The Change Curve: What employees experience during change

What makes Heraclitus to consider change as the only constant is the undeniable inevitability of this ubiquitous phenomenon – whether today or in his time over 500 years ago. When brought up in a meeting, employees may approve of change; however, in action, resistance to change is a commonly reported problem in change management.

The exponential speed of technology and other environmental factors along with the inherent complication of change itself makes it even more difficult for leaders to manage the change within their organizations. On one hand, (un)predictable changes are taking place around your business – take PESTEL Model for example. On the other hand, people, processes and departments evolve, modify and transform within your company as time goes by.

Developing many different theories and models around change management indicates the importance of this topic in leadership. One of these models is Organizational Change Curve. This model was initially developed by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969 to explain the emotional phases one goes through when faced with traumatic life events, particularly death. These stages are as shown below.

The model was an inspiration to many other similar ones some of which later entered the management field as organizational change models with more or fewer stages. In almost all the available theories, change begins in the current state in order to boost the performance. According to the change curve, denial is the first employees’ reaction to the upcoming change, which of course cannot prevent change from happening; therefore, it’s then followed by anger towards the change. This feeling may reflect in employees’ negative behaviors, such as creating rumors, verbal criticism, sarcastic comments and even questioning the leadership. In their next attempt, employees will resort to bargaining; that is, they strive to postpone the change or find a way out of it.

Facing the truth and by realization of the fact that change is actually happening, a new phase comes up: Depression, a.k.a. Valley of Despair. This point, where performance reaches a minimum level – far lower than the initial one – is maybe the most crucial point in the change process. This is when disappointment arises for both employees and leaders, and thus if not managed correctly, it may cause all the efforts to go down the drain and consequently no positive outcome of the change implementation and resources allocated to it.

The transition from old to new occurs at the Depression stage. At this point, those who haven’t been able to cope with the implemented change will leave the company. The remaining individuals will enter the Acceptance phase and start adjusting to the modifications. Accordingly, performance increases again to reach the desired level – higher than the initial one.

In addition to the illustration of the phases that employees experience in an organizational change process, the optimization of this process can be shown through the change curve. Given that the resistance to change is unavoidable – just like change itself – it should be recognized as a part of change process. Looking at the change curve, we can say that resistance emerges in the downhill of the valley, while acceptance is developed in the increasing half. Therefore, by flattening the curve through making resistance occur earlier and in a shorter period of time, employees not only do experience less performance decrease at the depression phase but also go through acceptance at the earlier point of time. More importantly, this may lead to a performance level higher than the desired one at the end of the implementation.

Whether you can flatten the change curve or not, you need to reach the acceptance stage; however, acceptance is not the final stage in change management. A change plan is accomplished when the intended change is integrated into the organization. This is indeed the Refreezing stage in Levin’s model of change. Finally, don’t forget that change is not a one-time thing at your company. Although it’s common to consider change as a process, it’s more of a cycle; once one change is integrated, a new one will eventually come up.