How to overcome resistance to change in a process of transformation
Any organizational change is a scary experience for employees. Ani Kocharyan, the leader of Change Experience Design at Growth Culture Group, talks about four principles of transformation which will reduce the level of resistance to change.
Why people resist change
There is hardly an expert in the domain of management consulting who wouldn’t have studied the issue. So, it is possible to outline several hypotheses why people are against changes:
- Fear. It is common for most people to keep everything under control and be afraid of the unknown
- Force of habit
- Lack of confidence. People often doubt they are able to cope with new tasks
- No clear prerequisites for changes
It was Dr. Khalid M. Al-Ali, the CEO of the Qatar Science and Technology Park Project, having lived 17 years in Silicon Valley who said, “We need structures that will support individuals, not individuals who will support structures.” Don’t let changes just come out of the blue to employees, try to let them introduce new ideas and transformation projects to the company. One of the conditions for successful transformation is creating clear vision of future which will give the employees the image of their life and workstyle throughout the transformation process and when it ends. Thus, the key objective is to enhance employee engagement from the very beginning in order to complete the transformation successfully.
Four ad-hoc principles of transformation
Based on the results of the Change Experience research there came four principles formulated by Innovation Culture which are worth implanting in every transformation process.
1. Use different ways of communication for better employee involvement
Use various forms and channels of communication not only to announce results and new projects but most importantly to convey essential messages. The metaphorical mapping of transformation is one of the tools. The banking group ING in Germany used such approach in its agile transformation process. They draw an Agile Adventure Map where they depicted all the departments and the new interaction formats and processes between them. Even the least involved workers started looking for their departments, studying the roads, the characters and the names in the map discussing them with each other.
2. Ask for feedback during the transformation process
We’ve got used to ask for feedback only after the launch of a project. However, some projects may take months to evolve throughout the transformation process, and the reality is so volatile that our plans and strategies often become out-of-date. It’s vital to be on the alert and constantly correlate the company’s aims and objectives with its real challenges and employee and customer experience. For instance, one international retail company realized the project “Become better” on its intranet portal where the employees could share their ideas and recommendations concerning the changes in their work or the improvement of customer experience. That came as an effective tool for regular feedback which accumulated important details from real employee and customer experience.
3. Maintain an open dialogue
Direct feedback from the company’s executives is a crucial driver for transformation. An open and frank dialogue always brings everyone along and serves as support in highly turbulent situations. When his business faced hard times, Arman Yahin, the CEO of Main Road Post, gathered the employees and had an open talk with them on an equal as he believed their suggestions would help him to find the right solution concerning the whole company.
4. Create the workplace for new business routines
Office is a significant part of working environment because the place and the surroundings considerably affect people’s thoughts, habits and behavior. For example, most of the negotiation rooms in the Launchlab office in Berlin have a wooden white square high table in the centre for working on foot, a white three-shelf stack nearby full of stationery items like paper and paper board, scissors, glue, and even Lego constructions. Due to this the habit of rapid prototyping became a key stage of all meetings and discussions of project teams in the company.
These four principles can lead your company to quite simple and obvious insights and practices and engage employees in the process of transformation making them its main characters.
