Whether it’s corporate mergers, technological updates, layoffs, new products and services, or even moving headquarters, change often fails. Given that employees and business leaders have been downsized, right-sized, outsourced and in-sourced within an inch of their lives, the failure rate is hardly surprising. People can and often do suffer from change fatigue.
Is there a way to avoid this weariness? How can organisations make the changes they need to make, and get them right, first time? According to a number of experts, thought leaders and practitioners, it’s not easy. Successful change demands significant planning, communication and employee engagement.
Thinking broadly
Di Worrall, author of A Climate for Change, and principal of Worrall & Associates, likens the struggles many businesses have with change, to one much larger change that the whole world is struggling with. She notes that the challenge of climate change, and the way world leaders have responded to it, provides some important lessons that can address everything that does, and doesn’t work, about change on the smaller scale.
“The first area where we fall over is in the mindset of leaders who are leading change – they are not quickly enough adopting the new paradigm of sustainable leadership that’s going to work in this day and age,” she says. “The second stumbling block is in the systems we use. We’re caught up using Industrial Age systems that have been out of date for at least 30 years.”
That leads to one important question.
“What’s going to sustain our businesses in the future? We need to look carefully at things like accountability, about trust, about the environment around us, and how we make our relationships, our environment and our businesses more sustainable,” she says.
“These are massive areas with one common link – we need a new model of sustainability if our change programs are going to work.”
Sustainable change
Fiona MacLeod, president of convenience retail in the US and Latin America for BP Products, says change programmes need to stay on message. She warns that the corporate world is “addicted” to serial change management programmes that consume massive amounts of resources but ultimately fail to solve the problems they were designed to address. She told this year’s Wharton Leadership Conference that many of failures are followed by similar initiatives within one or two years, often before the original programme is even completed.
She says many change management programmes are doomed to failure because the new processes don’t take into account the reality of the business in question. “The change we are putting in place is not sustainable – and sustainability is absolutely crucial”.
Leadership thought leader Dave Ulrich agrees. He tells HRM that in order to achieve sustainable change it is often useful to separate ‘events’ from ‘patterns’. “Change is too often an event, not a pattern. People go on diets, but don’t change lifestyle. Changing patterns requires stable and sustainable actions that are woven into daily actions of employees and organisational practices.”
Establishing – and following through on – new routines is easier said than done. Old (sometimes subconscious) habits die hard. “If I’m a new CEO there are things I’ll automatically do,” Worrall says. “I know they’re the right things to do because that’s what I’ve learnt. (Far fewer leaders say) ‘hey, I’ve got the opportunity to question absolutely everything’.”
Worrall says one of the most important changes business leaders need to make, is in the way they in fact address change itself. “Our traditional education told us we need to control everything,” she says. “We’ve always been told the leader is the one who is supposed to have the vision and who will control processes and handle the tough decisions. It’s very much a top-down bureaucratic approach.”
She says leaders should instead take on an ‘enabler’ role, tapping into the creativity of the workforce and the varied skills of departments, including HR. “By removing obstacles you allow counter-intuitive change to start to take hold within the people. A key to sustainable change is that it sustains itself,” Worrall says.
One India-based multinational has taken this to the extreme level. HCL Technologies has successfully adopted an “employees-first” management model. J. Kalyanaraman, Head, Asia Pacific, says by putting employees above all else, even customers, not only have retention and engagement metrics improved, so have sales and revenues. “While the attrition rate at HCL has been declining, the employee to revenue ratio and employee utilisation rate have increased,” he says.
Leaders without followers
Organisations often revert to old habits because employees do not understand why change is needed, or they lack the tools and training required to sustain the new approach. Leaders may be effective at identifying what is wrong and how to fix it but less effective at the ‘soft side’ of change management – that is, capturing people intellectually as well as emotionally.
“When people know the ‘why’, they accept the ‘what and ‘how’,” Ulrich says. “However, many leaders focus on ‘what’ to do and ‘how’ to do it, not ‘why’ to do it. The ‘why’, or rationale, for a change requires both cognitive and emotive cases. The intellectual side comes from hard data and shows what is wrong or could be better. The emotive agenda comes from capturing feelings through experiences or stories.”
Tips for better change
Many change programmes also fail because ownership of the change programme rests with an external team of consultants, rather than the leaders responsible for running the business. Leaders who perhaps only have a superficial understanding of change leave it up to the consultants to take charge, often with disastrous consequences.
“Consultants are not owners of change, but architects,” says Ulrich. “Until leaders feel and personalise the changes, they won’t likely be sustained. People become committed to a change when they understand it intellectually, feel it emotionally, and act on it behaviourally. Consultants who want to create long-term change need to build intellectual, behavioral, and process agendas within the company so that leaders are fully committed.
