What action do you take when employees resist change?

I can summarize all stories of these books and these models just in one word: Participation! It is the key of successful change management.
Generally you should participate in the evolutionary process of change with your employees. They should feel that all of these changes are not only beneficial for them but also the change is based on their own ideas and suggestions and not an external agent!

I believe usually change agents fail to investigate on human effects of change. Any organizational change has two side. One is about processes, strategies and technologies and other side is about people values.
If people resist on change it may mean that they have no vision of future and they can't figure out what will happen to their values.
According to my experience, in case of facing resistance it's best to redefine change, let people aware about change and assess requirements for every person to change. different people in different departments have different requirements.
At the end you should be able to answer this question clearly: "What's that change that we are talking about in our organization?"

If change requires a change in behavior, then we need to know if the employee is well suited to the new behavior.

in an organization usually employees are set to the existing culture, they will always create a comfort zone, if anything change going to take place in the organization they will always think about their comfort zone, is this change really makes once job comfortable, or if they are not adjusting with change what will the action. so before doing any change activities company should educate them change for what? change leads to what? than only they will ready to accept it. if at all they are not ready need to take some strong steps to change them.

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Employees only show resistance when they have fear of losing their job or they are not aware of the change being brought in the organization.. a good change manager should know all the pros and cons of the organisation .. a well communicated change would entirely change the meaning of change resistance shown by employees as per after knowing the agenda and motives of change the employees would have clearer picture.. training and educating the employees would also be very useful tool indeed...

Using an example, the biggest resistance to change in technical support I have seen is the use of the knowledge base. I give them the industry studies that show how much more productive it makes support and talk about those studies. I talk about my previous experiences with knowledge bases. I look for others in the group who can give a testimonial about how useful the tool has been to them in previous jobs. In the end, there are a small number of skeptics. I have to ask the hold-outs to trust I know what I am doing and give it a fair try. In two months or so, I make sure to point out the improvements. The skeptics acknowledge it is a great improvement and the next change is that much easier.

To summarize, get the buy-in of as many as possible and then have the hold-outs give it a fair try. Point out successes of changes to make future changes that much easier.

When did business become a democracy? Of course, you go for buy-in and all the other touchy-feely stuff but in the end....