During a major organizational transition, my first instinct used to be the standard playbook: communicate more, reassure often, keep morale up. What I learned is that in a real crisis, people do not need more optimism from leadership. They need the truth and a sense that the organization is absorbing the uncertainty rather than quietly pushing it down onto them.

So I shifted the strategy in two ways. First, I traded reassurance for honesty and predictability. That meant communicating at a regular rhythm, even when the update was “we still do not know yet,” because silence during uncertainty does more damage than hard news. People can plan around a difficult truth. They cannot plan around a vacuum, and the vacuum is where anxiety and rumor take over. Second, I stopped framing resilience as something we needed from employees in a hard moment and started treating it as something the organization owed them. The question moved from “how do we keep people engaged through this” to “how do we keep this from landing entirely on their shoulders.”

The key insight that changed my approach permanently: engagement is not earned in good times and drawn down in bad ones. It is built or broken by how an organization behaves when things are hardest. The companies that come through a transition with trust intact are not the ones with the best messaging. They are the ones who told the truth, shared the burden, and treated people like adults who could handle reality. After that, I stopped measuring engagement by how people feel when things are going well and started paying attention to whether they still trust us when things are not.

My team is small and spread across multiple time zones, so when we hit a rough patch a couple of years ago with a product line tanking and cash getting tight, the damage showed up fast. People went quiet on calls. Updates stopped flowing. I was losing my team’s attention before I had a handle on the financial side.

I started running a short one-on-one with each person every week, just one open question and then I’d shut up and listen. Sometimes it was about workload, sometimes it was personal stuff, sometimes it was complaints about me.

Within a few weeks, the silence broke. People started flagging problems earlier, and some of my best contributors told me they’d been close to quitting but felt heard enough to stick around.

The business problem got solved eventually. I kept those weekly calls going, and I’ve kept that cadence ever since, even when things are going well.

When the Strait of Hormuz crisis hit, I watched 4 Southeast Asian governments do in days what many HR teams had debated for years. After interviewing HRDs such as Larissa Murmann and Artem Ivanenko, I saw that the companies adapting best had built trust, leadership habits, and hybrid infrastructure before the emergency arrived. So my employee experience strategy advice shifted from asking where people should work to designing how people perform, connect, learn, and stay supported under pressure.

Trip.com showed hybrid staff matched office peers on productivity and promotion, while resignations fell by 33%. My key insight was Larissa’s sharp reminder that location is rarely the root cause of performance. When leaders manage outcomes, flexibility becomes strategy; when they manage chairs, it becomes expensive babysitting.

When we were building Interseller, we hit a pretty rough stretch right before the Greenhouse acquisition. The team was small, the timeline was uncertain, and the normal playbook for keeping people engaged, all-hands meetings, frequent updates, felt hollow because we didn’t actually know what was going to happen yet.

The thing that worked was getting much more granular about individual scope, not team morale. Instead of company-level messaging about the future, we sat down with each person and said: here is exactly what you own for the next eight weeks, here is why it matters regardless of what happens at the company level, here is how I’ll know if you did it well. That shift from company narrative to individual clarity changed the energy fast. People will tolerate a lot of uncertainty about the org if they feel clear about what they personally are supposed to be doing and why it matters.

When transitioning from an old scheduling network to a new one within our organization, we were able to develop our employee experience strategy by including blocks of microlearning in each employee’s regular day. We made sure to reduce all non-essential admin tasks by 20% so our coordinators had the opportunity to focus on learning how to navigate the new system without being interrupted. My most significant realization is that employee satisfaction declines dramatically when teams are required to learn new, complex systems with no reduction in baseline productivity. By allowing them the ability to protect the time needed to maintain a dedicated focus on learning, it allowed us to improve morale and greatly reduce errors in data entry. This way of handling transitions has changed how we manage projects at our organization. It has shown us that sustainable organizational growth requires a leadership team that views the development capacity of its employees as a valuable resource that needs to be supported and protected.

