NextGen Change

Change is constant and accelerating, bringing opportunities for growth and innovation at an unprecedented pace. New ways of working, AI-driven digitization, evolving job roles, and global interconnectedness are helping to create new avenues for businesses to thrive.

Many organizations still treat change management as an afterthought, focusing on timelines and budgets rather than engagement, ownership, and long-term impact. This outdated approach can lead to disengaged employees, resistant leadership, and initiatives that fail to drive lasting transformation.

The numbers tell a clear story:

Over 50% of workers feel there's too much change at work happening at once, and 44% don't understand why things need to change (PwC Global Culture Survey 2021).

Nearly two-thirds of employees have experienced more change at work in the last year than in the 12 months prior, with one-third experiencing four or more significant changes (PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024).

81% of respondents who strongly believe their organization was able to adapt during the 12 months before the survey also say their culture has been a source of competitive advantage (PwC Global Culture Survey 2021).

74% of workers are willing to expend discretionary effort to acquire new skills through training to improve their workplace experience (PwC Workforce of the Future).

Our world calls for a bold new approach to change—driven by vision, energized by leadership, and brought to life through connected teams and personalized employee experiences.

Let’s turn change into your competitive edge.

Our NextGen Change Approach

Meet NextGen Change, PwC’s human-centered approach that moves beyond traditional change management to transform your organization.

Our approach is built on three key pillars: Leader & Citizen Activation, Personalized Experiences, and Essential Skills & Behaviors.

These pillars are powered by ten capabilities, allowing you to craft a direction for unfolding change that is tailored to the needs of your workforce strategies and strategic programs.

Leader & Citizen Activation
Personalized Experiences
Essential Skills & Behaviors
Measure Success
Capture Hearts and Minds

Leader & Citizen Activation

Align leaders with a shared vision and identify key influencers throughout the organization, leveraging the power of the network to help inspire employees to actively embrace change.

Change Journey Vision
Co-create a vision for the future, from structure, governance, and toolkits to the skills and roadmap, to help get there.
Visible Leader Activation
Coach and upskill leaders to adopt a transformational mindset, build strong relationships, and reinforce commitment to behaviors that can actively inspire, encourage, and incentivize employees to work in new ways.
Communities & Coaching
Develop a motivated and engaged network of influencers to lead change and help create interest and excitement throughout the organization.

Personalized Experiences

Create immersive, digital, and interactive experiences that personalize the change journey for affected stakeholders, to help make transformation engaging and meaningful.

Branding & Creative Communication
Craft high-impact, memorable messaging and visuals. Confirm that communications are clear, informative, engaging, and motivating for stakeholders, helping them understand the changes and feel energized and excited about them.
Ways of Working
Empower high-performing teams to achieve significant improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity. Transform the way teams operate by introducing innovative methods and tools that can streamline processes and enhance overall performance.
Immersive Experiences
Use roadshows, demos, and live or virtual events to share compelling stories and experiences, encouraging users to become more emotionally invested in the environment, culture, or new way of working.
Transformation Orchestration
Establish a winning team and project foundation with governance, team building, metrics, and guiding principles to help enhance team potential, guide the project, and foster continuous learning and improvement.

Essential Skills & Behaviors

Equip leaders and employees with the skills of the future through continuous capability building and high-performance teaming, to help solidify new ways of working and improve organizational performance.

Culture Ignition
Accelerate and sustain transformation by tapping into cultural strengths and focusing on the 'critical few' behaviors to help drive success.
Experiential Learning
Equip individuals to handle change effectively by offering high-impact, immersive, and social learning experiences. Confirm that learning is continuous, delivered in consumable 'drip-feed' portions, enabling learners to better retain information and apply it in real-world scenarios.
High-Performance Teaming
Build capabilities within the organization to help create capacity, elevate productivity, collaboratively problem-solve, and engage across silos to establish future state ownership and sustainable change.

Measure Success

Turn progress into proof by defining what success looks like and tracking it in real time. Using data, feedback, and behavioral insights, we surface what’s working, where to adapt, and how to sustain momentum—allowing transformations to deliver measurable value at every step.

Capture Hearts and Minds

Change sticks when people believe in it. We bring transformation to life through storytelling, leadership alignment, and personalized engagement that connects individuals to the bigger picture. By grounding change in purpose and creating space for people to see themselves in the journey, we help build trust, energy, and lasting commitment across the organization.

Why it Works

When it comes to navigating organizational transformations, success doesn’t happen by accident. Our NextGen Change approach can uniquely unlock the true value of our clients’ change efforts – here's how:

Flexible, Modular and Scalable Approach
Experience-Driven Delivery Excellence
Lasting Capability and Behaviors
Digitally-Enabled and Data-Driven

Flexible, Modular and Scalable Approach

Our approach adapts seamlessly to meet each client’s unique needs. With human-centered design, we can pinpoint what matters most to clients, using an assessment to match the right change approach to the challenge. Our tailored playbooks and assets enable effective solutions for various project types.

