October 2014

This blog was first published on Fresh Business Thinking on 1st October 2014.

It’s not about change – it’s about control

I stared at the blank screen in disbelief. I prodded the power button, it burst into life and then died again. It was 9.30pm at night, dark and I was somewhere deep in the Provence countryside. I’d been cycling since 6.30am and had ridden over the equivalent of Mont Blanc and Ben Nevis combined. I was tired and hungry and now my GPS device had failed. I had no idea where I was or which way to go. I got my phone out, 25% battery left, but I knew that with the GPS enabled that would soon disappear to nothing.

Out of control

That feeling of being out of control facing an uncertain future is exactly the same emotion most of experience when confronted with a significant and potentially life impacting change at work. When all is said and done, it is the raw fear of the unknown and the uncertainty that drives our response. The trouble is, it gets wrapped in all sorts of other excuses and false logic that disguise the real issue.

Icebergs

As a change management programme facilitator, I’ve stopped getting too hung up on the business outcome to be achieved. I find the most effective thing to do is to get inside the minds of those involved and impacted by the change. What’s their angle? What is it they fear about the change that they are not expressing? I don’t mean the ‘impact on the business’ stuff, I mean the deeply personal impact, as in ‘I can’t afford to lose my job’ or ‘I can’t afford to lose face by being demoted or having to report into another tier of management’ or even ‘I’m worried person X will get promoted and I won’t’.

Whatever the driver, the outcome is the same, resistance to the change. The tip of the iceberg is a well-argued logical business case against the change that makes perfect sense. It’s pretty much utterly irrelevant in my experience. It’s the iceberg under the surface you have to worry about, the hidden feelings and fears.

Black ice

Let’s think about control for a moment. When you are driving along a country road in the winter and the sub zero temperature warning chimes on the dashboard, you will probably drive a touch slower. If you experience some black ice, you will probably drive slower still. Why? To feel in control. The fear of the consequence of what could happen slows you down. If the road became too treacherous, you’d probably stop all together. In the same way, the announcement of change has people slowing up “What’s going on? What’s happening here?” They proceed with caution. For some, an opportunity will open up and they will accelerate to take advantage of it. For others, the perceived consequences will have them go very slowly until they can make sense of it all.

What to do

If I want to help people with change, I have to understand their perception of the consequences. Armed with this information the next step is to help them feel in control. If this means they are likely to lose their job then it’s about helping them get control of preparing themselves for hunting for a new role. If it means demotion it means helping them think through the cost of this versus the price of moving elsewhere. If I can help the organisation help people in this way, or do it myself, then I can help make the change happen.

Controlling consultants

We need to think more broadly about control. I’m spending a lot of time at the moment facilitating discussions between business consultants and their customers. The consultants have been paid substantial fees for helping the organisation implement change, but the working relationship is fractious and unproductive. The consultants are seen as simply trying to expand the amount of fees they can charge. The employees feel impotent in the face of their recommendations, they are impacted by them and yet cannot influence them. Meanwhile the consultants see the employees as unhelpful and resistant.

Take it back to its core set of issues and we can begin to see the real drivers. The consultants are paid on results. Each person has to demonstrate to their boss that they are delivering what they have been asked to do. The consequences of failing will impact their reputation and future success. And yet they have no power. They can only ask and influence the customer to do what they need to happen. They feel frustrated and impotent in the face of resistance. Typically they will then tend to push harder and harder to get what they want.

In the company, employees see the consultants as having all the power and none of the responsibility. They are seen to make recommendations that do not take into account all the facts. They can make suggestions that could have a very serious impact on each person’s future. Why would you reach out to help someone who could hurt you? You might, but probably only to mitigate the damage.

Getting it together

Putting both sides in control, is about helping reframe the way of working together such that people can mitigate their fears and concerns and identify a way of working together seen to be in their mutual interest. It’s about helping people feel in control.

