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As leaders, we often pay close attention to employee engagement scores to determine how well we are tracking and where best to apply our effort. Some organisation are going as far as to pay performance bonuses based on employee engagement scores, so you can bet that leaders are paying close attention to the numbers.
However, what’s often masked behind the results, is the reason for them. The responses in the survey typically point to how someone is feeling, but rarely does it answer why they are feeling that way. We must look to the root cause if we really want to move the needle on engagement, and more often than not, it’s down to our ability to effectively lead our people through change that makes the difference.
There’s recently been a resurgence on social media of well-meaning people sharing of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief portrayed as a change curve and suggesting that the role of change management is to move people as quickly through the curve as possible.
Nope.
That thinking had to led to change management being used as a reactive antidote in times of crises, which is why 75% of change initiatives continue to fail. Change management is quite simply applied to late. If we engage change management at the point when people start to voice their emotions and fears, we only stand a15% chance of achieving the project’s stated objectives. That means we are wasting 75 cents in every dollar.
If we try to move back a bit in the curve and engage change management to when we preempt people’s reactions, our chances of achieving the objectives sky-rockets to 44%, which is why data-driven insights are crucial to understanding and planning change.
It’s even better if we engage change at the beginning of the project, providing accurate input into resource planning and budgets, the chance of success rises to 76%. However, this is still not ideal as it’s limited to the project lifecycle and sustainability remains a challenge.
We need to stop thinking about change management and start working on managing change. When change stops being an event and starts becoming part of our everyday culture your chances of successfully implementing sustainable change hit a largely guaranteed 94%.
It’s obviously a no-brainer, but herein lies the rub. In the word’s of Leo Tolstoy, ‘Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself’ and in much the same way, our people won’t go, where we don’t first go ourselves. We’ve got to take pause to consciously and deliberately change, how we go about change.
If you want to do it the right way, we need to make change everyone’s responsibility, not just the training or communications person. Not just the project manager or initiative sponsor. Everyone in the organisation has a role in the change, whether as the person adapting to the change, an influencer responsible for driving the change or an agent leading the change.
The People-Centred-Implementation framework approaches this perfectly. By keeping our people at the heart of what we do, we win their hearts, and their minds follow.