Over the last few years, the corporate world has weathered The Great Resignation, The Great Reset, and The Great Reshuffle.
But according to Gallup, it’s now experiencing something new: The Great Detachment.
Overwhelmingly, employees feel less engaged at work, and it’s easy to see why. Disruptions caused by COVID-19, inflation, geopolitical conflicts, a meteoric rise in social and technological complexity, and the birth of AI have stressed everyone to their limits. It shows in the data. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Workplace Report puts global employee engagement levels at just 21%—the lowest ever recorded. Gallup also reports that employee willingness to support change initiatives has fallen from 74% in 2016 to just 38% in 2022.
Willingness and engagement might seem like “squishy” metrics, because they essentially measure how people feel. But feelings, while not facts, are data—and they tell us much about how your staff is likely to react to a major transformation. Corporate change often requires employees to modify or replace old processes, learn new skills, use new software, and attend more meetings. If they start out feeling exhausted and overwhelmed? Your chances of achieving successful change drop significantly.
Closing the ‘Why Should I Care?’ Gap
Getting company leaders excited about change is easy. After all, the initiative usually originated with them, plus it offers several status-boosting perks: greater operational speed, efficiency, profit margins and investment opportunities.
Unfortunately, front-line workers tend to view those same perks as detriments to their wellbeing. “Speed” promises a greater sense of overwhelm, “efficiency” implies layoffs, and “more profits” says that, once again, performance-based raises will be curtailed. So while you’re celebrating these benefits in every email and Town Hall, your staff is quietly sinking deeper into detachment.
What employees really want to know is how the new transformation will impact their roles:
- Will the new software work as promised—or become another bottleneck?
- Will their questions and concerns be met with adequate support—or left to fester?
- Will they be rewarded for championing the change—or laid off when it’s finished?
- Will old workplace issues finally be resolved—or entrenched even further?
If your communications never address these concerns, your employees will see little reason to support the change.
Resistance: Natural, but not Inevitable
Resistance to change is a natural response, but rarely does it stem from raw unwillingness. Everyone prefers their familiar, comfortable ways of working, because familiarity provides psychological safety. Even if systems are fraught with inefficiencies, some prefer to deal with the problems they know over the solutions they have yet to experience. So when you ask people to change, you’re essentially asking them to give up their sense of safety.
To surmount that obstacle, you must demonstrate how giving up their old sense of safety allows them to create a new, greater sense of safety. This is most likely to happen when you invite them to collaborate on the change, provide space for them to voice their concerns, and normalize the learning curve. When people understand the why for change, see a clear path to achieving it, and feel supported along the way, resistance gives way to momentum. Suddenly, everyone is on deck to turn vision into reality.
In our work, we’ve seen how thoughtful communication builds trust, inspires joy, and overcomes detachment. It doesn’t just make employees feel better, either. It also makes them more innovative and productive.
The data bear this out as well. The annual cost of detachment? $8.9 TRILLION in lost productivity, says Gallup. Now there’s a compelling reason to change!
