Gartner HR Research Finds Just 32% of Business Leaders Report Achieving Healthy Change Adoption by Employees

Only one in three (32%) mid-to-senior level business leaders said that the last change they led achieved healthy change adoption by employees, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc.

Gartner defines healthy change adoption as the success elements that leaders can directly influence – getting employees to act on change, do so on time, and in a healthy way that doesn’t adversely impact employee performance and engagement and cause undue stress.

“Changes today are continuous, stacked on top of one another, highly interdependent and often driven by factors external to the organization,” said Kayla Velnoskey, Director in the Gartner HR practice. “While leaders are used to operating in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) environment, the nature of change today has made it ungovernable.”

Ungovernable change has lowered employees’ trust in the organization’s ability to change effectively. An April 2025 Gartner survey of 141 HR leaders found that organizations experiencing ungovernable change are 1.6 times less likely to experience high change trust. Another April 2025 Gartner survey of more than 2,850 employees revealed that 79% of employees have low trust in change.

“Organizations with better than average healthy change adoption report two times higher year-over-year revenue growth rate,” said Ingrid Laman, Vice President, Advisory in the Gartner HR practice. “For companies with more than 50,000 employees, this can equal up to $2.2 billion USD annually.”

Typically, leaders use inspiration and the vision of change to get employees to adopt change, however Gartner analysis found the inspirational approach only works when there is high change trust. When change trust is low, Gartner’s model predicts that only one-quarter of changes led by inspirational leaders would achieve healthy change adoption.

The best change leadership approach is when leaders routinize change, so it becomes instinctive for employees to adopt change as part of the normal course of doing work. Gartner has identified three ways HR can help leaders routinize change to achieve healthy change adoption (see Figure 1).

HR needs to help leaders communicate that constant change is today’s business reality and focus employees on making regular progress on the change journey. This requires business leaders to embrace a new, active role in leading change all the time, not just when it is most intense. Leaders must regularly prepare employees for change and focus on acknowledging progress on interim goals, not the ever-shifting vision for the future.

“To business leaders, this sounds like more work than they have capacity to tackle,” said Laman. “HR can help by showing business leaders that acknowledging the change journey is not more work; instead, it requires them to apply the skills they already have in new ways, redistributing and balancing their time and effort to make change leadership sustainable.”

Leaders and employees often feel great discomfort when they are asked to lead through or adopt changes. It is hard for leaders to help employees manage these emotions without knowing what’s driving employees’ discomfort. However, if leaders and employees cannot cope with this discomfort, it can create resistance to change.

HR must equip leaders with tools and techniques to regulate the emotional component of change, including resources to help employees self-identify and cope with their reactions to change. Ultimately, leaders are responsible for equipping employees to get to an emotional state where they can act on change despite how they feel.

Leaders who routinize change drive employee action by training intuition, so that change adoption is second nature. HR must help leaders build employees’ change reflexes by identifying what core change skills matter most and finding moments within daily work to practice those skills.

HR should partner with leaders to address the following:

• What are core change skills – skills needed by employees to prepare for and adopt change regardless of the type of change – that employees must practice?
• How and when do they practice these change skills?
• How can leaders get employees to commit to practicing these change skills?

“When leaders routinize change, our model predicts that employees are three times more likely to adopt changes on time and in a healthy way even though they have low change trust,” said Velnoskey.

Gartner clients can read more in the report “Reinventing Change Leadership: Leading Through Never-Ending Change.”

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