Beating Change Fatigue Without More Meetings
Change fatigue is real, and most teams are drowning in back-to-back meetings that promise clarity but deliver exhaustion. This article draws on insights from organizational development experts to show how leaders can maintain momentum without adding another calendar invite. The strategies outlined here focus on trust-building, asynchronous communication, and predictable rhythms that keep teams aligned and energized.
Build Trust to Sustain Momentum
One huge area I see that's under considered when it comes to change fatigue is trust. If an employee population doesn't trust themselves (feel confident in their skillsets and aligned with their work), trust each other (feel confident toward leadership, believe they are communicated with consistently and with transparency) and trust their industry (believe in the purpose and the work they are doing to make a positive impact in this world), all of the change management and change fatigue plans in the world can't help. Regularly focusing on self-trust and relationship trust building will keep the ball rolling in the right direction.
Run Brief Post Agenda Alignment Chats
One approach that eased fatigue during a long transformation (while we were setting up a PMO to bring multiple projects under a single strategic steer) was a short informal discussion at the end of each PMO meeting. Once the formal agenda closed only the core stakeholders stayed on. The tone was conversational rather than procedural. People were simply asked whether the transformation was heading in the direction they expected and what, if anything, felt off track.
Because it wasn't framed as a formal review, people spoke openly. They compared what they were seeing on the ground with what the PMO was coordinating and they raised points that would have been difficult to surface in a more formal setting. For instance, they mentioned priorities that were drifting and functions at risk of working at cross-purposes. Before the PMO existed, those misalignments were common because each project had been running on its own logic.
The PMO captured the themes quietly and used them to make the necessary adjustments. Over time and as the programme settled, the conversations became shorter because the underlying noise reduced. The ritual worked because it created an informal space for honest alignment without adding process or new meetings. My takeaway from this experience is this: fatigue can be the result of unspoken divergence and even a light-touch forum can keep a complex portfolio moving in the right direction.
Send a Weekly Wins Digest
We swapped out a potential status meeting for an asynchronous, highly-curated 'Weekly Wins Digest'. The one hard rule was our project leads could submit only one thing per week, and that something had to be concrete and indicate forward motion - a shipped feature, a customer bug turned to resolution, a nasty bug squished. We weren't after the big wins, we wanted to lay down a relentless and quite visible drumbeat of small wins to undermine the story that we were one endlessly mid-cycle transformation.
The digest went out from my office every Friday afternoon. It created a habit, a ritual cadence wholly focused on momentum. Rather than ask people for more of their time in a meeting to discuss progress we simply showed them the progress that was happening. As Lets Talk Talent writes, "It is important to celebrate small wins and achievements throughout the change process". That digest was our way to do just that, at scale and with little lift.
We tracked sentiment with simple bi-weekly pulse surveys asking staff to rate their confidence in the direction of the project, and tracked a directly positive correlation between consistency of the digest and a drop in 'This project will never get unstuck' type comments. You won't always need a meeting to align people; sometimes you just have to make the small wins hard to ignore.
Adopt Predictable Updates with Opt Outs
During long, multi-quarter transformations, the most effective way I've mitigated change fatigue is by reducing noise and increasing predictability, rather than adding more touchpoints.
In practice, that meant replacing ad-hoc meetings and layered updates with a single, consistent written cadence. Each update followed the same structure: what changed, why it matters now, and what people actually need to do differently. Leaders were asked to reference that update directly instead of re-explaining it in meetings, which helped prevent message drift.
Two mechanics made a measurable difference. First, updates were opt-out for teams not impacted in that phase, which immediately reduced overload and rebuilt trust. Second, sentiment was tracked indirectly through a decline in repeat questions, escalations, and conflicting interpretations, rather than frequent surveys.
I'm using this approach again on a current, multi-quarter transformation, and the pattern holds: when people know what to expect and can easily self-serve information, momentum stays high without meeting fatigue. Predictability, not volume, is what sustains confidence over time.
