Do you have enough people involved in the workplace changes you are making?

Very often, involvement in workplace change is something that happens “at the side of the desk” – additional work that somehow must be squeezed into existing workloads. This causes problems for those involved in scoping and planning the changes, because change does not become a reality until those affected have the time to identify and then practice what needs to change. Managers and staff are trying to balance their existing work with creating new ways of doing things. Demands from customers in the present will always be perceived as more important than developing the future ways of working. This is because things that are due to happen in the future are not prioritised by our brains. This phenomenon is called “delay discounting” – the brain discounts the importance, impact and urgency of things further away in time than what is taking place right now.

We cannot change the pressures on those who must change how they work, but we can increase the results from the time they have available. These managers and teams get very little (if any) training in how to manage change. We need simple, routine activities that enable them to know how to best use the time they have.

Increasing the results from people involved in workplace change

To increase the results from people involved in workplace change, use these 3 aspects of change to create motivation for everyone to learn the basics.

1. Implement a Structure for Change – Effective change management can avoid lots of wasted time and effort. If there is a structure to follow and clearly defined steps to doing things in new ways, then we can avoid the risk that people decide for themselves how to work differently, so they do change how they work, but they all do it differently and they adopt bad habits, which take months to put right. The change has happened but there are varying levels of accuracy, little consistency and some short-cuts that miss out important steps. The longer this is allowed to continue, the more these “not quite right” ways of working become habits that are hard to break.
2. Involve the Right People – Lots of time can be wasted by having to repeat important briefings, or re-run demonstrations or training sessions because not everyone that needed to be there was invited. This is because “accidental” change management has not given managers clear site of everyone who is impacted, not only in their team but in other teams who provide inputs or rely on outputs to their team. Knowing the basics of change provides insight into how to assess who needs to be involved and when, minimising time-wasting attendance at unnecessary events and repetition of important briefings.
3. Utilise Your Leaders – Devolve the confidence for leading change from change professionals to every manager, team leader and supervisor, by ensuring they know what to do and how these tasks will add value. We can show these managers example change plans that they can tailor to their own situation. This will help them plan their time, organise their work to include these activities in existing team meetings and one to ones with their team and give them confidence. For example, helping these mangers to recognise the number of repetitive communications needed to ensure everyone embraces the change, by knowing how different people adopt change at different speeds and that the brain initially rejects change and resists new ways of doing things reassures them they are not going crazy when they answer the same question from team members for the 5^th time! Similarly, giving them techniques to boost resilience and reduce resistance takes away some of the friction triggered by change, making their role as team leaders feel less of a thankless task.

Mastering Reaching Enough People Involved in Workplace Change

Change is always with us and our organisations. There is always more change than can ever be supported by a small central team of change professionals. The biggest challenge we face is getting enough people involved in workplace change and building the confidence and skills required for leading change. The support needs to match the volume of new ideas every organisation is grappling with.

This upcoming master class has been specifically written from the perspective of a non-change professional, empathising with the pressures they face and their need for simple, easy to apply activities and techniques that result in a shift to new ways of working.