Change at the Top Is Unsettling. Here’s What Actually Keeps Teams Together While It Happens

Research on workplace change consistently finds that most organisational change is poorly managed and leaves employees stressed, regardless of whether the change itself is positive and that people look to their immediate team and shared identity, not leadership announcements, to feel steady through it. A well-designed, co-created uniform programme is one of the few tangible, daily tools an organisation has for building that shared identity. Murray’s own research and case work, including a 98.8% wearer satisfaction result across an 18,000-strong workforce, shows what happens when uniform is treated as a belonging tool rather than a compliance one.

Next week, Westminster will commence a leadership transition when nominations for the Labour leadership open on 9th July and close on 16th July, with Andy Burnham the clear frontrunner to become the UK’s next Prime Minister. Whatever your politics, it’s a useful, live example of something every large organisation eventually experiences: Change at the top, decided by a small group of people that everyone else needs to absorb without having chosen it.

That’s not a political comment on government, it’s highlighting a pattern of events which occurs inside businesses just as often: a restructure, a merger, a new leadership team, a rebrand and the evidence on how people actually respond to it is worth paying attention to.

What happens to people when change happens from above

Change management research is consistent on one point: employees can see the value of change and still find the process of it destabilising.

A 2025 US survey of 1,448 employees by Eagle Hill Consulting found that 63% had experienced at least one significant workplace change in the past year. But 34% said the change wasn’t worth the organisational effort and only 25% agreed their organisation manages change effectively across the workforce.

The same research found that employees don’t look to senior leadership to know how to feel about a change. They look sideways and downwards to their immediate team lead, who 47% of employees say has the most influence over how a change lands, and who 59% see as a role model for how to respond to it.

In other words: when change happens at the top, it isn’t top-down messaging that determines whether people cope with it. It’s what’s happening in the room they actually work in, day to day.

Belonging is the thing that gets people through change

Separate global research from Qualtrics, drawn from a study of more than 11,800 employees, identifies a sense of belonging as the single strongest driver of employee engagement : ahead of trust in leadership and career growth opportunities. Crucially, one of the specific factors that research identifies as building belonging is employees “feeling supported in adapting to organisational change.”

The business case for taking that seriously is substantial. Employees who feel they belong are 3.5 times more likely to be engaged than those who don’t, and report far higher wellbeing; 78% versus 28%. Belonging isn’t a soft add-on to change management, it’s one of the load-bearing walls.

Which raises an obvious question for any organisation with a uniformed workforce: what is actually building that sense of belonging, day to day, on the shop floor or in the warehouse or the ward and is it working with the change your organisation is going through, or working against it?

The lever hiding in plain sight

A uniform is one of the few things that touches almost every employee, every single day, regardless of role, seniority or which part of the business they sit in. That makes it an unusually powerful (and unusually underused) tool for building the kind of shared identity that helps people feel anchored when everything else is in motion.

It’s also, if done badly, a source of exactly the disengagement that change-fatigued employees are already primed to feel. A uniform that’s imposed rather than designed with the people wearing it sends a small, repeated signal: this decision was made about you, not with you. Multiply that by every shift, for every employee and it becomes a meaningful drag on the belonging that change resilience depends on.

We see the opposite effect clearly in our own case work. When Lothian Buses redesigned its driver uniform, the brief went well beyond fabric and fit. As their Operations Director put it:

“Uniforms are very important to us because they help bring people together, break down barriers and help our team feel proud of the role they play at Lothian.”

That’s belonging, described in exactly the terms the research predicts and it’s not an accident. It’s the result of a design process that treats uniform as something built with a workforce rather than issued to one.

What the numbers say about getting it right

Murray Uniforms’ research with Coventry University, based on more than 2,500 respondents, backs up why this matters commercially as well as culturally:

• 97% of employees say it’s important that their uniform represents the company brand
  91% say what they wear affects their own confidence at work
  70.5% say their uniform influenced their decision to join their employer in the first place

None of that works if the uniform feels imposed. It works when people have had a hand in it. Our JLR programme is the clearest evidence of that at scale: rolling out a new uniform to 18,000 employees across multiple sites and roles, involving wearers in the design and consultation process before anything was finalised, achieved 98.8% wearer satisfaction. An outcome that a top-down specification exercise would be very unlikely to produce.

Building a uniform programme that helps people through change, not around it

For any organisation going through (or bracing for) change at the top, a uniform programme review is a smaller, more controllable place to start building the belonging that bigger changes will draw on. A few questions worth asking of your current programme:

1. Was your current uniform designed with input from the people wearing it, or specified for them?
2. If your organisation went through a restructure or leadership change tomorrow, would your uniform feel like a stable, shared identity or one more thing that’s changed on people?
3. Do your line managers and team leads, the people your workforce actually looks to, according to the research,  feel any ownership over the uniform programme, or is it purely a head-office decision?
4. When did you last ask your own people what their uniform says about whether they belong?

If the honest answer to any of those is “we don’t know,” that’s a reasonable prompt to look again. Not because the uniform is broken, but because belonging is worth building deliberately, especially when the wider organisation is navigating change it didn’t choose.

 Is your uniform programme building belonging, or working against it?

Murray Uniforms designs uniform programmes around the people who wear them, not just the brand guidelines. If your organisation is navigating change and want your uniform to be part of the stability rather than another variable, our design team can talk through what a wearer-led review would look like.