Liberty Mutual: Employee-Driven Change Conversations

Overview

Research shows that 67% of employees do not understand their role when a change initiative is launched. This is because most companies communicate change using a top-down approach that makes it difficult for employees to understand the strategy, the impact on their workflow, and their role in executing it.

Liberty Mutual designed a process to address this gap — one that identifies employees' fears and assumptions, drives change ownership, and provides questions (not directions) to help employees personalize change actions. The result is a model that transforms employees from passive recipients of change into active participants.

The Challenge

During a period of high-volume organizational change, Liberty Mutual discovered that its top-down communication style was failing. Employees felt like changes were "happening to them" rather than with them. The company's existing approach:

• Did not effectively promote engagement or feedback
• Failed to address the unique needs of individuals and groups
• Created mistrust, confusion, and anxiety in the workforce
• Focused disproportionately on stakeholder buy-in rather than helping employees develop the behaviors and capabilities to adapt

More than half of change management initiatives ultimately fail, and three-quarters of companies still use a traditional top-down change management strategy — a major reason organizations fail at change.

Solution Components

1. Employee Change Reactions Workshop

Provide a platform to identify employees' fears and assumptions to drive change ownership.

After introducing a change, Liberty Mutual's change management program facilitators conduct workshops focused on change ownership. The workshops give employees a voice in the change and provide them with a sense of co-creation, directly challenging the feeling that change is being done to them.

The workshop follows a structured agenda:

1. Acknowledge fears and worries — Facilitators start by openly recognizing employees' emotional responses, allowing them to separate emotions from rational responses to change
2. Group expression of anxieties — Employees are encouraged to express their anxieties as a group, giving them the opportunity to reconcile and normalize their emotions
3. Collaborative solution-finding — The company encourages employees to take control of finding solutions to their problems and addressing necessary behavior changes together

Workshop duration ranges from one to eight hours, depending on schedules and urgency. The key insight: separating feelings from rational responses enables employees to identify and own the behavior adjustments necessary for change success.

2. Question-Based Action Plans

Provide questions — not directions — to help employees personalize change actions.

After conducting change reactions workshops, Liberty Mutual helps employees translate organizational change communication into personal action. Rather than proposing directives that tell employees what to do, the company guides employees to initiate productive dialogue with their peers and managers through question-based action plans.

To drive personalization, Liberty Mutual:

• Encourages employees to seek, not just receive, change information — guiding them with questions that drive active involvement in change
• Prompts employees to think like leaders — asking them to apply their critical and strategic thinking skills to the change and its impact on their specific context
• Asks employees to consider peer-to-peer impact — thinking about who they work with and how, in addition to what they do

Question-based action plans — instead of to-do's dictated from the top — help employees think through the personal implications of change and drive productive change dialogue.

Results

After adopting the change conversations process, employees at Liberty Mutual reported:

• A strong sense of change ownership
• The ability to manage negative change reactions constructively
• Better understanding of how change impacts them personally
• Becoming active participants in change efforts rather than passive recipients

"If we are going to be better, we need to be talking about it and planning. Talking about how we change individually and how to lead the organization to change are paramount to it." — Employee, Business Insurance Underwriting

"I was able to put some of what I learned into practice during a talent review yesterday when a manager was discussing how someone on their team responded during a change in the organization." — Employee, HR

"Employees feel they've been given permission to engage. It's okay for them to be out there and asking questions versus the old world of sitting tight and getting information when leaders were ready with it. We've also seen managers and leaders getting more comfortable with saying, 'That is a great question, but we don't have the answers to it yet and we are working through it.'"
— VP of Organizational Effectiveness and Strategic Project Management

Key Takeaways

• Questions beat directives — Providing questions rather than instructions helps employees think through change personally, creating deeper ownership
• Acknowledge fear, don't suppress it — Giving employees space to express anxieties normalizes the emotional side of change and enables rational planning
• Peer-to-peer impact matters — Employees need to think about how change affects their working relationships, not just their individual tasks
• Permission to engage is powerful — When employees feel they have permission to ask questions and seek information, the entire organization becomes more adaptive
• Involve frontline managers early — Ensuring managers and employees understand their role as drivers of change (not just recipients) is critical to success