Engaging People Through Change
How do you achieve change, whether that is upsizing, rightsizing, or diversifying your business effectively and efficiently and ensure everyone within your team continue to pull in the best direction for the organisation?
The short answer? Get your employees involved.
Let’s take a step back for a moment to explain this in more detail.
Your business has overcome the Covid challenges of the last 2+ years but for virtually every single organisation and individual that period has brought about much change in work and in life. As a business, you may have taken on further debt, and perhaps seen some of your customers have to pivot so no longer require your products/services or have to close their business permanently. Perhaps you are one of the lucky businesses in the right place when Covid struck or perhaps you were able to pivot and change direction despite the pandemic. For your staff, they may have lost loved ones, lost income, dealt with huge stress, and potentially had an increase in care responsibilities, amongst many other factors.
Added to those there are new challenges post pandemic – the rising cost of living for many of your employees plus increased costs to your organisation. It’s still a candidate driven market and there IS a continuing war for talent and The Great Resignation is still very real for many businesses according to recent McKinsey research, (The Great Attrition is making hiring harder. Are you searching the right talent pools? July 2022).
With all the flux and instability right now, your people are going to be reluctant to embrace change, in fact are probably very against any more change.
Bridging the Gap
Recent headlines also suggest a growing divide between employers and employees. To retain more employees and deliver on business objectives, companies need to address employee needs broadly and bridge the gap between their leaders and teams.
None of the factors we’ve mentioned bode particularly well for high levels of employee engagement though. Why is this so significant? Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report states that employees who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity. That's equal to 11% of global GDP.
Striking a balance between what your business needs and what employees now want and expect will be the key to engaging and retaining your people and introducing change in such a way as to create a healthy and productive workplace culture.
And a clear winner when it comes to getting your employees engaged with any change and committed to staying with you is to consult them, ask for their opinion and ideas and act on them. This will enable you and your management to create stronger programmes and policies that resonate with the elements each individual employee cares about the most.
By bridging the gap between your management and your employees, implementing change can be a more inclusive experience for all. You and your management can then better help every individual within each department, region, and team to progress through change, with their full understanding and input.
So, how to get your employees involved?
Many companies have taken the stance to introduce an annual employee survey as a way of gaining a better understanding of the mood of their employees, especially with the considerable pandemic induced changes that have impacted so many organisations.
This is a good starting point but, by its very nature, change can impact the feedback received if it’s just done once a year. Individual responses may be skewed by recent events, current news etc and this means the overall feeling in the business at that moment in time may not truly reflect the longer-term issues, opinions and ideas submitted by individuals. Employee expectations evolve continuously, and an annual survey just creates a snapshot in time, which does not allow management to be truly agile in taking the feedback and acting promptly.
Also, the logistics, admin, and time to deliver, analyse and communicate the sheer volume of feedback means that often an annual employee survey is too big a monster to be truly digested and fully acted upon. What does this mean to your employees? They feel disheartened and their trust in the business can be damaged as the perception is their opinion is not taken seriously and no real change as an outcome of their feedback is seen.
But surveys and feedback represent important employee communication channels that enable your organisation to develop a conversation with your entire team. So, one suggestion to ensure involvement from your employees is to introduce quarterly feedback. More real-time feedback, less admin resource required to analyse and easier to implement specific actions too. Little and often with manageable and quick to implement elements will win over a huge annual survey every time.
By introducing regular employee feedback and involving your employees in developing plans for change, you will deepen trust. Empowering and involving them in making change a reality can bring teams together, gives individuals a sense of ownership, improves overall employee engagement, and will deliver improvements that are important to both the company and its people.
Here’s a proven step by step process to improve employee engagement:
Tell them why you’re surveying them, and how their feedback will be received.
Publish the survey.
Thank them for their input and acknowledge that you have listened by sharing high-level survey details, including scores and the key themes that emerged from the feedback.
Tell them what you’re going to do.
Do it.
Communicate that you’ve done it.
Re-survey the team once per quarter and repeat steps 1-7.
The result?
You’ll be able to keep your finger on the pulse of your organisation and will have a clear view into where your employees stand, what is concerning them, and where your focus as a business leader needs to be. Your employees will feel engaged, valued, and will appreciate more regular, relevant, and transparent communication from their management team.
ProAction HR are an HR transformation company that actions people change. We work with CEOs, MDs, FDs, HRD’s and COOs of mid-sized businesses and advise, manage, and resource the strategies that will change how people work for your organisation.
Whatever the reason for the change, our expertise can devise and implement a change programme for the most favourable outcome. This enables you as a business leader to maximise new products, marketing opportunities or ways of working – whether that’s driven by legislation, new market opportunities, employee feedback or simply a new business strategy.
To support you further, we are delighted to now be a partner with Engagement Multiplier, the leading employee engagement platform to make your business more productive, more profitable, and easier to run. Engagement Multiplier is a unique, personalised tool that will allow you to communicate the need for change and understand its potential impact on your people before starting the process to implement any actions. Over time, this tool also keeps a regular check on how well changes are received. Read more about Engagement Multiplier.