprietary surveys of employees and HR leaders. The full methodology is not public, and the data is self-reported. The 2016–2022 period includes the pandemic, which probably amplified the trend. Some secondary sources cite 43% instead of 38%; we use the figure from Gartner's own publications.