According to the physician and non-fiction author Holger Bertrand Flöttmann, anxiety can be understood as a danger signal in response to a real or imaginary danger that only arises in our individual imagination.

Fear, as a subjective feeling in a specific situation, does not always arise consciously. It influences our lives to a greater or lesser extent in a wide variety of areas.

In both our private and professional lives, we humans tend to maintain the familiar and familiar state in our environment.

If there is a change that challenges or disrupts our established habits and routines, this can lead to a confrontation with anxiety.

If, for example, the departmental structure is changed, a new collaboration model is introduced or processes including the use of new IT systems are altered, the ‘autopilot’ that has been developed over months and years no longer works.

Employees react to changes in their individual ‘comfort zone’ with varying degrees of doubt, suspicion and even fear, as it is often not clear what exactly is changing, where the journey is going and how the change will affect their individual future in their professional environment.

As already shown in the various phases of a change in our previous article, many people react to the announcement of a change with shock and horror. As possible shock triggers, we can identify fear of the new, uncertainty about the unknown or mistrust of change.

These reactions can vary greatly depending on the individual situation of the employee.

Previous behaviour patterns and procedures may lose their validity, the comfortable status quo may have to be abandoned and an increased amount of energy expended in order to integrate the new into everyday working life. Due to bad experiences from the past, many people do not see the point in changing their approach again.

Since dealing with the unknown has not yet been sufficiently tested, the fear of making mistakes or not being able to do something arises and the ‘autopilot’ cannot be activated.

The reasons that can trigger anxiety in employees are often very different and cannot always be directly recognised by the employee themselves, but also by colleagues and managers. Dealing with this is therefore not always easy.

This is why careful and active listening is required in order to recognise individual anxiety.

Appropriate communication between managers and employees plays a particularly critical role in the success of change projects so that the right approach can be found to dealing with fear and overcoming it.