Why Work Slows Down During Change
The Workday During Change, Part 3
When productivity falls during a major change, the explanation is often that employees have become distracted by the uncertainty.
There is usually some truth in that. People are thinking about their roles, their teams, and what the change may mean for them. But distraction alone does not explain why work that used to move reasonably well can suddenly take much longer.
In many cases, the work has become structurally harder to move through the organization. Responsibilities are shifting, decision authority is less clear, and the processes supporting the work may still reflect the organization that existed before the change.
Employees spend more time figuring out how to move something forward before they can make much progress on the work itself.
A team may officially own a new responsibility while still depending on people from the former organization to complete it. The new leader may have the authority to make a decision but not yet have the history or relationships needed to make it confidently.
Employees continue involving the people they trusted before the change, while also adding the people who now appear to own the work. The result is often more participation without much more clarity, and that additional involvement shows up quickly in calendars.
Meetings expand because employees are trying to prevent a missed handoff or an unexpected decision later.
Work gets reviewed by both old and new stakeholders because nobody is quite comfortable removing the former approval path.
People maintain information in more than one place because the new system or process has not yet become dependable enough to replace the old one
So, everyone can look extremely busy while surprisingly little is moving cleanly from beginning to end.
This becomes especially difficult when roles or staffing levels change without a corresponding decision about the work itself. Responsibilities are redistributed, but the existing commitments, reports, approvals, and recurring meetings remain. Employees absorb pieces of work from people who have left while continuing to perform the work they already owned.
Over time, the organization may expect the new structure to produce greater efficiency while employees are still carrying much of the operating weight of the old one.
Managers often absorb a different kind of work. They spend more time interpreting enterprise direction, answering questions that do not yet have settled answers, and helping employees decide what should take priority.
When guidance changes, they revisit those decisions and explain the change again. This translation is necessary during a transition, but it can consume a large part of the time managers would otherwise spend leading the work and developing their teams.
I saw a version of this when I began moving a workplace organization toward a more agile way of working. The problem was never a lack of effort. We had talented people who cared deeply about the outcome but work often moved sequentially from one functional group to another. Each handoff created additional waiting and another opportunity for the original need to be interpreted differently.
A project could remain active for a long time even though only a small portion of that time involved someone directly advancing it. The rest was spent waiting for a review, preparing for another handoff, or resolving questions that might have been addressed much earlier if the right people had been working together from the beginning.
Changing the operating model meant more than introducing new terminology or meeting routines. We had to change how people organized around the work and how quickly they could learn whether an idea was actually solving the problem.
During a large organizational change, progress is often measured through implementation activity. Leaders can see whether positions have moved, training has been completed, systems have launched, and program milestones have been reached.
Those measures are useful, although they say relatively little about whether work is now easier to move through the organization.
The daily experience provides different evidence
A piece of work that once required one decision may now move through several conversations because ownership is uncertain. An employee may spend more time locating reliable information because the old source is outdated and the new one is incomplete. A manager may need to reconcile two reasonable but conflicting interpretations of the same enterprise direction before the team can continue.
Following a piece of work from the original need through the final decision can reveal much more than another status report. It shows where the work waits, where it returns to a previous step, and where employees have added informal coordination to compensate for something the formal process no longer provides. Those are often the places where productivity is being lost, even though everyone involved is working hard.
Some slowdown is unavoidable. People need time to learn new responsibilities, establish relationships, and become comfortable making decisions inside a different structure. The concern is when temporary friction continues long enough to become the normal way work gets done, while leaders assume performance will recover once employees have adjusted.
From the employee’s point of view, the extra effort can become normal surprisingly quickly. People keep adding another meeting or follow-up until a piece of work that once moved directly now takes a much longer route through the organization.
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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This article perfectly articulates the often-overlooked friction points during organizational change, especially how 'everyone can look extremely busy while surprisingly little is moving cleanly.' The shift in manager's roles to interpreters rather than leaders, consuming valuable time, is a critical insight. It makes you wonder how organizations can truly assess productivity beyond just activity metrics when the underlying processes are so fundamentally disrupted, perhaps through more qualitative feedback or even through the lens of sz games' approach to process optimization. 🧐