Summary: The persistent problem of failed change is expensive and damages culture and trust in leadership. There are neuroscience-backed reasons why change initiatives fail at the individual level and practical steps that leaders can take to improve adoption.
A July 2025 survey by Gartner found that just 32 per cent of business leaders reported that the last change they led was successfully adopted by employees.
That’s not far off from the decades-old statistic that 70 per cent of corporate change fails.
Globally, the change management consultancy industry is worth $2.12 billion, but this failure percentage hasn’t budged.
Organisations are feeling the consequences of failed workplace change profoundly these days because its frequency has increased exponentially since the pandemic.
Remote work, for example, was implemented 43 times faster than anyone thought was possible.
After the speed of change precedent set by remote work, organisations have rapidly cycled through various iterations of hybrid to find the right one.
But with organisations going all in on new systems and ways of working, failed change is expensive and damages culture and trust in leadership.
Workplace change is complex, but it usually fails at the human level. Why?
1. The brain treats the uncertainty of workplace change as a threat
Uncertainty activates the regions of the brain responsible for threat detection and survival.
Grupe & Nitschke (2013) found that uncertainty during an organisational change increases psychological strain on individual employees, especially when there’s a lack of individual autonomy and communication from leadership.
The human brain is really good at keeping us alive and also really good at confusing life-threatening and non-life-threatening events.
Even a minor workplace change can create psychological strain for employees that impacts decision making and change adoption.
On an individual level, this could look like employees relying on informal communication networks with peers that could be pushing misinformation, negatively predicting the future and becoming more risk-averse.
Collectively, this reduces trust in leadership, creates resistance to experimentation and triggers a return to pre-change routines.
Even a minor workplace change can create psychological strain for employees
Workplace leaders can mitigate the effects of change uncertainty by:
- Communicating consistently and transparently throughout the change
- Taking accountability if things don’t go to plan
- Involving employees in decision making before, during and after the change and making this highly visible throughout the organisation.
2. Existing workplace habits are neurologically efficient
According to psychology professor Eliot Berkman’s neuroscience model of goal pursuit, change requires the engagement of executive control systems and value-based decision making. Cognitively, these take more effort than habits.
The brain makes up just two per cent of the body’s total weight but consumes 20 per cent of its energy. It’s constantly making a multitude of subconscious decisions.
A change to something familiar, even if it comes with clear benefits, takes up a lot of the brain’s energy. That’s why you’re likely to find yourself sitting in your old desk after a new seating plan is rolled out with no memory of deciding to sit there.
Employees naturally default to their usual routines since they require less mental energy. As Berkman argues: “a goal is a detour from the path of least resistance”.
What workplace leaders can do to make change more neurologically efficient:
- Set clear guidelines and norms at the organisational, team and individual levels during periods of change
- Standardise expected results .
- Design routines that minimise decision making.
3. Workplace change can disrupt social norms and employees’ sense of belonging
Social Identity Theory describes the need to belong as a “powerful, fundamental and extremely pervasive motivation”.
Urrila et al (2025) found that particular aspects of hybrid work like flexibility have an impact on employees’ sense of workplace belonging and identity.
With the average person spending 90,000 hours at work over the course of their lifetime, the workplace should be a source of belonging and community.
Something as seemingly innocuous as a new neighborhood seating plan can change that.
If someone derives a sense of identity from working remotely most of the time, shifting to a 50 per cent in-office schedule changes that identity.
If someone has built up a sense of community through informal interactions with people at the desks around them, moving to a new neighborhood can disrupt that identity.
This makes change adoption failure more likely because workplace identity serves as an informal system demonstrating what normal looks like.
When norms go out the window, psychological safety and trust in leadership decrease and everyone falls back into old habits out of self-preservation.
What workplace leaders can to do increase a sense of belonging during workplace change:
- Tailoring workplace changes to team norms
- Facilitating spaces for new communities and connections
- Avoiding drastic transitions.
Aspects of hybrid work like flexibility have an impact on employees’ sense of workplace belonging and identity
4. Cognitive overload from new tools, processes and workplace norms reduces adaptability
Rerup and Feldman (2011) found that as a system becomes more engrained in employees’ ways of working, behaviour becomes faster and more automatic. But when a new system or tool is introduced, that speed is lost.
This fits with Cognitive Load Theory, which states that too many tools, processes and decisions overload working memory and slow adaptation.
On an individual level, change disrupts the mental shortcuts employees form around familiar workplace routines, like technology they use on a daily basis or navigating the office.
This makes workplace change more likely to fail, because increased cognitive load creates change fatigue. People see change as a source of annoyance, leading to low adoption of new systems and workarounds that undermine workplace strategy.
Workplace leaders can mitigate the effects of cognitive overload by:
- Rolling out fewer changes at the same time
- Creating new routines within teams (e.g. team anchor days after a new hybrid policy)
- Choosing tech that’s just as easy to use as what employees are using outside of work.
5. The brain’s dopamine and reward systems favour immediate payoffs over long-term ones
McClure et al. (2004) found that two different brain systems are activated when people evaluate decisions with immediate versus delayed gratification.
A decision with an immediate reward activates the midbrain dopamine system, while a decision with a long-term payoff activates the lateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex.
We’re hardwired to seek out immediate gratification. Unfortunately this approach falters when thousands of people have to make individual decisions that result in something like a more cohesive organizational culture or reduced office carbon footprint.
On an individual level, this might look like employees deciding not to commute in or a manager deciding not to have a difficult conversation about accountability because short-term harmony feels more comfortable.
Change management relies on individuals sacrificing short-term convenience in exchange for longer term benefits that may seem far off and abstract, making failure more likely.
Workplace leaders can mitigate the effects of immediate gratification seeking by:
- Creating short-term wins
- Reducing contradictions between organisational values and each employee’s lived experience of change
- Demonstrating the measurable success of the change as frequently as possible.
