Future Clarity: the hidden key to change resistance

TLDR: Employee resistance to organisational change can hinder the success of any business, and future clarity plays a crucial role in overcoming such resistance. Future clarity refers to an employee’s ability to clearly envision their future, both personal and in the workplace. Future clarity can help employees comprehend the reasons for organizational change and its long-term benefits. Two critical factors that contribute to the development of future clarity for employees are resources – having the right resources to support the change – and communication – providing transparent, timely, and meaningful communications that asks and answers their questions. Managers can also help employees develop future clarity through providing appropriate training and development opportunities, incentives and rewards, encouraging open communication, and answering questions honestly. Using creative techniques to create a compelling vision of the future can also help build future clarity – such as visioning workshops, visual posters, storytelling, and rich-picture imagery. Explicitly addressing how to build future clarity into change and transformation initiatives helps mitigate against resistance, contributes to employee wellbeing, and helps towards ensuring achievement of ogranisational goals and therefore organisational success.

Organisational change is a crucial process for any business, and its success can often determine whether a company survives and thrives or stagnates and fails. Yet despite the potential benefits of change, employees can often be resistant to it, making it challenging for managers to achieve their goals. Recent research from Charles Darwin University (1, 2) has uncovered a critical link between something called future clarity and employee resistance to organisational change.

What is future clarity?

Future clarity refers to an individual’s ability to clearly envision their future. People with a strong sense of future clarity tend to be more optimistic about it and have a greater sense of wellbeing: conversely when the future is uncertain people can feel threatened and experience poorer wellbeing, including anxiety, sleep disturbances, excessive worries, and concomitant physical ailments.

In the context of the workplace, lack of future clarity can lead to poor work performance, absenteeism, workplace accidents, staff attrition, substance use, and resistance to change. In the context of organisational change, providing employees with a strong sense of future clarity can help employees understand the reasons behind the change and how it will benefit them in the long run. This means helping them mentally “see” themselves in their job after the change, going about their daily business activities. Employees who have a strong sense of future clarity are more likely to embrace change, whilst those whose futures are uncertain will resist it.

What the research shows

This makes intuitive sense and yet surprisingly (to me) there had been little research on the impact of future clarity on the success or failure of organisational change initiatives. One study investigated a link between between future goals and resilience in the face of change (3); another found a link between future goals and openness to change in older people (4). It was not until 2018 that researchers from Charles Darwin University, led by Dr Simon Moss, investigated specifically whether there is a link between future clarity and employee resistance to change. In their paper “Resistance is Futile: Do Vivid Images of the Future Diminish Resistance to Change?” they presented evidence that employees who could vividly envision their future had less resistance to organisational change. However, their study was based on hypothetical rather than actual changes in the workplace, and they proposed that future research could explore actual workplace change (1).

1. Future clarity predicts change resistance

My research in 2021 did just that (2). It tested the experiences of Northern Territory public sector employees across a range of organizational change and transformation initiatives. Using a well-regarded and reliable method called Structured Equation Modelling (SEM), my research confirmed that future clarity is a critical factor that precedes change acceptance. Specifically, employees who could vividly envision their future at work and their role in it were less likely to resist the change, while those with lower levels of future clarity showed higher levels of resistance.

The specific items that measured future clarity were

1. I found it really hard to predict what my work might be like in the future
2. I had a clear and vivid sense of what my future work would be like after the change
3. Images of myself at work in the future seemed hazy, not clear at all
4. The future at work seemed too uncertain for me to plan very far ahead
5. The future at work seemed vague and unclear to me

2. Resources and communications (but not participation) predict future clarity

The research also identified two key factors that contribute to building future clarity for employees: resources and communication. Resources refers to having sufficient staffing, skills, processes, and systems in place to support the successful implementation of the change. Communication refers to employees having timely, sufficient, useful information that adequately answers their questions about the change. While managers cannot directly control an employee’s personal sense of future clarity, they can influence it by addressing these organizational factors. By ensuring that employees have access to the necessary resources and information, managers can improve the degree to which their staff accepts or resists change.

