Your team isnβt resistant to change, maybe they are simply exhausted by it.
May 20, 2026
From Los Angeles to Sydney, regardless of industry, leaders are facing a similar challenge. A portion of their team seems flat and a maybe a little checked out, pushing back on all the change.
But is it resistance to change? Or are their brains simply fatigued and they are running on empty?
The State of Workplaces Right Now
According to Gartner's Global Talent Monitor, the number of Australian employees who consider themselves highly engaged has dropped to just 19.6%. That's a 10% decline since early 2022. Gartner's own analysts attributed this directly to "employee fatigue leading to disengagement."
Meanwhile, PwC's 2024 Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey of 1,500 Australian workers found that 54% don't understand why the changes happening in their organisation need to happen at all. Nearly two-thirds said they'd experienced more change in the past year than the year before. And while many workers say they ‘want’ to adapt, the pace of that change is creating real psychological strain.
The most telling statistic? Gartner found that ‘change fatigue’ causes ‘employee intent to stay’ to decline by as much as 42%, and performance can decline by as much as 27%. Further this matters to your team as PwC's 2025 data shows, that workers experiencing high levels of fatigue, boredom, or feeling overwhelmed are 30% less motivated at exactly the moment when organisations need their people most engaged.
What is change fatigue?
Change fatigue is defined as ‘the overwhelming feelings of stress, exhaustion and burnout fuelled by feelings of ambivalence and powerlessness associated with rapid and continuous change.’ This isn't the same as being tired after a big project as its a much deeper state.
It shows up as apathy, withdrawal, cynicism and a silent decision to stop trying as hard. People start doing just enough. They disengage from the initiatives they used to care about. They stop putting their hand up. And over time, they start looking for the exit.
Even positive change can create this change fatigue. It might be a restructure, a new technology platform, a shift in strategy, a return-to-office policy. All of it draws on the same finite cognitive and emotional reserves. When those reserves run dry, fatigue sets in, regardless of whether the change itself is "good."
Change has a real cost on the brain and neuroscience can help explain why
Neuroscience shows us that constant change is biologically exhausting.
Every time we navigate change, we're drawing heavily on the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, adapting to new situations, managing our emotions, and making sense of uncertainty. It's our most sophisticated brain region, and it's also our most energy-hungry.
Research published in Current Biology found that sustained cognitive effort causes a build-up glutamate in the prefrontal cortex. As this accumulates throughout the day, it becomes increasingly costly for the brain to keep activating that region. Thus, the more change your brain has to process, the harder it becomes to stay calm and make good decisions. Worse still, a tired brain starts making easy choices for immediate rewards. Not great for longer term decision making.
Each new initiative, restructure, or pivot asks the brain to adapt, without giving it the time to recover.
The downstream effects are real. Research on burnout and cognitive performance shows that people experiencing chronic workplace stress show impairment across working memory, attention, decision-making, and executive function, the exact capabilities needed to navigate change successfully.
Your team isn't failing to adapt, their brains may just be running on empty.
What We Can Do About It
The good news: change fatigue is not inevitable. And addressing it doesn't mean slowing everything down. It means being smarter about how we lead through change. Here's where to start.
ONE: Schedule Recovery
Make "recovery from change" as deliberate as the change itself. Build in intentional consolidation time before the next initiative lands. A refreshed worksforce will be more resilient, more positive toward change and have more energy to contribute effectively.
TWO: Communicate the Why, Not Just the What
According to the Gartner research, a new process, a new tool, or a new structure can erode trust and impact wellbeing when the reasoning behind it isn't communicated clearly. And yet, according to the 2025 Gartner HR Priorities Survey, 54% of HR Managers admit their current change communication methods fail to engage employees.
Most organisations tell people ‘what’ is changing. Very few consistently explain ‘why it matters’ and ‘where they fit in’. When people understand the purpose behind change, they regain a sense of control, and that sense of control is one of the most powerful buffers against fatigue and anxiety.
Before your next change announcement, ask. “ Does every person impacted by this understand why it's happening and what it means for them personally?”
THREE: Build Psychological Safety Around Change
When people feel they can ask questions, admit confusion, or flag concerns without consequences, they are significantly more resilient through disruption. Gartner describes this as the difference between "championing change" and "building change-readiness". Creating forums where employees can voice their genuine reactions, not just be told to “get on board” increases sustainable performance by up to 16%.
Creating real two-way dialogue where leaders listen as much as they communicate.
FOUR: Invest in Resilience as a Skill
Studies show that resilience acts as a direct buffer against the pathway from change fatigue to burnout. When organisations invest in structured resilience training, and ongoing skill-building, employees develop a real capacity to process uncertainty without burning out.
This means helping your people build practical tools: how to regulate their nervous system under pressure and how to reframe uncertainty. And importantly how to create recovery rituals. These aren't soft skills. They're the skills that determine whether your people thrive or burn out over the next 12 months.
Two Ideas Worth Exploring
Beyond the proven strategies above, there are two emerging approaches that we think are worth putting on your radar.
- “Change Sequencing” or "Change Dosing. Just as elite athletes manage their training load to avoid injury, organisations can manage the pacing of internally-driven change. Not all change can be controlled, market forces, regulation, technology, but the timing and sequencing of change that ‘can’ be managed, and should be. Piling three major initiatives on a team simultaneously isn't bold leadership, it’s overload. Brains need recovery time between bouts of sustained cognitive effort.
- The Change Inventory Audit. Most organisations measure change impact after the fact, through engagement surveys that arrive months too late. A forward-looking ‘Change Inventory’ maps the cumulative cognitive load currently sitting across a team: how many concurrent changes are they absorbing right now? Where are the pressure points? This allows leaders to redistribute change burden proactively, before fatigue becomes disengagement.
The Change Reframe
Maybe we need to stop asking “why are our people so resistant to change?” and start asking “what are we asking their brains to carry right now?”
Change fatigue is a predictable, biological response to an unsustainable pace of disruption.
Less than one in five Australian employees are highly engaged. Fewer than half understand why change is happening. And nine in ten HR leaders say their managers aren't equipped to support people through it.
The organisations that will perform during this period of AI change will be the ones that can protect the human capacity that makes all of the change possible.
Want to build a more change-ready, resilient team? Explore how you can bring tools from psychology and neuroscience to your workplace to build resilience today with our EQ Minds Wellbeing Series
References
Gartner Global Talent Monitor Survey, Q4 2024 — Australian Workforce Data, published February 2026.
Gartner HR Priorities Survey, 2025.
Gartner HR Leaders Survey, July 2023 — Change Fatigue and Performance Data.
PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, 2024 — Australian Insights (n=1,500).
PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, 2025 — Australian Insights.
Wiehler, A. et al. (2022). A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions. Current Biology.
Beaulieu, L. et al. (2022). Change fatigue in nursing: An integrative review. *Journal of Advanced Nursing.*
Gavelin, H.M. et al. (2021). Cognitive function in clinical burnout: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Work & Stress.
Gao, Y. et al. (2025). The chain mediating role of resilience and change fatigue between intolerance of uncertainty and job burnout in nurses. Scientific Reports.
Gartner (2025). Building resilience in change management. gartner.com