As an LPC-S and forensic mental health evaluator, I’ve led clinicians through high-stakes work where crisis, trauma, legal pressure, and confidentiality all collide. During transitions, I focus first on psychological safety and ethical clarity, not perks.

When expanding school-based mental health services at Houston Adventist Academy, I shifted from “be available if staff need help” to structured support: clear escalation pathways, protected consultation time, and space to debrief difficult cases without shame.

With AdventMind, our pro bono outreach, the challenge was emotional load and mission fatigue. I learned to watch for over-identification with clients, because compassionate people can burn out while believing they are just “being dedicated.”

The key insight: employee engagement improves when people feel protected by the system, not just inspired by the mission. A strong mission attracts good people, but clear boundaries, supervision, and predictable support help them stay healthy enough to keep doing the work.

As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and counselor, I help professionals navigate career transitions by treating chronic workplace stress and burnout. When we scaled our network at Collective Counseling Solutions, we adapted our employee strategy by treating major transitions as nervous system stressors rather than just operational tasks.

We moved away from high-efficiency routines and instead introduced restorative “rituals” to signal safety, such as dedicating specific times for teams to transition slowly between complex client cases. This sensory-grounding approach prevented the emotional numbness and detachment that often plagues teams during periods of rapid organizational change.

The key insight was realizing that during a crisis, employees operate in a “low-battery season” where pushing for optimization only accelerates burnout. True engagement is sustained by shifting our focus from strict productivity and control to compassion and psychological preservation.

At Art & Display, we build trade show environments where deadlines are immovable, so a transition hits the team fast. When clients started asking for more modular exhibits, rentals, and financing-friendly options, I stopped treating that as just a sales shift and made it an employee-experience shift.

We brought design, production, and account people into the same conversation earlier, especially around the 8-12 week approval window and 4-6 week vendor timeline. That reduced the “panic handoff” problem where one team inherits decisions they never helped shape.

On larger brand work for companies like Google, NASA, Samsung, or Tencent Cloud, the lesson is the same: the booth only works if the people behind it understand the story, the constraints, and the client’s real goal. I started putting more emphasis on context, not just tasks.

The key insight: engagement improves when employees can see how their decisions protect the client’s outcome. People don’t just want a checklist; they want to know why the ADA path, cord-capping, lead capture flow, or graphic placement matters to the brand moment.

Our team made a quick shift in how we managed our employee experience when our facility suddenly switched from a custom-built internal software application (for tracking purchases) to an off-the-shelf product provided by an outside company. Instead of measuring each person individually based on their own success, we began to use shared team-based measures. During the first few weeks after implementation, our administrative employees were measured as a group on overall system accuracy instead of being judged individually on the number of items they could process per hour. We learned through this exercise that the power of working together as a team has an enormous effect on people’s willingness to take risks and make mistakes. By removing the fear of individual failure associated with implementing a new software application, our staff members were able to communicate with each other openly, exchange ideas about what worked best, and learn the new purchase-tracking tool at a much greater pace than if they had been working alone. That discovery helped us permanently adjust our approach to creating a high-trust, no-pressure work environment where all employees can succeed without worrying about how others are performing.

We went into co-creation with the business side, leaders and associates. What we learned was the leaders and associates have very different ideas about how well the CRM (and other tools) worked. In general, leaders based their expectations on productivity while associates were focused on simply trying to work around the many issues getting in the way (aka digital friction). When we were all in the same room, it became clear that leaders had no idea the tools were so labor intensive. The key insight I gained was the value of starting with the frontline, focusing on the engaged and tenured (not the new or the “super users” who by definition are not average workers) and working backwards through their lived/felt experience, then sharing that (not just productivity numbers) with leaders. Some didn’t care, others were appalled.

