Thousands of my fellow Long Island business owners will decide to make a significant change to their businesses in the next six months, and hundreds of thousands of Long Island employees will feel the impact. The success of each business’s change is going to be based in large part upon how well the change has been thought through, and how effectively leaders communicated the why and how to their employees.
If you are a leader, deciding to make the change is the easy part. Helping your managers and employees understand and implement the change so you get the results you want is the hard part. So often, companies invest heavily in the technical side of a change without really thinking through the impact on their employees. Nearly any change requires redefining employees’ roles, expectations and behaviors, and many leaders just assume employees will figure it out. But that doesn’t always work.
Failing to address the people side of change can create major hurdles for a business. Here are seven signs of trouble:
1. Employees complain there is “no communication”
2. Managers protect their turf
3. Employees do end-runs around new authority and workarounds on new processes they don’t like or understand
4. Customer complaints increase
5. Decision-making slows to a crawl
6. Good employees leave
7. Employees burn out, give up, go into “coast” mode
Leaders can get better results from their change initiative by appreciating that change will naturally disrupt their employees’ feelings of stability and comfort. While you may be excited about what the change will do for your business, employees are nervous about what the change will do to them.
A wise approach is to think through the implications for jobs, roles and individuals, and communicate both what the impact will be to an individual, and what is in it for them. By doing so, you will be light years ahead of the game.
That information is an essential part of what an employee needs to process, understand, accept and internalize the change. And receiving it from you, in respectful, appropriate way, goes a long way toward creating the type of atmosphere and culture that will help your business soar.