Top tips to combat technology change overwhelm using communications
If you listen to the headlines, you’d think the biggest challenge facing organisations right now is choosing the right technology. You’ll hear a lot about which platform to pick, or which vendor? Even questions around which AI tool will give us the edge we need to be competitive. In reality, most technology transformations don’t fail because the tech was wrong, though. They fail because the people's side was underestimated - meaning that the questions shouldn’t be just around tech, but rather, how to manage it.
For example, new systems, AI tools and digital platforms land in already-busy workplaces, with already-tired people, who are juggling constant change while trying to do their jobs well, which is where things start to wobble. This final blog in our five-part series on people change looks at technology-driven change from a different angle: not what is changing, but what it feels like to live through it and what communicators can do to make it survivable, and even successful.
What’s the real risk?
Most organisations focus heavily on digital capability: things like can people use the system, have they been trained and do they know which buttons to press? What’s talked about far less is digital confidence.
Confidence is about whether people feel safe using the new tool: like whether they trust it, or if they’re worried about making mistakes, looking foolish, or being left behind. In many workplaces, you’ll find people who are technically capable but quietly hesitant. They know how to log in, but they’re unsure what the tool will do to their role, their workload, or their future.
That hesitation matters because confidence tends to come before adoption, not after it. For communicators, this means the job starts earlier than training. Long before go-live, people need space to ask questions, voice concerns, and hear reassurance that it’s okay not to be an expert on day one.
Why speed makes everything harder
Technology change today is both bigger and faster. AI pilots roll straight into production, legacy systems are switched off with little overlap and new tools appear before people have recovered from the last rollout. All of which contributes to a lot of change fatigue.
Many employees genuinely believe they should be able to keep up, so when they feel exhausted by the pace, the learning curve, and the sense that the ground keeps shifting under their feet it can cause distress. Which is also often where communication goes wrong, because leaders push harder, communicate louder, or over-celebrate the future without acknowledging the strain.
Which only makes trust erode with your people. The best way to communicate change isn’t just through explaining the change, but by legitimising how hard it feels. Sometimes the most powerful message is not “this will be amazing”, but “we know this is a lot and we’re going to support you through it”.
Stop: the business case sell. Start: talking about daily work.
One of the quickest ways to lose people during a technology change is to frame the why entirely around organisational benefits like cost savings, efficiency, growth and shareholder value. These things do matter, but not to someone trying to get through their inbox, meet deadlines, or navigate clunky systems every day.
People engage when they understand how the change affects their work:
What will be easier?
What will be faster?
What frustrations will finally disappear?
Even better, when you can connect the change back to pain points people have already raised, the narrative shifts from “this is being done to us” to “this is responding to us”. That reframing alone can significantly lift willingness to engage.
Co-creation is risk management.
Technology projects designed in isolation are expensive gambles. When end users aren’t involved, organisations risk rolling out tools that don’t fit real workflows and no amount of comms can rescue a system people actively avoid.
Co-creation does two critical things:
It improves the design by grounding it in real work.
It builds ownership, credibility and trust.
From a communication perspective, co-creation also unlocks something powerful: authentic voices. So when people hear about a new system from someone like them, a peer, not a project lead, scepticism softens. This taps into well-known behavioural effects like similarity bias and the messenger effect, where who delivers the message matters as much as the message itself.
If you want social proof for adoption, don’t manufacture it. Borrow it from the people who helped build the change.
Make the right thing the easy thing
Even the best messaging will fail if the new way of working is harder than the old one. Behavioural science tells us that friction kills change and if people have to hunt for information, remember complex steps, or decode jargon-heavy guides, they’ll default to familiar workarounds. Communicators can’t fix bad technology but we can reduce unnecessary effort around it.
That means:
Putting help where people need it, not where it’s tidy to store
Offering information in multiple formats
Making support visible and human
Testing materials with real users before rolling them out
Technology change is human change
At its core, every technology rollout is a people change because it reshapes how work gets done, how value is created, and how confident people feel in their roles. When organisations treat it as a purely technical exercise, they miss the biggest risk and the biggest opportunity.
