Change Fatigue Isn’t a Volume Problem. It’s a Direction Problem.

Editor's note: Posts published on From the Workplace are written by outside contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of SHRM.

Most conversations about change fatigue start with the same assumption: employees are exhausted because too much change is happening at once. The instinct is to slow down, consolidate, or space out rollouts. SHRM has already covered proactive strategies for combating change fatigue directly, and those tactics matter. But volume alone doesn’t fully explain the exhaustion. Organizations have always changed constantly, and workforces have absorbed near-constant change before without collapsing under it. What’s shifted isn’t how much is changing — it’s whether anyone inside the organization can say where all of it is headed.

An Intensifying Trend

Gartner’s July 2025 survey of 473 HR leaders found that 73% report their employees are fatigued from change, and 74% say their managers aren’t equipped to lead it. The same research found that 79% of employees report low trust in their organization’s ability to change well, and only about one in four say they can absorb the current pace of change without it damaging their health. What’s changed isn’t the existence of fatigue — it’s how many simultaneous, uncoordinated initiatives are now producing it at once.

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The Portfolio Blind Spot

Walk into most organizations today, and you’ll find several change initiatives running in parallel: a restructuring here, a system rollout there, a culture or engagement push somewhere else. Each has its own sponsor, plan, and communication cadence, and each may be individually well-managed. But almost no one holds the full picture of how these efforts interact, compete for the same attention, or occasionally contradict each other. This isn’t a fringe scenario. SHRM Foundation research on leading change found that organizations report an average of more than four major change initiatives running concurrently, each typically managed on its own track.

Consider a mid-size health system running an electronic health record migration, a leadership restructuring, and a new performance-management rollout at the same time, each led by a different executive sponsor with no shared timeline. Employees don’t experience three separate projects. They experience one exhausting, disorienting year.

Why Standard Change Management Misses This

Communication plans, stakeholder maps, and training schedules are designed to move a single initiative from start to finish, and they’re often good at that job. But these tools operate inside one initiative’s boundaries. None of them is built to ask a more basic question: Does this change point in the same direction as everything else already underway? That gap isn’t a failure of execution. It’s a structural blind spot in how most organizations plan change in the first place.

An Instrument for Orientation

What’s missing is something closer to a compass than a project plan. This shared reference point tells leaders and employees not how to execute any single initiative, but whether everything already in motion still points toward the same destination. A compass doesn’t dictate pace or specific steps. It tells you whether you’re still heading the right way, especially when several paths are being walked at once. Without that shared bearing, individually well-run initiatives can still pull an organization in conflicting directions. The fatigue is misread as a motivation or capacity problem, when it’s actually a navigation problem. In practice, this means someone at the leadership level needs a single view of every active initiative, evaluated not only by its own timeline, but also by whether it reinforces or contradicts the direction other initiatives are already moving in.

What HR Can Do Now

Before approving another initiative, ask:

• Is this change oriented toward the same destination as everything else already underway?
• Who currently has visibility into every initiative touching the workforce at once?
• Where are two or more initiatives quietly competing for the same managers’ time and attention?

HR is often the only function positioned to answer these questions, because it’s the one seat that touches every change moving through the organization. That vantage point is worth using deliberately, not incidentally.

Change fatigue isn’t a warning sign to manage around with more communication or slower timelines. It’s a signal. When people lose their bearings, the fix isn’t fewer changes — it’s a clearer sense of where all of them are headed.

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Dalia Massiel is a strategic change management professional who helps organizations build the readiness needed to navigate simultaneous, large-scale change.