Frustrated and disheartening feeling. It may make someone think that inspiring a team to change together is impossible. Don’t overuse myths, though. Successful transitions are possible whether you’re going digital, agile, reorganizing the chain of command, or changing the culture. It needs finesse. It requires a clear strategy, minimizing opposition, and emphasizing the change’s importance to all employees Let’s look at why a corporation would wish to make a large change, the forms of resistance you might meet, and how to overcome organizational change resistance.
We need change. Why?
Growth and progress require change. No one changes for any reason. A company must expand and adapt to its changing environment. Below are some reasons an organization may need to change significantly.
Generational Workforce
The employment landscape changes as new generations age and older ones retire. Around 40% of the workforce is made up of Millennials and Generation Z (born after 1981). Around 10,000 Baby Boomers retire each day; thus, these two younger groups will soon overtake Generation X and Baby Boomers, who make up 58% of the workforce. These two younger generations have different objectives. Overall, Millennials and Generation Z want more from their employment than a paycheck. When they don’t like workplace changes or the culture doesn’t fit, they leave quickly. This new environment necessitates organizational reform. To attract Millennials and Generation Z, workplaces must offer work-life balance and align with their beliefs.
The gig economy
Finishing a job often takes particular abilities. This is a temporary necessity. A corporation shouldn’t engage a freelance artist full-time if it just needs their skills sometimes.
The gig economy of freelancers and contractors is growing quickly. The gig economy is growing 15 times faster than paid employment. Nearly 30% of Fortune 500 organizations use part-time workers, and some use freelancers and contractors exclusively!
This tendency challenges organizations to evolve in many ways. HR must create new freelancer and contractor onboarding and training processes. Culture changes too. When half the team is temporary, project managers use a different approach to rapport and communication.
Recruiting and retaining talent
People switch employment for several reasons in the modern workplace. This makes hiring and keeping staff difficult.
Company culture is key to retaining employees. A healthy culture invests in people and gives them chances to learn and thrive. Additionally, it constantly thanks employees for their time and effort. Younger workers like flat companies where everyone can participate in improvements and leadership. Leadership examines its culture and changes it to recruit the right talent to stay ahead.
Product and Strategy Improvement
Products and consumer requirements change quicker than ever in today’s environment. Apps and online markets will become obsolete in months if not continually enhanced.
As product managers diligently analyze clients and the industry, it frequently becomes evident that a company has to tweak a product or learn new skills to stay current. These adjustments demand team flexibility and a willingness to evolve.
Organizations must continually adapt and develop. Changing to meet employee or consumer demands is essential to staying current.
Why We Resist Change
Change is inevitable, but resistance is sure. We are creatures of habit, and from the top of a company to each management position, individuals grow set in their ways and like things to stay the same. A good transition strategy anticipates and investigates this opposition. Look at different resistances.
Comfort with status quo
Most individuals like familiarity. They feel comfortable in a predictable workplace where everything and everyone is the same and their day goes as planned.
This sense of security and well-being is threatened when they must report to a new supervisor, learn a new system, or do a different task. They feel out of control when top-down reforms are implemented without their input.
Mistrust the Leader
Any journey into the unknown is difficult, but when an employee hates top management or specific leaders, structural or managerial changes are harder.
First, recognize distrust and overcome it. A successful shift requires team trust.
Challenge of Learning New Skills
When we do anything new and difficult, a small voice doubts our abilities.
Everyone is nervous when a firm switches to a new software system or transitions from waterfall to agile. They wonder if they’ll understand the new material and stay up with everyone. Change robs individuals of stability. We like established methods and systems. Letting go of the steady takes guts and trust. The company’s culture should prioritize employee well-being. Effective leaders anticipate and understand these frequent resistances. He or she can calm employees throughout transition and transformation.
Resistance Types
A woman slumped in her chair, her arms crossed, her brows furrowed, and her mouth curled down in a scowl, representing resistance.
“You can’t make me,” says the stance. Open opposition to change exists. Usually, it’s more subtle. When facilitating a shift, managers should know what types of resistance to expect to minimize or lessen them.
- Active Opposition
Employees may directly fight change. This includes acrimonious manager-coworker interactions and a drop in job performance. Teams may be more dysfunctional, and workers may cease attending meetings or responding to communications.
Active resistance is difficult to deal with, but it’s straightforward to recognize and diagnose.
- Passive Resistance
Sometimes workers appear to be accepting changes while secretly resisting them. Someone attending a meeting without contributing or employees performing baseline work requirements and leaving are examples of passive resistance. Passive resistance is difficult to detect since it’s covert. Open communication and meetings where individuals may vent reduce passive resistance.
- Intellectual Resistance
Sometimes work procedures and protocols necessitate things that make no sense to the worker. Employees who never glimpse behind the curtain may not understand the transformation. Without knowing the bottom line and never interacting with high management, an employee may not understand the necessity for a software transition or agile. The good thing is that intellectual resistance is easy to identify. Good old-fashioned communication fixes it. This intellectual resistance disappears when individuals learn why a transformation is happening.
