Change through engagement

For those who get it right change programmes can yield both lasting bottom-line benefits and intangible advantages that will sustain the company’s longer-term profitability. However, at least 80 per cent of change initiatives fail to deliver their anticipated value and employee productivity can fall by between 25 and 50 per cent during large-scale change. Study after study reports that organisations blame project failure on resistance and a lack of commitment by employees. Given this evidence and the established link between employee attitudes and behaviour, and financial performance, it would seem sensible for an organisation to put its best efforts into engaging employees in the change process. Yet, Corven’s research reveals a surprising reluctance and lack of senior management knowledge about how to engage staff during major change.

Corven’s research identified that the majority of change programmes, including merger and acquisitions, new system implementations, restructuring and new business launches, still adhere to a conventional top-down change approach that many employees view as imposing change. Only when the solutions have been arrived at and the important decisions made are staff encouraged to become involved. Only a small percentage of impacted staff were involved in the early stages of the typical change programme – 18 per cent at the initiation stage growing to just 36 per cent during implementation. For large scale change to be successful it invariably means changing mindsets and behaviours, not merely changing processes and systems, yet this can only happen when employees feel engaged and have a true sense of ownership.

Conventional wisdom and current best practice, despite their inherent drawbacks, are so ingrained, many leaders find it difficult to conceive of any other method. Rather than engaging employees, the conventional approach produces unintended consequences which actually lead to disengagement and only serve to make the change process more difficult.

An approach to change based upon engagement benefits the business by harnessing the collective wisdom of the organisation, which should result in better decisions and build greater trust and ommitment from all involved, leading employees to ‘go the extra mile’ voluntarily. Employee engagement is more than mere ‘buy-in’, where staff are on the receiving end of a persuasive sales pitch. It represents a fundamental change in philosophy from the conventional approach to change, where the goal is typically to reduce the anticipated resistance, to one that seeks to develop true ownership and commitment from the outset. It represents an approach to change, rather than a line item within a project plan and should be treated as a sustained process. One of the keys to this process is the perception by employees of senior management’s alignment with, and commitment to, the change programme. Therefore, employee engagement must start at the top. This requires new leadership skills and behaviours.

The all-too-common consequences of poor employee engagement during change programmes – the reduced magnitude of the benefits achieved, drawnout timescales for their achievement, and the failure to sustain them beyond the immediate implementation phase – should be compelling enough to encourage the adoption of a bold new approach.

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