5 Critical Ways to Lead Your Team Through Workplace Transformation

Learn five key ways to effectively lead a transformation in the workplace.

In brief:

• Workplace flexibility isn’t a perk anymore — it’s how you compete. And you need the right tools and leadership to keep up with workplace transformation successfully.
• Agile thinking is spreading beyond tech teams into every part of the business, changing how teams talk to each other.
• Today’s leaders need to shift from command and control to coaching with empathy.
• Continuous learning beats one-time training. Around 58 percent of employees want bite-sized, accessible opportunities to learn new skills.
• Resilience to change is now a core competency, not simply a project management function.

With economic shifts, generational changes, new leadership models, and collaboration methods, it seems the workplace is transforming by the week. And organizations are facing increasing pressure to adapt in real time.

What’s making these workplace transformations particularly challenging is that many are driven by factors outside your control — macroeconomic forces, labor shortages, evolving employee expectations, and even health and weather emergencies.

Consider this: In 2022, the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes, such as restructures, culture transformations, or technology overhauls, up from just two in 2016.

The pace of change has been relentless, but if you treat this as an opportunity to reassess and realign your workplace strategies, you’ll emerge better equipped to meet the moment.

5 Key Trends Shaping the Transforming Workplace

The workplace isn’t simply changing. It’s completely transforming.

Between rapid technology upgrades, evolving employee and customer expectations, and external market pressures, it can feel like the ground is constantly shifting under your feet. Instead of fighting the change, however, you need to recognize the trends and understand their impact, then take steps to make them work for your organization.

Here are five ways to approach workplace transformation, plus questions to ask along the way.

1. How You Show Up: Make Flexibility Functional

Flexible work models aren’t new, but the way they’re showing up today is more complex than ever. Since the pandemic, many organizations have embraced remote or hybrid models, while others, especially in banking and financial services, are trending back toward full-time office requirements.

What’s consistent is that workplace flexibility is no longer a perk — it’s a business strategy. And that strategy needs the right tools, leadership behaviors, and team norms to succeed.

Yet in a study of workplace collaboration trends, 75 percent of employees said they felt collaboration suffered the most since switching to remote work. And 64 percent of employees report losing up to three hours each week because of collaboration inefficiencies.

As Verna Montgomery, my colleague and people and change expert, shared, “It’s not just about having the tools — it’s about knowing how to use them effectively.”

Key Questions to Consider:

• Are your collaboration tools optimized for your hybrid reality?
• Is your workplace set up to encourage employee engagement?
• Do your people have the skills to lead when they can’t see their team?
• Is your workplace model enabling performance or creating confusion?

2. How You Work: Adopt Agile as a Cultural Mindset

Agile has long since evolved from a software development concept to a business imperative. Cross-functional teams, iterative delivery, and decentralized decision-making are becoming the norm. But Agile ways of working still require new mindsets and mechanisms: transparency, trust and real-time communication.

One challenge we’ve seen repeatedly is that empowering teams without evolving communication systems creates bottlenecks. In a recent engagement, we worked with a client to redesign their communications flow across teams to support decentralized, Agile decision-making, ensuring that empowerment didn’t come at the cost of alignment.

The numbers back this up. While 70 percent of information technology (IT) teams report using Agile development methods, almost 30 percent of business operations have also adopted the methodology, indicating that Agile methodologies are no longer the exception.

Key Questions to Consider:

• Are your teams empowered to prioritize and deliver value quickly?
• Are your communications designed for speed, clarity and adaptability?

3. How You Lead: Rethink Leadership for a Distributed Culture

Today’s employees expect leaders who listen, coach and inspire rather than just direct. But that shift isn’t always intuitive for leaders who built their careers in more traditional models instead of within a transforming workplace.

We’re increasingly seeing organizations request leadership coaching on situational and servant leadership principles. One client, for example, engaged us to assess their leadership culture and design coaching programs to build empathy-driven leadership competencies across the organization.

In fact, executive coaching is increasingly promoted by executive MBA providers as a crucial career development service. Statistics from the Executive MBA Council (EMBAC) reveal a significant rise in coaching services among their member programs, from 58 percent in 2011 to over 87 percent in 2023.

Montgomery notes, “Leadership today isn’t about command and control. It’s about empathy and empowerment. Leaders need to connect with their teams on a human level, especially in a distributed work environment.”

Key Questions to Consider:

• Have you assessed your leadership style against current employee expectations?
• Are your leaders equipped to manage distributed teams and evolving cultural dynamics?

4. How You Grow: Prioritize Skill Development and Learning Agility

The rapid pace of technological change — especially with emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology — means the half-life of skills is shrinking. Still, many organizations are hanging onto outdated, one-size-fits-all training models that don’t match today’s need for speed, flexibility or relevance.

That’s why there’s a growing shift toward more Agile learning strategies: microlearning, skill-based assessments, and personalized development plans. These methods meet people where they are and make learning easier to fit into the flow of work. In fact, 58 percent of employees say they’d be more likely to engage with online learning if the content were broken into shorter, more manageable lessons.

The organizations leading the way aren’t treating learning as a one-time event — they’re building it into the culture as a continuous, embedded part of how work gets done.

Key Questions to Consider:

• Have you assessed the upskilling or reskilling needs across your teams?
• Are your learning programs flexible and accessible enough to meet people where they are?

5. How You Build Change Resilience: From Coping to Thriving

According to Harvard Business Review, 85 percent of executives and project managers report a rise in the number of change management projects. And that’s not without reason. As major events increase, so too does how we work.

But even if that weren’t the case, change isn’t an event — it’s a constant. Organizations that treat it as a one-time disruption are already behind. Those that succeed treat change as a core competency to build and sustain.

Some clients we work with are building enterprise change management (ECM) offices. Others are embedding change agility as a formal competency across roles. In both cases, the shift is toward viewing resilience as a shared responsibility, not simply a function of the change team.

Key Questions to Consider:

• How resilient is your organization to continuous change?
• Are you investing in change resiliency across all levels — not just leaders?
• Do you have a pulse on your employee experience during these transformations?

Recognizing these trends is only the first step. The real challenge — and opportunity — is figuring out how to respond in a way that sets your people and your business up for long-term success.

Your People Strategy Is Your Business Strategy in a Transforming Workplace

Change is not just about a communications plan — it’s about workforce planning. If you’re not revisiting your people strategy in the face of these external pressures, you’re likely falling behind.

Now is the time to ask the hard questions:

• Do you have the right people in the right roles?
• Are your structures aligned to what your business will need not only today, but tomorrow?
• Are you enabling change, resilience, and innovation, or just reacting to disruption?

The organizations that will thrive in the next era of work are those that see this moment not as a challenge but as a chance to reset and lead forward.

Change is inevitable, but successful transformation requires more than just a project-by-project approach. We specialize in Enterprise Change Management (ECM) — enabling your organization to enable change and create a competitive advantage. Skip frustrated employees, missed opportunities, and a lack of sustainable transformation by working with ECM experts to drive your organization toward change. Learn more