Change management isn’t a new concept, but it’s more complex and more important than ever.

Rapid digitization, massive workforce shifts during the pandemic, and now new advancements in AI prove that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (and the author of Moore’s Law) was right when he said that at any given point in time, “change has never been this fast and will never be this slow ever again.”

In a recent global survey of CEOs by PwC, 40% said they don’t believe their organizations will exist in 10 years if they stay on their current path. Change is not only inevitable, but absolutely necessary if your organization is to survive and thrive.

At the axis of this change is the labor market, where the needs of both employees and employers are quickly evolving, making it particularly difficult to navigate. As new jobs emerge that never existed before, it’s skills rather than just experience or education that will determine successful hiring and retention.

It’s time to shift thinking from change management — a top-down process meant to usher your organization through one big change — to change agility, a continuous, employee-driven, constantly evolving approach to real-time resilience.

To help you navigate significant and continuous workforce changes, Eightfold AI and The Josh Bersin Company hosted a webinar centered on 10 lessons on change agility. This is not a one-time process of change management, but an ongoing ability to respond to, adapt to, and successfully navigate change. Here are the key takeaways from that session.

The business resilience maturity model

Before we present the 10 lessons, we have to give some context as to why change agility is essential in an environment where entire industries are transforming and refocusing at a faster pace than ever before.

Not so long ago industries had clearly defined lines. For example, all consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies exclusively operated within that realm. Today, CPG companies are becoming retail companies, but those are hardly the only ones. Walmart is going into health care. Traditional banking is emerging into fintech. Every automaker is now an EV maker. And so on.

Fortunately, almost everyone is prioritizing effective transformation. In our webinar, 39% of survey respondents asserted that talent transformation was a critical C-suite priority, while an additional 40% said it is a high priority across leadership and HR.

But everyone varies widely in their readiness to execute on that belief. A few months into the pandemic, The Josh Bersin Company studied 1,400 organizations around the globe. The study asked higher-level questions that included reinventing remote work, redesigning performance management, and fostering transformation.

The results yielded a maturity model for what we call “business resilience,” or how people in the organization have built their “transformation muscle” enough to impact their culture. The four levels of business resilience maturity include:

1. Hope for the best.

These companies tried to keep operations running and focused on financial survival, often choosing mass layoffs to cut costs quickly (18% of companies surveyed).

2. Care for the people.

These companies focused on keeping workers healthy and supporting their wellbeing (46% of companies surveyed).

3. Drive agility and culture.

These companies focused on the mission, educating and supporting employees and their families to move fast, develop cross-functional solutions, and stay resilient and productive (15% of companies surveyed).

4. Transform and reinvent.

These companies reinvented hiring, job design, performance management, and compensation so they could transform to a new business or operating model (21% of companies surveyed).

Business resilience matters because highly resilient organizations had much better outcomes. Level-four organizations are 4.5 times more likely to effectively respond to change and 3.9 times more likely to be financially high-performing. When your business is resilient and change-agile, you don’t just hire people for today — you help them prepare for tomorrow.

10 lessons of change agility

Change management has to stop being a sibling of program management or project management — it has to be a design discipline that puts people first and builds capabilities to respond to and anticipate change.

When you think about change, you can’t see it as a discrete activity or a project, but as something that’s iterative and ongoing.

How can your business achieve this? The Josh Bersin Company wrote a change in agility playbook, The Big Reset: Change Agility. Here are the 10 lessons from that research

1. Every interaction is a change interaction

Every interaction you have with users or with leaders in your company is a change interaction. Don’t save it for last, when you’re already done designing everything or rolling out a new approach. For example, Starbucks employed this lesson when they redesigned the entire frontline hiring process. They brought along hiring managers and candidates in system selection and design to get their input early on.

2. Effective change starts with listening to employees

When people think about change management, they tend to think about telling employees that something is happening, or thinking about the best way to communicate it. But before we talk, it’s important to listen. Listening to employees really takes you from a place of knowing it all to learning it all. Learn the concerns of your employees and listen all the time.

3. Start a mission-first movement, not a marketing campaign

Effective change processes reinforce the company mission and culture. When you tell people not just the “what” of the change, but also the “why,” and tie it into what the organization is here to do, everything changes.

For example, the LEGO Group designed leadership programs with employees at the center with the company mission as the framework. Basically LEGO said, “What are we here to do? We’re here to play.” The company wanted to energize everybody to think and be more like kids, and integrate that mindset around fun and play into their experiences at work.

4. Foster human-centered leadership to inspire change and transformation

In any change process, even when bottom-up and employeecentric, leadership is critically important. Often in traditional change management, leaders have talking points to tell their employees what they need to do.

Leaders can have a much bigger impact if they don’t just talk but also model the change. Have your leadership walking the walk, not just talking the talk.

5. Set the tone with transparent, fit-for-purpose communication

When you communicate, think about not just what you communicate, but also how you communicate — the medium must fit your audience and message. Take the aforementioned Starbucks example. When you think about candidates in stores, ask yourself how they prefer to communicate — it’s likely text, not email.

Think about how you communicate, what medium you use, and what format you use, and your audience. Coordinate your messaging plans around that.

6, Design thinking builds change adoption into the solutions

The key to change adoption is building the right solutions. Design thinking is an approach that guarantees to make this a reality. It’s about involving employees from the start, testing, and iterating for the right solution.

For example, Deutsche Telekom, has been using design thinking for a decade and now uses it for every HR program, not just tech projects, even for designing the best executive compensation. They started with one pilot project and now have 600.

7. Microchanges result in macrotransformation

A big principle of design thinking is not making one big change, but doing many little iterations and microchanges. Big changes can be overwhelming, but when you break it down for everyone, it appears doable and gets much easier.

8. Nudge technology puts behavior change into the flow of work

The technology for change management is often projectmanagement solutions, tracking pieces of the process, including communication, training, and stakeholder management. That’s all great, but you should also think about how you can nudge people along and make the right thing easy to do.

PwC was cultivating human-centered and inclusive leadership behaviors. The organization used technology that looked at their managers’ behaviors and how they communicated with team members. It then offered suggestions as they were going into team meetings, for example, “Whenever you meet with this person, you don’t let them talk very much. Maybe you can ask some more questions and help them open up.” Nudging means you’re not just training people, but telling them in the moment, “Here’s what you should do.”

9. Reward and recognize new changed behaviors

Highlight, model, and tell stories to show people what good looks like. In a skills-based organization, it might be hard to highlight how specific skills are deployed, but you can do things like showcase managers whose teams are adapting well and adopting change. Change is hard, but it’s much easier when people see from their peers what it looks like and why it matters.

10. HR capabilities to foster change agility are critical

HR capability for change management and communication is critical. At The Josh Bersin Academy, it’s the most required and most requested HR capability from the thousands of HR people supported there. But only one in five practitioners is really good at that. There are many opportunities to foster those skills. And, when correlated with organizational growth, change management and communication is the second most impactful capability, right after developing leaders and managers.