I am borrowing a very popular phrase from the London Underground: “All change please” . This announcement is made when passengers are required to leave the train whether it is the train has been taken out of service or has arrived at the destination.
Organisational change requires people to change as well. Organisations are run by people. Employees are people. Customers are people. In my 20+ year’s career, I have worked on a number of large scaled major digital transformation programmes. The inertia behind why people resist changing is that most people don’t like to get out of their comfort zone to face the uncertainty. However, from the organisational view point, without change, there will be no progress and no growth. Employees have to accept the harsh message from their employers that: “Change or you will be changed….”
It is not just the employees who are stubborn and refuse to change. It is the organisations which are so inward thinking and only focus on replacing obsolescent IT systems with new shiny technology. It is undeniable that technology plays a critical part of business changes particularly in digital transformation. However, there is a lot less emphasis on helping employees transition to the new way of working and new culture. As a result, employees find it difficult to adapt the changes of processes and technologies which could lead to an unhappy workforce and then affect the customer services. Customers become unhappy, they complain or go elsewhere, business performance drops, and employees’ mental health suffers.
Before embarking to changes / transformations, organisations should consider the employees’ situations such as training, welfares and the time they’d need to transition to the post changed organisation. Employers should ask themselves these questions:
· How to redeploy / retrain employees to adapt the changes?
· How to ensure customer’s demands are met or exceeded during and after the changes?
· How to pace the changes?
· What is the reasonable / sensible frequency of changes?
The frequency of changes is particularly important as constant changes for the sake of it could lead to fatigue of employees. When employees cannot keep up the pace of the changes, they get stressed out and their stress would affect their Wellbeing and performance hence cannot meet customer demands. Organisations should allow sufficient time to enable employees to catch up the pace of changes. Organisations should provide employees adequate training (not just the new technology and new tools but also the new culture) and support to adapt the changes while still meeting customer demands.
For those employees whose roles have been replaced by the technology automation, it is understandable from the business view point those employees could lose their jobs if employers need to drive efficiency and to achieve cost effectiveness. The departure of those employees could have a negative impact on the employees who remain in the organisation. Employers must provide support to tackle the morale issues. Employees must be given training and support and time to adapt the changes and assurance they still have career progression and opportunities in the future.
Until one day when organisations are fully automated with all employees replaced by machines, people still play a vital role in organisational functions and purpose. People are still a vital asset to the organisations.
~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimers: This article was written entirely based on my personal opinions. It has nothing to do with either my current or previous organisations I am / was employed by.
~~~~~~~~~