Experience-Driven Delivery Excellence

Our approach is rooted in a change vision that prioritizes employee experience and purpose, with programs that leverage design thinking and storytelling. Through collaborative problem-solving, gamification, and innovation, we can drive meaningful change that resonates across your organization.

Lasting Capability and Behaviors

Our targeted upskilling campaigns equip teams with essential tools to help build the skills and ignite the behaviors that can drive lasting business success. We strengthen internal change with user-friendly playbooks and resources, enabling critical behaviors that empower strategy and can sustain new ways of working.

Digitally-Enabled and Data-Driven

We write a measurable value story and identify priority "hot spots" for real-time feedback, applying deep analytics for tailored change planning rooted in organizational and cultural insights – helping to successfully capture employee sentiment and effectively measure change readiness.

NextGen Change Approach in Action

From strategy to execution, our NextGen Change approach empowers businesses to adapt, innovate, and thrive. Explore real-world success stories where we’ve helped organizations drive change with confidence—and deliver lasting results.

Power & Utilities
Energy
Technology, Media and Telecommunications
Consumer Markets
Healthcare

Power & Utilities

Employee-Centric Change at Enterprise Scale

Challenge
As part of a broader effort to modernize, an energy company launched a suite of 10 transformational projects across the organization, impacting 4,000 employees and 2.9M customers. This required a fresh way to implement change for an end-to-end technology transformation.

Solution
PwC brought a holistic change approach by implementing a Change Management Office (CMO) across all projects for stakeholder engagement and communications, organizational strategy, learning and culture. Despite the large audience, the projects remained uniquely intimate, with a range of highly interactive, experience-based tactics employed and then tracked using PwC’s Change Navigator platform.

Results
Multiple go-live dates provided the ability to iterate and improve between releases, while automated data and system monitoring enabled the PwC team to get ahead of client concerns and adjust preemptively. The change approach implemented by the CMO resulted in strong adoption of the new technology and an enjoyable experience for stakeholders throughout the transition and beyond.

Energy

Experiential & Capability-Driven Change from Strategy to Execution

Challenge
A global energy company sought to modernize their technology platform to enable improved data insights and digital optimization, while reducing technical debt and freeing cash flow year over year. It was essential that the solution was anchored in business value.

Solution
PwC introduced its change management approach, helping business and technology leaders align on ways of making decisions anchored in a common framework for defining business value. Early leader and stakeholder alignment was achieved through a series of interactive and collaborative workshops across the globe engaging impacted functions and territories. Alignment was further sustained through a capstone collaboration event, where the top 80 leaders united around a single strategy and an “enterprise mindset” for generating business value and driving future technology and process decisions.

PwC went on to support the implementation of a highly successful three-year tech enabled transformation program to 13 business unit territories, across major functional workstreams - Finance, HR, Supply Chain, Capital Projects, Operations, Data Modernization and Security & Controls. The early leader alignment work served as the foundation for an enduring governance and decision process throughout the program and beyond.

Employees engaged in a different type of change experience. Personalized change journeys were created to address new ways of working for key impacted roles. Early interactive engagements – such as live demo events – were conducted to build interest and drive early, immersive learning. Training was multi-modal and delivered across a global, hybrid workforce of 9,000. The personalized and behavior-driven change program was conducted in collaboration with the client team, fostering agile teamwork, ownership of new ways of working, and the building of a “change muscle” that would serve the organization in the future.

Result
With a shared vision and alignment across senior leadership, the program launched successfully with clear guidelines, behaviors, and high user adoption. Change was leader-supported and citizen-led, putting people and capabilities at the center of the effort.

Through targeted and interconnected execution, the program reshaped how digital technologies transformed existing ways of working. The change effort underpinned end user adoption of new behaviors and the streamlining of processes on modern systems.

Technology, Media and Telecommunications

Enabling Lasting Change Through a People-Centric CRM Transformation

Challenge
A global technology organization aimed to transition all 32,000 employees to a reimagined, flexible CRM platform designed to boost productivity, streamline workflows, and position the company as its own leading use case. To achieve this, the organization needed a structured, people-first approach to change management that enabled alignment with business goals and accelerated adoption.

Solution
PwC's Change Management team worked with the organization to implement a persona-based approach, enabling a seamless transition tailored to employees' unique needs. The team first designed a reimagined end state, identifying process gaps and opportunities for improvement. By assessing the organization’s maturity and readiness for change, they developed targeted interventions that aligned with both business objectives and employee expectations. Throughout the process, the change strategy was closely integrated with the technical roadmap, fostering collaboration between business and technology stakeholders.

