Webinar to tackle why workplace change fails to stick

Solve by Talent and HiBob are holding an online webinar on workplace change adoption, bringing together speakers from business, media and government.

The session will examine a problem many employers face after announcing change programmes: keeping staff engaged once the launch period has passed. It will explore why employees resist or ignore change, how leaders can build trust before a rollout, and how data and feedback can identify friction early.

The webinar comes as more organisations move from discussing artificial intelligence to introducing it across their workforces. That shift has sharpened attention on a familiar issue for human resources and people leaders: whether staff alter their day-to-day behaviour after a policy, system or process is introduced.

Rather than focusing on launch communications, the panel will examine what happens in the weeks after a company-wide announcement. Its premise is that early enthusiasm often fades quickly, and staff revert to established routines unless managers, teams and systems reinforce the change.

Tom Mackintosh, Managing Director at Solve by Talent, will host the session. He said the focus reflects a broader challenge within organisations, where communication around a new initiative may be polished but follow-through is uneven.

"The all-hands was never the hard part. The hard part is day twenty, when the launch energy's gone and people quietly default back to how they've always done it," said Tom Mackintosh, Managing Director at Solve by Talent.

"We built this session around three people who've actually solved that problem, in a newsroom, in government, and inside the workforce itself."

The line-up includes Emily Zhang, Director at The HumAIn Impact. Her work has focused on workforce transformation and behaviour change in large organisations, including in banking and financial services. Her background speaks to the operational side of change programmes, where planned reforms meet the practical realities of process, culture and daily work.

Zara Seidler, Co-Founder of The Daily Aus, will bring a media and audience perspective. She built a youth-focused news platform in Australia and also leads FutureProof, an advisory business that helps organisations understand how younger employees think about work and respond to change.

The third speaker is the Hon. Victor Dominello, Chief Executive Officer of the Future Government Institute and the inaugural NSW Minister for Customer Service and Digital. During his time in government, he oversaw major digital transformation efforts, including the digital driver's licence and the Service NSW app. Those projects reached millions of citizens and required public trust as well as technical delivery.

Trust and adoption

Together, the panel reflects three related but distinct strands of the change debate. One is internal workforce transformation, where leaders need staff to change habits and adopt new systems. Another is public and audience trust, where institutions compete for attention and credibility. The third is government service reform, where digital adoption depends on both usability and confidence in the institution introducing the change.

The mix suggests organisers want the discussion to go beyond standard human resources guidance. In many workplaces, resistance to change is not always expressed through formal objections or poor survey scores. Instead, it can appear in low usage rates, workarounds, delays or a quiet return to existing practices.

Those patterns have become more relevant as employers introduce new AI tools and HR software. For people teams, the issue is no longer only whether a tool is launched successfully, but whether employees and managers keep using it as intended after the initial communications campaign ends.

HiBob, which develops the Bob HR platform, is partnering with Solve by Talent on the session. Its involvement underlines the growing role technology suppliers play in workplace change, particularly as buyers ask not just how software is deployed but how it is adopted across teams.

Solve by Talent sits within Talent International, a recruitment and talent business in the Asia Pacific region. The business launched in 2018 as Talent Solutions before adopting its current name in 2024, reflecting a broader repositioning of its services around talent acquisition and management.

The webinar is aimed at senior leaders in people, culture, talent and people operations. That points to the commercial backdrop behind the discussion: stalled change programmes can carry costs through weak uptake, duplicated effort, lower productivity and disengagement, especially when organisations are introducing new systems across large groups of staff.

The session will run online for one hour and attendance is free, with registration capped. Its core argument is likely to resonate with employers that have learned announcing change is often easier than making it stick.