Importantly, participation in a change activity was not a reliable predictor of either future clarity or employee resistance. Importantly, because participation is often seen as the silver bullet for change success, yet the evidence to support this is limited. In fact, requiring employees to participate in change initiatives routinely can have the opposite to the desired effect, taking employees away from their usual duties, and leading to resistance to change, change fatigue, workplace stress, and employee burnout.

Strategies for Providing Future Clarity

Providing employees with future clarity requires a strategic approach that involves clear communication and careful planning. Some strategies that can be employed to provide employees with future clarity, including the following:

1. Build a strong vision for the future, co-created with staff: Managers should communicate a compelling vision for the future and clearly demonstrate how the change will help achieve it. This helps employees understand the “why” of the the change and how it will benefit the organisation in the long run. If possible, involve employees in the development of that vision and planning for the change so that they have a sense of co-creating their future and owning the outcomes. They don’t necessarily need to participate in implementing the changes but numerous studies have shown that co-creation of the future state is a helpful factor is successful change initiatives.
2. Provide appropriate resources: Employees may resist change if they are uncertain about how it will affect their career prospects or job security. To help employees overcome this uncertainty, managers can provide them with training and development opportunities that clearly helps the employee mentally situate themselves in the organisations future state. This helps remove uncertainty, and builds employee confidence and resilience. In addition to standard training activities for change management, managers should ensure that staff have the necessary resources, including people, processes, and systems, to support the successful implementation of the change.
3. Offering incentives: Incentives can be a powerful motivator for change acceptance. Incentives and rewards help build future goals and and time-shift employees into the future in the workplace. Examples of incentives include financial rewards such as bonuses or profit-sharing, as well as non-financial incentives like flexible work arrangements, opportunities to participate in work design or decision-making processes, and so on. By offering incentives, managers can help employees understand the benefits of change and how it can help them achieve their future goals, which in turn can sharpen their future clarity. This approach can also foster a sense of shared purpose and commitment to the organization.
4. Encouraging open communication: Open communication is essential in overcoming employee resistance to change. By encouraging employees to share their concerns and ideas, and responding with transparency and honesty, managers can help to build trust and confidence, and create a shared vision for the future. This can also help to identify potential barriers to change and develop effective strategies to overcome them.
5. Using creative techniques to create a compelling vision of the future: To help employees develop a sense of future clarity, managers can employ various communication strategies. For example, managers could consider utilizing storytelling, conducting visioning workshops, using visual posters, or implementing other forms of visual management to create a clear and compelling vision of the future for employees (5,6). These activities can help employees understand the reasons behind the change, visualize their role in the future, and better understand how the change will benefit them in the long run.

In conclusion, future clarity plays a critical role in employee resistance to organizational change, and providing employees with a strong sense of future clarity can help them to understand the reasons behind the change and how it will benefit them in the long run. Resources and communication are two important factors that contribute to building future clarity for employees, and managers can influence the degree to which their staff accepts or resists change by addressing these organizational factors. Providing employees with future clarity requires a strategic approach that involves clear communication, involvement in creating a shared vision, offering incentives, and encouraging open communication. By implementing these strategies, organizations can increase the likelihood of successful change implementation and achieve their goals.

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References:

1. Moss, S. A., Irons, M., & Wilson, S. G. (2017). Resistance is futile: do vivid images of the future diminish resistance to change? International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 8(4), 290-304. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJWOE.2017.089294
2. Doney, Cathryn. (2022). Modifiable Antecedents To Employee Resistance To Change – Communication, Participation, Resources, and Paradoxical Leadership. Cathryn Doney (c) 2022. 10.13140/RG.2.2.31441.40801.
3. Wanberg, C. R., & Banas, J. T. (2000). Predictors and outcomes of openness to changes in a reorganizing workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(1), 132–142. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.85.1.132
4. Kunze, F., Boehm, S. and Bruch, H. (2013), “Age, resistance to change, and job performance”, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 28 No. 7/8, pp. 741-760. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-06-2013-0194
5. Bell, E., & Davison, J. (2013). Visual management studies: Empirical and theoretical approaches. International Journal of Management Reviews, 15(2), 167–184.
6. Liff, S. (2004). Seeing is believing how the new art of visual management can boost performance throughout your organization. In Seeing is believing how the new art of visual management can boost performance throughout your organization. AMACOM.