After conducting a needs-analysis at my organization, Senior Leadership found a major opportunity to empower our distributed workforce across multiple markets with the ability to respond with agility to the needs of their communities—patients, partners, and teams—by localizing leadership and veering away from our previously centralized model. This ultimately led to a restructure that emphasized placing experienced and familiar local leadership within each market to make customized calls to best support the business and our patients. Gone was the cookie-cutter approach to solutions and we enabled ourselves and our teams to address issues appropriately for the communities they served.

This not only impacted our ability to drive a positive experience within our patient and partner populations, but it also prompted a transition away from an HR model that only allowed for reactive measures, rather than proactive movements, due to a centralized and remote team serving a multi-state company. Alongside the operational pivot, I reformulated and restructured my team to specialize in respective HR disciplines and created a team focused on Employee Experience that served markets that they understood, resided in, and could visit and become immersed in as their client groups needed. Leaders and employees alike were then able to put faces to names, develop rapport with their HR partner, and truly leverage HR as intended—as a resource! By eliminating the ominous HR figure that only existed behind emails on a screen, we were able to gain a true understanding of our teams’ needs and address issues like culture and accountability that do have downstream impact to business results.

At FCSA, I sit between school leaders, teachers, families, and policymakers, so COVID forced us to rethink employee experience fast. We shifted from normal advocacy rhythms to rapid-response support: crisis guidance, media training, and sharing what was actually working in schools.

One example was Somerset Academy Silver Palms, where the principal focused on teacher well-being, parent communication, and preserving student experiences like graduation and sports. That reminded me that staff engagement improves when leaders remove obstacles to serving students.

The key insight: during a crisis, employees don’t just need information; they need evidence that their work still matters. Highlighting teacher stories, student success, and practical school-level solutions became part of the engagement strategy, not just communications.

My advice: don’t wait for the perfect plan. Build a tight feedback loop, act on small needs quickly, and let the people closest to students help shape the response.

We’re living one right now. I run the agency from Australia but our core team is in Nepal, and we’re relocating the office, so for the moment everyone’s working from home through the move. A physical disruption like that can quietly fray a team that’s already spread across countries and time zones.

The insight that changed how I think about engagement is that connection has to be deliberate when the office isn’t there to create it by accident. We leaned harder on async updates, kept the rhythms that signal normality, regular check-ins, clear communication about what’s happening and when, and made space for the casual chatter that used to happen in a room.

Engagement isn’t a perk you bolt on. During upheaval it’s mostly about people feeling informed and not forgotten. Over-communicate during a transition, even when you feel like you’re repeating yourself.

When COVID hit, we had clients calling us to pause programs they’d been running for years. It was a gut check.

We kept our employee rewards program running internally. Not because we had a grand strategy, but because we’d seen enough client data to know what happens when recognition stops during a stressful period. People check out fast.

The thing that surprised me was how much the tangible part mattered. A thank-you email during a crisis lands differently than a prepaid card or a reward they can actually use. One is a gesture. The other tells someone their work had a dollar value attached to it.

That changed how I talk to clients now. When a company goes through a merger, a layoff, or a rough quarter, the instinct is to cut the rewards budget first. I get it. But that’s usually when your best people start looking around.

We saw the same pattern on the customer side. Brands that kept their rebate programs active during the downturn held onto more customers than those that pulled back. People remember who showed up when things were tight.

My advice to anyone rebuilding after a rough stretch: don’t wait until morale is already gone to start measuring it. By then you’re paying to replace people instead of retain them.

During a major transition I adapted our employee experience by implementing a structured HRA alongside a modestly higher deductible so the company could take on controlled, predictable risk while protecting employees from large out-of-pocket costs. We funded the HRA to cover unexpected claims rather than absorbing across-the-board premium increases. Crucially, we paired the design with clear, plain-language communication and targeted education so employees understood how the change protected them. The key insight was that transparent communication turns a benefits redesign into a shared solution, preserving trust and engagement rather than creating frustration.