Result
With materials tailored to specific user personas, the program drove higher engagement and adoption. The approach confirmed that change management efforts were proactive, strategic, and positioned for long-term success. A unified voice across the Change Management team and Program Management Office enabled shared goals, faster solutioning, and risk mitigation. The successful transition to the new CRM experience led to an anticipated $585M increase in annual revenue, reinforcing the organization’s commitment to innovation and operational excellence.

Consumer Markets

M&A-Driven Technology & Process Transformation

Challenge
A global beverage company, exiting from their parent organization, needed to transition all IT services within an accelerated post-acquisition timeline. This change affected employees throughout the company, combining digital, organizational, and cultural shifts that required a holistic change management approach.

Solution
PwC established a holistic blueprint to support smooth execution and governance across a complex, time-sensitive transformation. PwC’s Change Management team developed an integrated approach—anchored by a centralized Transformation Management Office—that brought together multiple client workstreams with varying levels of change readiness along a consistent journey. Regardless of where each workstream began, the plan allowed all groups to receive role-based messaging and training tailored to their specific needs. This enabled alignment to a single vision and unified way of working across the newly independent organization, fostering clarity, confidence, and a shared direction among employees.

Result
The implementation was completed in a record 15 months, deploying 310 new processes across 5 business units to establish a new entity with 1 consistent source of data. PwC delivered 250+ communications to 3,100+ users across 7 countries in 3 languages, to communicate to the company’s employees not only how to use the new unified system, but to understand the new business processes established for working at the new company. Through leveraging role-based learning journeys and a unique training curriculum, the program prepared 98 stakeholder groups and facilitated 700+ train-the-trainer and end-user training courses, to successfully transition employees to the new ways of working.

Healthcare

Leading Global Change Management Strategy and Execution for Post-Acquisition Integration and ERP Implementation for Global Pharmaceutical Client

Challenge
A global pharmaceutical and life sciences company embarked on a multi-year, post-acquisition integration journey that focused on three key pillars: 1) rationalization of the operating legal entities, 2) integration of the legacy ERP systems, and 3) optimization of the future state supply chain footprint and operating model.

Given the scale and complexity of the integration – spanning across 45+ commercial markets and 10+ manufacturing sites – a tailored approach to change management was critical.

The organization required a scalable, fit-for-purpose strategy that could accommodate diverse stakeholder needs across geographies, functions, and cultural contexts.

Solution
The PwC team collaborated with both global and local project managers and leaders to understand the specific needs and cultural nuances of their audiences, while also taking into consideration the varying requirements for each individual market or manufacturing site, multiple languages and employee shift schedules.

PwC developed and implemented a scalable change management and communications strategy across a variety of functions and stakeholder groups, including Finance, Supply Chain, Procurement, Quality and Manufacturing. This enabled a more targeted change journey for end users – considering the type and magnitude of change each group faced (ranging from a change in legal entity, to a complete overhaul of their systems and processes) – ultimately engaging stakeholders in the right way, at the right time.

Results
Through strong leadership alignment and highly engaged end users, the team enabled 30+ successful go-lives across the various markets and manufacturing sites, empowering end users to adopt new technologies and ways of working.

With a fit-for-purpose change management approach – that prioritized the perspective of the end user in the context of business outcomes – the organization is better equipped to deliver on its objectives to operate more efficiently and deliver medicines to patients faster.

Our Tools

We leverage advanced technologies, including AI tools to empower you with tailored strategies for managing transformation, aligning culture, and enhancing employee and customer experiences.

Change Navigator
Culture Thumbprint
PwC Listen

Change Navigator

Change Navigator is a tech-enabled solution that, alongside PwC’s leading services, helps teams manage strategic transformations. By leveraging generative AI, practitioners can develop and implement a rapid, effective change plan with powerful data collection tools; generate digitized organizational assessments to produce data-driven stakeholder-level insight; curate client-specific agendas for leadership alignment sessions; and more!

Culture Thumbprint

The Culture Thumbprint, a tech-enabled diagnostic service developed by the Katzenbach Center, PwC’s global culture center of excellence, is how PwC assesses organizational culture. It is an AI-driven survey-based tool that surfaces insights on dominant culture traits so that leaders can identify ‘The Critical Few’ behaviors that help drive cultural alignment with business outcomes and employee experience.

PwC Listen

PwC’s Listen Platform is a survey and analytics solution designed to capture real-time feedback from employees and customers. By utilizing expertly crafted questions and AI-driven analytics, it can uncover strengths and identify areas needing improvement within an organization, enabling leaders to proactively address challenges within change management activities, enabling smoother transitions and higher adoption rates of new initiatives. The platform's configurable dashboards and holistic reports can provide actionable insights, allowing for timely adjustments and informed decision-making throughout the transformation process.

Explore Further

Want to learn more about our Workforce Transformation offerings? Check out our capabilities below!

Insights

Learn more about our NextGen Change approach by accessing the articles below!