“Consultants are effective when they are not in front of the change, but behind the change, coaching and advising leaders to make the changes happen.”
Open communication is also crucial. Basic psychology reveals that people comprehend information in different ways. Some people like facts and figures; some like stories; others prefer the person speaking to them to really know their subject; and yet another will like to know the other person cares about them. Some people need to blurt out their opinion without thinking about it, other people need to digest the information and perhaps share their opinion anonymously later on.
Worrall says HR needs to plan their change communications with these differences in mind. “If you construct every piece of communication this way when you’re trying to communicate to large numbers, then you’ll hit most of your population – or at least most of the population will have the opportunity to connect with the information in the way they know and can hear,” she says.
At the same time, HR must accept that there will always be people who will never be onboard. The role of a change agent is to decide early on who’s in their environment. Worrall suggests doing a stakeholder analysis test: who’s with you; who’s not, and who’s on the fence.
“As a leader, it’s getting back to removing obstacles. A naysayer might just snipe – that could be because you’ve annoyed them somehow. That’s repairable. But active saboteurs can cause actual or potential damage to programs and processes. You don’t need that,” she says.
Tracking progress
For any change initiative, people like to know which direction they are heading and how progress is being measured. Worrall warns that this may mean a reevaluation of overall performance management techniques.
She cites a US-based ‘super coach’, Marshall Goldsmith. Instead of ‘feedback’, which is the traditional notion of performance evaluation, Goldsmith turns this around into ‘feed forward’. Under a ‘feed forward’ regime, employees take an active interest in their own futures, not just once a year but as frequently as they like. The employee talks to everyone in their surroundings – managers, colleagues, clients – and they develop ideas of how and what they need to work on.
Worrall says it gives employees greater control over their destiny, and performance. “You can tell me I need to achieve this, this, and this, but what motivates me? Where does my energy and creativity best come from,” she asks.
“Also, what are the two or three things that I’m going to improve upon?”
Returning to the message of change, this new way of thinking about performance introduces the notion of collaboration. It removes the third party structure and helps to increase personal accountability and responsibility on both sides of the employee-manager divide. “That’s why things actually change – because I’ve got my personal motivation to get up in the morning to actually change something. I’m energised to change because I’ve got control over it,” says Worrall.
How have you handled change?
We asked some leading HR professionals how they have navigated change in their organisations.
“We’ve recently undergone significant organisational restructure. We effectively burnt the business model to the ground and built it from the ground up with the focus point being the end user, the people that buy the cars at the dealerships. We started by looking at our people – what skills and competencies do those people have, what skillsets do we need, and what knowledge will we need for the future?
“I’d suggest HR were the architects of change. Automotive is a very conservative industry. It doesn’t like change. The best way to integrate change is to make sure you have key stakeholder engagement. You build it out in. To overcome that conservatism, we’ve inverted that and built it from in to out. So we built the architecture of the business, we identified key stakeholders, we brought them in bit by bit – for example the managing director and the COO – and we got buy in from them, and then we built outwards. It’s not a textbook way to change but we had to be flexible and adaptable to get it through.” Sean Edwards, National Manager – People, Culture and Legal, Nissan Australia
“In the mid 1990s, Alexandra Hospital was considered a 1-star hospital – it was seen as a hospital for the old and poor; a cheap option. In Oct 2000, it was restructured with a new management team, that drove to turn that reputation around.
“We started by setting permanent, unchanging goals for all staff. In line with these, employees were encouraged to always think proactively and with a service mindset. Since 2001, staff have signed on to agreements that continually aim for excellence, learning, and respect for both colleagues and patients.
“Part of this involved clear empowerment of staff. Acting within those guidelines, they have been encouraged to think proactively with the end goal of quality patient care in mind – we tell them to provide a level of care which is good enough for their own mothers without the need to make special arrangements. Understanding the anxieties of making hospital arrangements for loved ones, employees can identify with patients and provide top-notch service as a result.
“This has helped to turn the hospital around, winning the Ministry of Health customer satisfaction survey for five consecutive years to date." MK Fatimah, HR Director, Alexandra Hospital, Singapore.
You have the plan, and the passion, for change – but how can HR get their staff on board. Dave Ulrich, author and HR thought leader, says there are three important ‘levers’ for change that need to be addressed:
+ Information: surround people with information about the rational for the change from legitimate and credible sources.
+ Behaviour: get people to behave as if they are committed to the change in a public way.
+ Reinforcement: when people make the changes, reward them publicly for what they have done.