- Emotional Resistance
Change is never fun when you know what to anticipate from a software system or your weekly task. It may feel like “one more thing” folks can’t handle right now. Maybe it’s terrifying. To overcome emotional barriers, make space. An unfamiliar system or team takes time to learn. Let folks get used to it and allow for production delays. Expect workplace strife for a while.
- Personal Resistance
Change is hard when you don’t want to. But when your hated manager or supervisor gives commands, it’s worse. Making a change is like wading through concrete when people detest the leadership or mistrust the organization.
Management must first repair trust and relationships before implementing the transformation.
Overall, employees seldom say, “I am resistant to this change, and here is why.”
Resistance can take many different forms and is often the result of various factors. It varies by personality and type of change. Overcoming resistance requires knowing its kind.
Overcoming Change Resistance
Transitioning is an art. Even when leadership knows where a firm should go, they must assess a team’s capacity. Everything fails when a strategy is overly grandiose or implemented too quickly.
Additionally, “solving” resistance by burying stress just fuels it. Change becomes impossible. A large transition aims to take a firm past growth troubles and into a new position with simpler processes, a transparent culture, or a superior product.
Let’s examine ways to overcome organizational change resistance.
Explain Ever find yourself completing job tasks out of obligation? Nobody’s ever explained why.
No one performs well when work appears pointless or they feel like a cog. People perform better when they understand why activities are done. Transparency about changing causes is key to compliance and collaboration.
If a firm is switching to agile, employees should grasp why the old system didn’t work and how the new one should fix it. When employees understand the “why,” they accept change more easily.
Speak and Listen
Communicate by speaking and hearing.
Everything is misunderstood when people rely solely on email for communication, as we’ve all seen. You can’t determine how the receiver takes it because of the tone, and it’s easy to misinterpret.
It turns out that there is truly no replacement for face-to-face contact, which has become a scarce commodity these days. While conversing face-to-face, every nuance of non-verbal cues is audible. You are tuned in to spoken inflection and tone, and you can read facial expressions.
Have one-on-one conversations with workers before implementing a major change, and pay attention to what they have to say. This ensures that all viewpoints are acknowledged and raises awareness among management about any worries or concerns.
While a written letter is useful in many contexts, it is most effective when employed as a follow-up to announce substantial organizational changes.
What’s my gain? How will it benefit me?
It is obvious that leaders care deeply about their company’s success. But they must also put themselves in the employees’ shoes if they are to successfully negotiate a major transition.
Having a job allows a lot of people, especially members of Generation Z and Millennials, to gain experience and establish their own personal brand. They still aren’t convinced to join a change initiative, even when they see the big picture of how it would help the business. That is to say, they are more devoted to themselves than they are to the organization.
This might be seen as an example of “enlightened self-interest,” as we should prioritize our own welfare and benefit. This is just how we are. Therefore, a leader should welcome this inclination instead of condemning it.
Make sure people know how they will benefit from the change when you implement it. Will gaining proficiency in a new program improve their employability? There is no doubt about it. The motivation gap can be filled by making the personal payout more clear.
Embrace a Different Perspective
The natural tendency of a firm is to bury any vocal opposition to change. Maybe this involves not inviting “difficult” individuals to meetings or just not listening to those who disagree.
On the other hand, everyone’s opinions may be heard in an open and honest work environment. It is open to feedback and discussion and makes an effort to improve.
The organization could benefit from listening to dissident views. Because the individual expressing the worries has a unique perspective, listening to them is the same as taking precautions.
Allowing for open dialogue, actively listening to opposition, asking questions, and creating a safe space for anyone to voice criticism are all crucial throughout organizational transformation. The company and its workers both gain from this.
Check the Change Saturation
A team’s ability to manage change is limited, even when its members are on the same page and comprehend the rationale behind the change. Apathy arises when individuals are confronted with an excessive amount of new knowledge or procedures. A mass exodus, in which everyone just gives up and leaves, may result from this.
The only way for leadership to prevent this type of catastrophic failure is to implement change gradually. Managers should take the temperature of the office on a frequent basis to get a feel for how things are running.
When troubleshooting, it’s important to listen carefully, both to what individuals say and don’t say. Is the break room lacking in friendship? Or a decline in participation during meetings? Either of these things could point to passive resistance.
Cushion the Most Affected Stakeholders
Leadership must not view the firm as a whole while formulating a strategy for a radical transformation. Major changes have different effects on departments and workers. While some people’s daily lives are completely disrupted, others see no influence. Effective leaders are acutely aware of the departments and workers who will be most impacted. There will be less pushback and more smooth sailing for everyone involved if these groups receive extra training, assistance, direction, and rewards.