The Announcement Is Not the Change
The Workday During Change, Part 1
Some of the most consequential change meetings I’ve been part of ended with a very different feeling depending on which side of the announcement you were sitting on.
For the people who had spent months designing the change, the announcement often felt like a major point of completion. They had worked through the decisions, agreed on the new structure, prepared the communication, and aligned on how the change would be introduced.
For the employees hearing it, though, the announcement was usually the beginning of a much more practical period of trying to understand how the work would now get done.
The questions that followed were rarely abstract.
Employees wanted to know what would happen to work already in motion, who would make decisions that had previously belonged to someone whose role was changing, whether current priorities still held, and how long old processes would remain in place while new ones were being built. Those questions were often difficult to answer because an organization chart can change much faster than the relationships, routines, and informal knowledge that have developed around the work.
People continue using the pathways they know because those are the ones that have worked. They call the person who has always been able to solve the problem. They keep including a former leader in decisions because nobody is completely sure where the authority now sits. They maintain an old process alongside the new one because the new process has not yet proven that it can support the work.
From a distance, some of that behavior can look like reluctance to move on. Up close, it is often employees trying to keep commitments, protect customers, and make sure important work does not stall while the organization is still figuring itself out.
I saw this repeatedly while leading change across a large organization. An enterprise decision could be reasonably clear at the top, but by the time it reached different businesses, markets, buildings, and teams, it had to be interpreted through dozens of local realities.
A decision about how and where people would work, for example, affected much more than office attendance. It changed staffing patterns, technology needs, meeting practices, workplace services, leadership expectations, and how teams coordinated across locations.
The communication could explain the direction and the reasoning behind it, but it could not anticipate every question that employees and managers would encounter once they began working within the change.
The organization still had to work through how the decision would function in practice. That part tends to receive less attention because so much energy has already gone into reaching the decision and preparing the announcement. Once the message is delivered, the work often moves into implementation mode. A program team takes over, training is scheduled, communications continue, and progress is reported against milestones.
All of that matters, but employees experience the transition in a much less orderly way. They are trying to complete today’s work while responsibilities are moving, priorities are being reconsidered, and new relationships are still forming. A process may be changing before the replacement is ready. A new leader may officially own the work without yet having enough context to make decisions confidently. Employees may find themselves keeping the old organization running while also helping build the new one.
No announcement, however, carefully prepared, can account for every dependency or answer every question that will surface. The more useful test is whether leaders stay close enough to the work to see where confusion is building and whether managers have enough room and clarity to make reasonable decisions when the official guidance runs out.
Employees will usually tolerate a fair amount of uncertainty when they know what has been decided, what is still being worked through, and where they can go when the change creates a problem nobody anticipated.
What wears people down is having to fill those gaps on their own while continuing to deliver as though the transition were already complete.
The formal change may have been announced. The organization employees actually work in will keep taking shape for quite a while afterward.
Nathan Bricklin
Senior Consultant, Global Workplace Experience
Helping enterprise leaders close the gap between executive intent and lived employee experience at scale.
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