The cult of change: Who pays the price?

The Flexibility Myth: Why "Agility" Is Quietly Burning Out Your Workforce

Walk into almost any corporate handbook today and you'll find the same gospel: change is good, agility is a virtue, and resilience is something employees need to build. Zappos tells staff to "Embrace and Drive Change." Microsoft frames growth as "not just possible — it's expected." Amazon champions "Invent and Simplify." Colgate-Palmolive urges its people to "Change Boldly."

The message is consistent, and on paper it sounds inspiring. The problem is that it ignores basic human biology — and the bill for that oversight is coming due in the form of burnout, quiet quitting, and rising absenteeism.

The nervous system didn't get the memo

Human physiology evolved for predictability. When the environment — physical or psychological — keeps shifting, the body doesn't interpret it as opportunity. It interprets it as threat. Constant reorganizations, revolving leadership, half-considered AI rollouts, and fuzzy role definitions don't feel like growth to the nervous system; they feel like danger.

That triggers what scientists call allostasis: an active, energy-intensive process of hormonal and cardiovascular adjustment the body uses to cope with a destabilized environment. It works — for a while. But according to neuroscientist Bruce McEwen's research, when these compensating systems stay switched on for too long, the wear and tear accumulates as "allostatic load." Left unaddressed, that load is now understood to be one of the biological roots of burnout, disengagement, and chronic absence.

Most people don't actually want constant change

There's a psychological explanation for why organizations keep pushing transformation regardless: a small but disproportionately influential group - often concentrated among senior leaders and the consultants who advise them - genuinely thrives on novelty. For this minority, change is energizing, even identity-defining. Without it, they lose motivation.

But research suggests roughly two-thirds of employees prefer the opposite: stability, or at most, gradual evolution. So a reorganization that a CEO experiences as an exciting new chapter can land on an employee's nervous system as a threat. The issue isn't that leaders enjoy change - it's that they set the pace for everyone else, and often mistake their own preference for a universal one.

Four ways the load builds up

Occupational health researchers point to several distinct patterns that compound allostatic load:

1. Repeated stress spikes - three "urgent" tasks landing Monday morning on top of unfinished business from Friday.
2. Failure to habituate - a stressor that recurs so often it should become routine, but never does (the Monday status meeting that still triggers the same knot in the stomach as the first one).
3. No off switch - the stress response bleeding into personal time, an employee still mentally replaying a 4 p.m. Teams call at 11 p.m.
4. Exhausted stress systems - cortisol output that can only sustain the load for so long before secondary systems, including inflammatory pathways, kick in.

Why wellness perks don't fix it

Resilience workshops and mindfulness apps aren't solving the underlying problem. As the saying goes, it's a bit like teaching yoga to the people living in a burning house instead of putting out the fire.

The scale of the problem is striking in Hungary, where this research originates: STADA's 2025 survey found 76% of Hungarians reported burnout-like symptoms, and Affidea's research put daily stress at 73%. Among HR professionals specifically - the people meant to be managing everyone else's wellbeing - the 2025 HR Mental Health Index found 58% of 279 respondents felt frequently or constantly exhausted, and 36.6% described themselves as outright burned out.

Fragmented workflows, poorly synchronized Slack, Teams and email alerts, and unnecessary status meetings all drain the cognitive energy that should go toward real work. Employees are left in a permanent state of micro-decision-making: what to prioritize, what's urgent, who to answer, which new direction to follow.

When stress becomes measurable - and dangerous

Once the primary stress response is exhausted, C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of systemic inflammation, can rise. Engagement surveys might still look fine even as CRP climbs and heart-rate variability (HRV) declines - a biological debt accumulating beneath a seemingly healthy surface.

That's why some researchers argue an allostatic load index may predict cognitive decline and mortality more accurately than a single clinical measure like blood pressure: it captures a subclinical state where lab results still look normal, but the body is already paying interest on a growing loan.

Chronically elevated cortisol doesn't just sour someone's mood - it affects brain function. The cynicism so often associated with burnout isn't a character flaw. It's a brain in protective shutdown, trying to shield itself from further painful adaptation.

Five interventions worth trying

The fix isn't training employees to tolerate more disruption - it's redesigning how organizations operate so they demand less constant adaptation in the first place.

1. Set a change budget. Cognitive and emotional capacity is finite. If a team is already absorbing three simultaneous changes - new software, a new KPI, a new manager - it shouldn't get a fourth. Leadership courage sometimes means protecting an overloaded team from the next "brilliant" idea, not launching it.
2. Simplify the calendar. Research from Shopify and MIT Sloan found that one meeting-free day a week boosts productivity by 35%; two days pushes that to 71%. Practical steps: cancel recurring meetings of three or more people unless there's a documented purpose; block at least one meeting-free day weekly; move status updates to asynchronous, written formats (Asana data suggests this alone can lift efficiency by 20%); and list the estimated combined salary cost of a meeting right in the invite.
3. Don't rely on willpower. Legal "right to disconnect" rules, like Portugal's, aren't enough on their own. Real disconnection needs a technical fix: default delayed-send settings so after-hours messages simply don't land until the next working day. It's not a courtesy issue - it's a systems decision.
4. Clarify the job. Gallup research shows barely half of employees know exactly what's expected of them. That ambiguity carries a real biological cost by keeping people in constant uncertainty. A low-cost fix: a one-page quarterly "role contract" answering three questions - where are you the sole decision-maker, what's been removed from your remit since the last reorg, and which two existing tasks would you drop if you took on something new?
5. Track leadership's footprint. As the old line goes, updated for the modern office: what isn't measured shows up in employees' bodies instead. Where possible, build leadership bonuses around metrics like the number of concurrent changes a team is absorbing, the volume of after-hours messages and calls from managers, and average weekly hours spent in meetings.

Recovery is a business interest, not a perk

Under what's been called the "recovery paradox," passive rest — an evening in front of the TV — stops being enough once the strain has built up over months. The body needs sustained time off, not motivational quotes.

Hungarian telecom Yettel offers a useful model with its Recharge program: a full month off after five years of service, explicitly framed as recognition that sustained performance requires periodic, structured recovery. It's consistent with WHO and ILO data showing that working beyond 55 hours a week produces no additional output — only higher allostatic load, measurable in rising HbA1c and weaker immune function, while business results typically stagnate or decline.

The bill always comes due

Organizations can pay this biological cost one of two ways: through deliberate, well-paced change management, or through turnover, sick leave, and long-term cognitive decline. Managing employees' allostatic load isn't a wellness trend or an HR luxury — it's the foundation of sustainable performance.

Change itself isn't going away. But how much of it an organization imposes, how much predictability it preserves, and how much room it leaves for recovery — those are leadership choices. The organizations that will come out ahead are the ones that recognize a simple fact: people do their best work when their brains aren't fighting for survival inside a structure they can't predict.

The original article in Hungarian can be read here and here.

The author of the original: Gerlei Béla MSc. MBA