How we deal with change
„The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change“ — Heraclitus
Well said Heraclitus but why people usually don’t like changes? They get uncomfortable when it comes to change themselves or or things that are happening around them. Especially in their work environment, when they can not determine or control it by themselves. The good news is, that’s pretty normal. The bad news is, teams, management if not to say the whole company has to deal with that anyhow. And we here at COYO can name numerous situations of this.
But before I will describe how we try to deal with change at COYO, I will describe what is happening in general during changing times, regardless of whether in a work or private context. If you do not take care of a few very basic informations, your change will be much harder and you will run into more resistance than necessary.
Let’s start with how humans react to change. Our brain is a pretty lazy but very clever thing. One reason might be that we need our brain for almost everything we do — and so the brain tries to automate as much as possible, to have less work to do. Once you learned to walk or to drive a bike, you will always remember and the brain has a much less work to do if we go for a walk. Every time we need to deviate from an automized process, or even learn something completely new, the brain has a lot of additional work to do and as said before it is lazy, so it doesn’t like that. And that is exactly the reason why change as such, is often perceived as stressful or exhausting. So stress or feeling uncomfortable during times of change are very normal reactions and it is almost impossible to stop that.
Stress or feeling exhausted often leads to a drop in productivity — sounds logic right? The fatal thing is, that exactly in times of change e.g. in a company like COYO, everybody is needed more than before to achieve the company goals.
For big changes you need at least a critical mass to support you and employees are only willing to support and accept change if…
🏠 …they feel save
🎯 …they have a clear goal in front of them
💡 …they understand the purpose of the goal
🏅 …they realize that they are needed and appreciated
Sounds simple in theory, but sometimes a bit bumpy in implementation. We can tell a few stories about that, as we at COYO are right in the middle of an incredible growth journey. Coming from a small start-up, that implies at least one problem: The relationships inside the company. Let me give you an example: In a 10 people company you already have 45 relationships in total. With 20 people that already makes 190 relationships. I think the average limit of equal relationships you can handle is 150, so with over 200 people it is not possible anymore and what happens is, that relationships get lost. And with this loss, there comes also change of course. New teams, new tasks, new colleagues and supervisors are just a few implications of growth. So the deal is, you run into change just by growing. Parallel and on top of that are changes in the company structure, the culture itself, processes, guidelines and last but not least often times also a change of the goals, the vision and so on.
With that in mind, how do we face all those changes? Transparency and a lot of communication are key elements for that. Even though you could say that everything is changing every time, so people should be ready for it, you will never find a company that consists only of people who like change and need changes all the time. There are people like that out there but the percentage is very low. So it is absolutely crucial that you have transparent change processes and being sensitive for the people and their work surrounding. As soon as you play the bulldozer and loose respect for all what is currently going on (and probably working pretty good) you also run the people over — and you might loose them. Let’s be honest, in times of change like fast growth etc. you might always loose some persons, thats sad but also normal. But you can prevent a wave of terminations and floors full of unsatisfied employees if you catch most of them and make sure that everyone understood why things need to change. That takes time and effort, but it is well invested.
💭 Examples for those things are e.g. a regularly AMA (ask me anything) with our VP, where everyone can ask questions directly to the management. Another thing that we do is to organize trainings for certain topics. Most of the time those trainings are about specific topics of the agile universe but they can also be about how to make decisions or change in general. The background is pretty simple: Explain why things are as they are. Agility is one of our core values at COYO and for me agility always included to be flexible and welcome change and support it — but with the addition: Where ever it makes sense and adds value. I have seen it so often that there are changes, most of the time strategy and process wise, just for the sake of change, just because something is not working as expected but changing processes without identify what exactly was not working before, is just a waste of time, motivation and resources and most of the time that leads to frustration and terminations.
Again, if you want to change something that effects a lot of people, make sure that you also explain the WHY. Explain it 3 times if needed, this extra effort is way better that leaving a bunch of clueless and frustrated employees behind. At our software engineering department this also means that our engineering managers, the VP and also the CEO are taking a lot of time to explain what is happening and why it is happening. And every single one has a lot of opportunities to ask questions and everyone is encouraged to speak up if they got something in mind.
Of course you can not take away all worries and often times decisions have to be made, that not everyone is ok with. Our approach is to get as much feedback as possible before decisions have to be made, then the responsible persons make a decision and then again, asking for feedback. As said before, you will hardly catch everyone and that is maybe something we all have to learn over time and somehow implement and integrate in our worklife. And with that I mean both sides, the management (or any other decision makers) and the employees. We are not a democratic institution, we are a running business and especially in times of change it is absolutely essential to make decisions. Everything else might end up in standstill.
In the end everyone has to make their own decision if they want to be a part of those changing times. From my point of view, all a company can do is to walk the extra information-mile to ensure that its employees decide as easily as possible to stay and be a part of this change adventure 🧗♀️
