When employees struggle with change, organizations love to reach for a convenient diagnosis:
They’re resistant… or they don’t want to learn the new system, they aren’t embracing the new strategy, they keep asking questions leadership thought they already answered, or even they seem skeptical about the latest transformation initiative.
That explanation is convenient but i’s also incomplete.
PwC’s 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey paints a much more complicated picture of what’s happening inside organizations. Employees are adapting. In fact, 88% said they applied new skills in their jobs over the past year, and nearly two-thirds had to learn new tools and technology to at least a moderate extent.
Yet only 51% say they have access to the learning and development resources they need, down from 59% the previous year.
In other words, organizations are asking people to change while access to the resources that help them change is going in the wrong direction.
Your Workforce Isn’t Experiencing Change Equally
Change is no longer something organizations roll out once every few years. New technology. Restructuring. New leadership. New processes. New expectations. New roles. New performance metrics. Another platform everyone has to learn by Friday. The workplace has become a constant stream of adjustment.
The same research from PwC identified these workforce groups:
- Front-runners have strong AI advantages and highly sought-after skills. They tend to feel confident, optimistic, and ready to adapt.
- Engine room employees make up 56% of the workforce and handle much of the day-to-day work organizations depend on. Yet fewer than 40% say they have access to the learning and development resources they need, and only 20% say recent organizational changes make them optimistic about their organization’s future.
- AI insurgent employees are relatively secure and engaged, but they’re feeling the pressure of constant change and increased demands.
- Indespensables have the fewest advantages and are the least equipped to navigate what’s coming next, making them especially vulnerable as work continues to evolve.
That means you need to stop treating workforce readiness as though everyone starts from the same place.
Different employees have different levels of confidence, workloads, access to development, relationships with managers, and experiences with previous organizational changes.
So what do employees actually need?
1. Employees Need to Understand the “Why”
Leaders spend months discussing a major organizational change. They attend meetings. Review data. Debate options. Talk through risks. Revise plans. Discuss the decision again. And again.
Then they announce it Tuesday morning and wonder why everyone isn’t fully committed by Tuesday afternoon. Leadership has had months to process the change. Employees have had 20 minutes.
Give them a minute!
Employees need context. What problem are we solving? Why isn’t the current approach working? What will success look like? And, most importantly, what does this mean for me?
If employees don’t understand the change, don’t immediately label their questions as resistance.
Sometimes questions are just questions.
2. Employees Need the Skills to Succeed in the New Reality
Organizations cannot continuously change job expectations without continuously developing the people expected to meet them.
The same research by PwC found that workers actually rate their own ability to learn new skills higher than the support they receive to do so. While 61% feel confident in their ability to develop new skills, only 51% say they have access to the learning and development resources they need.
Employees may be perfectly willing to adapt and still feel unprepared to do it.
Organizations need to provide development that connects directly to where the business is going. That means identifying the skills employees will need, giving them meaningful opportunities to practice those skills, and this part seems to mysteriously disappear from many development plans—giving them time to learn them.
You cannot tell someone to develop an entirely new capability while maintaining the same workload, deadlines, meetings, and performance expectations.
Learning requires capacity. If development only happens after employees finish their “real work,” you haven’t made development a priority. You’ve assigned homework.
3. Employees Need Managers Who Know How to Lead Through Change
Most workplace change looks something like this: Senior leadership announces the change → Managers are expected to make it happen, but, unfortunately, nobody developed the managers.
PwC found that 24% of managers themselves struggle to manage change, while confidence in their own job security has fallen.
Yet managers sit directly between organizational strategy and the employee experience. You cannot expect managers to confidently guide employees through uncertainty when they’re standing in the same uncertainty without a flashlight.
This is why manager development can’t consist of sending people to a leadership workshop once and checking the box.
Managers need practice navigating difficult conversations, communicating expectations, building trust, giving useful feedback, holding people accountable, managing conflict, and creating psychological safety.
Our Manager Evolution Lab is not just another one-and-done leadership workshop. Managers practice the skills they actually need on the job—from difficult conversations and accountability to feedback, trust, conflict management and psychological safety—so they’re better equipped to lead people when things get messy.
4. Employees Need to Trust the People Asking Them to Change
PwC found that trust in management fell seven percentage points in one year. Among employees in the “engine room,” only 33% trust top management and 40% trust their immediate manager.
Now imagine telling that workforce: Trust us. This transformation is going to be great.
See the problem? Change requires vulnerability from employees. You’re asking people to give up familiar processes, develop new skills, accept uncertainty, make mistakes while learning, and trust that leadership knows where the organization is headed.
Employees are much more willing to take those risks when they believe leadership will be transparent, consistent, and fair. Trust, therefore, isn’t separate from change management. Trust determines how employees interpret change.
5. Employees Need Permission to Get It Wrong
Organizations frequently tell employees they want innovation while rewarding behavior that says the exact opposite.
- Be creative but don’t make mistakes.
- Try something new but hit every existing metric.
- Challenge how we’ve always done things but maybe not that thing.
- Experiment but please provide the ROI first.
You can see why employees might be confused. Adaptability doesn’t happen because you put “agility” in the company values. People adapt when the culture makes adaptation safe.
Employees need room to ask questions, test ideas, admit when they don’t understand something, challenge outdated processes, and occasionally get something wrong without fearing that every mistake will follow them into their next performance review.
If the safest career strategy in your organization is to keep your head down and do things exactly the way they’ve always been done, don’t act shocked when people aren’t racing toward change.
Your culture trained them to behave that way.
Stop Managing “Resistance.” Start Building Readiness
Yes, some employees resist change. There will always be people who prefer the familiar, disagree with a decision, or simply don’t want to adjust.
But “resistance” shouldn’t become the catch-all explanation every time employees struggle with organizational change.
Before blaming the workforce, ask a harder question: Have you actually given people what they need to succeed through the change?
We help organizations answer those questions through workforce assessments, interviews and focus groups, then turn what we uncover into an actionable roadmap for change.
Because you don’t build an adaptable workforce by repeatedly telling people to be more adaptable. You build a culture that gives people the clarity, skills, trust, support and psychological safety to do it.
So before you launch another initiative designed to make employees “more adaptable,” find out what’s getting in their way. Your employees may not be resisting change at all.
They may be waiting for the organization to get better at leading it. Send us an email!
PS: Do you want to share your expertise with the Civility Partners community? We’re looking for experts to guest our Workplace Intelligence Series’ bi-monthly webinars and Culture Forward Show. If you have insights our audience of HR professionals and leaders needs to hear, we’d love to connect. Fill out this quick form, and we’ll send you more information about guest opportunities!
