Karen Richardson is an executive coach and psychotherapist with more than 20 years’ experience as an HR leader at firms including Ashurst and Baker McKenzie.

At a recent Totum Partners HR Managers networking event, she examined how HR professionals are dealing with constant workplace change, sharing tips and strategies on navigating through its complexity. We’re delighted to share some of her expertise from that session.

The duality of change 

Change is all around us and with that comes opportunities and challenges. We want our organisations to be fit for purpose, both now and in the future. Many of the future work challenges we see – think AI, remote working, fragmented teams, upskilling – are interlinked, making them even more complex.

As HR professionals, we are in the crosshairs of where firms want to get to and how they are going to get there. Too often, you have different parts of the business trying to do different things, with no-one linking things together. For people, it feels like they are being pulled in different directions.

HR is often brought in at the last minute to execute change, with little time to process what it means for them.  Do we ever stop to recognise that while change is going on around HR teams, they are also going through it too and yet are expected to be OK.

So what happens on an emotional level when change happens? Academics share models that describe how a change process involves working out what you want to change, thinking about how to do it, planning, thinking some more and then achieving the change. However, this doesn’t take into account the complexity of dealing with human beings.

Think about it this way. There are two types of change – those we want, and those we don’t. Even those we want to make can be hard to achieve, such as New Year’s resolutions. When there is a change we don’t want, that can be doubly hard to navigate.

As humans, we all have an immunity to change. It’s hard for us to do, even despite good intentions. As organisations, we’re very good at working out where we are and where we want to get to, but less good at spending time in the middle working out how we’re going to do it.   

Fight, flight, or freeze?

Change activates the brain’s stress response system, triggering our fight, flight or freeze reaction. Our pre-frontal cortex assesses and helps us adapt to these situations, so we have the capacity to move through change. However, emotional responses influence our acceptance or resistance to change, triggering fight, flight, freeze reactions. We can experience this reaction through workplace behaviours that are tricky to deal with.

The fight response is often the most evident, being triggered when change is seen as a threat. This is a strong reaction, resulting in resistance and confrontational behaviour. Think people complaining, venting about change, raising alarms. The fight response is very common.

The freeze response happens when we’re overwhelmed or paralysed. People feel stuck or unable to take action. An example could be line leaders struggling to have a conversation with an individual that we know they need to. Often, this reaction is about feeling under threat and not confident.

Finally, we have flight. This is triggered when people avoid change, withdrawing physically or emotionally from the change. This might be not turning up to meetings or the office, or going off long-term sick. It’s about wanting to escape from fear or anxiety brought on by the change.

Note that none of this is right or wrong. It’s simply how we respond as humans. As HR, our role is to give space to allow reactions to happen and to be cognisant of it going on.

During the session we then explored a number of coaching models which have the potential to empower HR professionals when responding to the reaction of others to change but also building awareness of what might be happening to them as individuals. Karen shared her personal experience of looking around for support when she was a HR leader for this quite distinct and unique challenge professionals face.

Now running her own business, Karen recognises that her understanding of the HR role combined with coaching models can provide a space and structure for HR professionals to gain support in dealing with such complex change.

Karen Richardson was speaking at a Totum Partners HR Managers networking event. To learn more about the network, or about Totum’s People and Operations offering, contact Briony Jenkins [email protected]