In difficult business environments change doesn’t always have positive connotations. It implies tight resources, downsizing and increased workloads. Yet organizational change should be an ongoing process that is designed to ensure that highly capable people are working within processes that benefit both the organization and the workers no matter what kind of economic conditions exist. In that context, change becomes a positive business model that relies on employee engagement, effective human resources utilization and a shift from short-term to long-term thinking.
A company must be adaptive and adept at responding to market dynamics. A business always needs a high level of employee engagement, but a difficult environment adds a sense of urgency in many cases. Just when the organization needs its workforce to become more productive and more engaged, many find employees struggling to stay committed out of fear of the economic impact on their jobs and the changes that seem to be looming in the workplace. This can lead to disengagement that disrupts innovative processes and can lead to lower productivity. Employees who are fearful and not involved in the change process will feel threatened, confused and discouraged due to the exclusion from decision making.
It’s important to understand that achieving high employee engagement is not a strategy to be applied only in boom economic periods. In fact, managers that ignore the level of employee engagement during good times will find that those employees quickly scale back their efforts and display a lack of commitment to the business as uncertainty enters the workplace. Instead of redoubling efforts to help the business succeed despite the economic conditions, many workers cut efforts out of the belief that the efforts are neither appreciated nor needed.
Old change management models tend to ignore the level of employee engagement in a business. The old models include issues like capitalization, production streamlining and new pricing strategies, but don’t address employee engagement. In the new change management model proposed by business management expert Dick Axelrod, author of Terms of Engagement: New Ways of Leading and Changing Organizations, people are the first concern in a high engagement methodology to affect change. In the new model, managers identify the relationship between organizational change and employee engagement.
There are excellent reasons for developing an engaged workforce. People who are committed to their organization and to doing a quality job will make a stronger effort to manage their responsibilities to the best of their abilities and competencies. This leads to more productivity, not less, and higher customer services levels, fewer human resources issues like turnover and accidents, and higher levels of innovation and creativity. All of these factors contribute to the organization’s ability to respond to the marketplace under any economic conditions.
Building strong employee engagement requires understanding the drivers for engagement. These drivers enable the organization to implement and manage those drivers to effect change on a long term, ongoing basis rather than as a response to an unusual or temporary occurrence like an economic downward cycle. An engaged employee is aligned with the organizational goals, which can lead to better results in the bottom line. It’s natural, then, to implement strategies that create meaningful and autonomous employee work design, develop commitment and understanding of the organization’s purpose, promote employee interactions and relate the job to the organizational purpose. Widespread participation in the change process is essential to high employee engagement, which is why job autonomy and teamwork are so critical.
Meaningful, Committed and Connected
The key words in a strategy to develop employee engagement are: “meaningful,” “commitment,” and “connection.” To find what is meaningful to staff, the obvious and simple step is to ask them. Simple conversations between business leadership and employees will quickly reveal the issues that are of importance to them. One of the reasons businesses fail is because they have an agenda that doesn’t give any attention to what’s important to their staff. Inevitably, the business and staff diverge, leading to rigid dictates from top management in an effort to force people to follow. Other possible steps that can be taken to promote employee engagement include: bringing employees into the decision making process so they are empowered; training and developing staff to encourage thinking outside of their immediate tasks; and providing opportunities for expressing innovative or creative approaches.
Another key to developing widespread organizational change is to embrace employees in the broader organizational purposes. The staff should care about the role the business plays in the community and how the business improves the world outside its walls. Social responsibility is not managed in a vacuum. It takes an engaged committed staff willing to contribute to the organization’s efforts to develop improved communities and to support actionable efforts to connect the business goals to community goals like fairness, equal opportunity, diversity, equity and many other principles.
Organizations are often good at identifying its needs but ignore the needs of its employees. These needs include:
• having a safe workplace,
• being included in the decision making process,
• understanding the results of their efforts,
• being utilized in the best position in terms of competencies,
• engagement in honest communication,
• having the resources to do a job properly and
• being treated fairly and equitably.
The change process doesn’t just consider non-management staff either. The change strategies designed to engage employees should also address the roles and competencies of the business executive and management levels.
The management responsible for change initiatives designed for the long term must develop the skills needed for developing and implementing positive actions. The skills required include being able to: effectively and honestly communicate with employees, adapt strategies to changing market conditions, and incorporate employee suggestions and ideas into change model. Change initiatives require leadership willing to engage employees in meaningful discussions and then having the skills to use the input in effective decision making.
Inclusion is Yet Another Benefit
It’s interesting to note that many of the employee engagement methods that promote effective change are the same ones that develop diversity inclusion strategies. The lesson here is that treating people with respect, giving them opportunities to share their competencies and creativity, and including them in strategic planning will always provide benefits to both the organization and the employees.
The end result of effective change management is that the organization is made stronger, more resilient and better able to thrive no matter what economic conditions exist. In the process, the business is also able to develop leadership talent and plan for succession because the most engaged with the most to offer will have opportunities to fully participate. In other words, change management is also inclusiveness management, and inclusiveness always works.
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