Change is inevitable. That’s one of the constants in business, especially in an era of increasing digital innovation, and increasing change in work practices across the world. Unfortunately, though, change is also regarded as destabilizing and difficult to adjust to – and it’s often most felt by your staff – who are quite comfortable in their current roles with their current working habits. When you wish to evolve your company, you need to bring your staff on that journey with you. And this article is about how you’ll do that – creating change across your firm without Alienating Staff and losing the faith you need onside during your change.
Dialogue
When you’re initiating change in your firm, you’ll look to your junior managers for advice. These managers are the ones who will be talking to your most junior members of staff on a daily basis, asking them how they are coping with their workload, what stresses they’re experiencing, and what changes they’d like to see. Your junior managers can therefore feedback to you on:
- Whether change would be generally welcome among your employees
- How your older employees will react to increased modernization and digitalization
- How much training you might need to put into place to help your staff adjust to the change
- Whether you will need to consider redundancies or new hires to accommodate your change
These items of information, and the dialogue that you’re able to open up between your junior managers and your junior staff members, will be vital in securing you an easy transition within your firm.
Surveys
As you make the change that you’ve been excited to see throughout your firm, there will be teething problems. There will be muttered curses on the desks of your staff, and there will be disgruntled emails about new tech platforms that you’re using, and new systems that ‘don’t work as well as the old ones’. This is inevitable.
The way to channel this feedback productively is to create a change management survey. This survey will ask your members of staff for feedback on the changes that you’re making internally – and it’ll give them the chance to be listened to. Often, some of the feedback will be incredibly important for directing you to more efficient change in the future.
Patience and Rewards
There’s no doubt that staff will be disgruntled with most changes that you try to bring into your firm. Why? Because your senior staff has worked for many years in their jobs, and they’ve developed effective routines your new modernization drive is likely to leave them redundant. They’re going to have to learn new ways of working – and optimize their workflows in new ways.
The trick to assuaging this frustration is to ask your workers for patience and to look to reward those workers who have been with you the longest. Give them a bonus for their hard work, or consider offering them all a pay rise, so that they don’t rebel or mutiny in the midst of the change that you bring into your firm.
Make change a positive for your company by embracing the three tips shared above without Alienating Staff.
