It is well known that people in general dislike change. As a former colleague recently put it: “Only babies like change!”. This is especially true with organizational transformations, where employees often don’t see the need to embark on yet another new strategy when they are still assimilating the previous one.
Everyone knows that the first step towards the successful introduction of any organizational change, big or small, is to explain why the change is needed in the first place. What many companies fail to appreciate, however, is that this “why” has two dimensions: the corporate and the personal.
The corporate “why” is easy: the benefits that the new strategy will bring to the organization as a whole. This can include gaining market share, increasing competitiveness, expanding to new regions, repositioning the brand, etc. What is often forgotten is the personal “why”: the arguments that appeal to the intrinsic motivation of each employee to adopt the change. Sometimes referred to as “What’s in it for me”, these arguments address the question “Why should I care?” by every person impacted by the change.
This individual dimension complements the corporate dimension, which tends to resonate with a few only, in particular those closer to the decision-making. The rest of the organization needs to understand how the change brings something of value to them as well – at least if we want them to change behaviour.
Take for example a company that decides to get rid of individual offices and move all its employees to open workspaces. This is likely to be received with resistance at best, and opposition at worst. This company would typically craft its messages around the benefits of breaking down silos, increasing collaboration, fostering knowledge-sharing, etc. As nice as they sound, these arguments won’t resonate with those who cherish their individual offices, because they tackle corporate aspirations, not individual motivation.
To appeal to employees’ intrinsic motivation, these messages should rather highlight what they can gain from the move. For example, to make “increasing collaboration” an appealing argument for individual employees, collaboration could be introduced as a desired behavior in the company’s performance assessment. Accordingly, employees would be rewarded for working collaboratively with each other. This would make the move towards the open workspaces coherent with the company’s performance culture, and therefore employees would have an incentive to embrace the change.
There are many other ways to appeal to the individual “why” in this particular example, but you get the idea: develop a coherent narrative as to why each person affected by the change has something to gain from adopting the change – and this may differ across the organization as some groups prefer collaboration more than others.
If the why is powerful, the how is easy
This important distinction between corporate and individual motivators explains why the changes imposed by the Covid pandemic were quickly assimilated by employees without much resistance. The huge sense of urgency imposed by the pandemic provided very powerful “why’s” on both fronts.
Covid-19 was a burning platform that forced companies to react quickly to adapt their operations and sustain their business (the corporate “why”). While this brought along a vast amount of change to most employees, we readily adopted new habits like mask wearing, hand disinfecting and home office without much resistance, because the individual “why” was very strong: being safe and staying healthy.
This sense of urgency is typically missing in the launch of corporate strategies. They are usually introduced after months – if not years – of profound deliberation, wide consultation and careful planning. By the time they are launched, the decision-makers are well ahead of the curve and ready for implementation, while everyone else is still figuring out what the new strategy is all about and why it is needed in the first place. Until everyone in the company finds their “what’s in it for me”, they won’t jump on it.
As communicators, we can contribute to the successful roll-out of corporate changes – from a small team’s reorganization to a large-scale strategic transformation – by ensuring that we convey not only why the company needs the change, but most importantly how each employee can gain something from it as well.
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Victoria Torrano is a Communications Manager with 19 years’ experience working in an international financial organization. She is currently transitioning into a new position as Head of Communications and Marketing in the International School Basel.