Mapping my future

When my GPS failed, I needed to get in control of the situation. It was getting late, I was tired and getting cold. So I phoned a friend. Town by town, road by road, junction by junction he guided me to my destination. A short phone call every half an hour or so helped put me back in control. This way my phone battery lasted the distance. Someone knew where I was should anything go wrong. My spirits lifted, my optimism and enthusiasm returned and the last few miles passed quickly.

My three top tips for managing change

1. Think about the people not the issue. This means being empathetic. I mean really empathetic, getting right inside their heads to imagine what it’s like to be them and experience what they must be feeling. Then check that your perception of how it might be for them is valid. This requires you to get their trust.

2. Put people in control. Having worked out where they might feel out of control, think through how you might get that control back. The more in control people feel the greater their level of confidence and the faster they will be prepared to make the change.

3. When you are struggling with something someone else is proposing – ask yourself why you feel that way? What are the consequences that are driving your resistance? The better you get at understanding your own thought processes the better you will be at helping other people manage theirs.

Dominic Irvine © 2014 All rights asserted

Read our case study on how we helped people feel in control over what was happening around them and to them during the restructuring of one of our clients.

This blog was first published in the Huffington Post on the 3rd of October 2014.

How bad must it have been?

Tom drove to work. He walked into the office, left the keys to the van on the desk and told the depot manager in no uncertain terms that he was resigning. He’d had enough. He could no longer take the pressure ‘management’ were putting him under to do more and more deliveries per day. Their expectations were totally unrealistic. It’s not that Tom had any other job to go to. He also had a family to look after – but he’d reached breaking point. Enough was enough. Tom was so disengaged with his job – he quit.

So what about you?

Take a look around your workplace, observe the employees and estimate the percentage of them actively engaged in their work. What figure do you calculate – 70%, 80%, 90%? If your guesstimate is around these ballpark figures then your organisation is doing remarkably well, or you may be sadly misinformed.

The harsh reality is substantially lower.  Gallup conducted a study of employee engagement across 142 countries in 2012 and discovered that only 13% were actively engaged. The State of the Global Workplace report also revealed that 63% were not engaged and a further 24% were actively disengaged.

These figures are dispiriting but there were a few positive trends. Firstly, the figures from an earlier report for 2009-10 showed that only 11% were engaged, so there was a 2% increase for 2012; and the actively disengaged measured 27%, meaning a decline of 3 percentage points. What is also promising is that these desperately low engagement levels provide great upside potential for managers who genuinely wish to raise productivity and profits.

Research by Kenexa identified that the top 25% of organisations in terms of employee engagement produced twice the annual net income or profit to shareholders compared to those in the bottom quartile. Over five years, the profit between the two groups reached a remarkable seven times differential.
At a national level there is massive scope for governments, agencies and organisations to improve their performance through enhanced engagement. Gallup estimated that active disengagement in the USA cost the country $450-550billion; in Germany €112-138billion, and the UK £52-70billion. It is unsurprising, therefore, that governments are now focussing their attention on strategies to improve engagement in their populations.

The 13% average engagement figure also disguises significant national differences. East Asia, at 6%, possesses the lowest proportion of engaged employees and this is mainly driven by low scores from Chinese workers. Conversely, Australia and New Zealand scored 24% on active engagement. It would appear that some places are closer to getting things right than others.

What is engagement?

So what is engagement? The most commonly used description was produced by Utrecht University which identified three areas: vigour – effort, energy and resilience; dedication – enthusiasm, inspiration and pride; and, absorption – concentration and being deeply engrossed in work.

What can be done about it?

The next question is how can engagement levels be lifted and enabled? The first thing to recognise is that there is no single silver bullet and employee engagement requires a combination of strategies, values and culture.

Firstly, leadership needs to provide a strong narrative or story about the organisation’s history and its future direction of travel. Without a clear description of where it is going employees will have limited focus and motivation.

Secondly, managers must motivate and empower the workforce. Managers should also be held accountable for the levels of engagement in their workers; this will drive them to create the conditions and atmosphere which support engagement.

Thirdly, engagement needs to be clearly expressed in everyday language which people understand and can respond to. Leaders set the tone and this should permeate throughout the organisation.

Fourthly, ensure that work is meaningful. Even in the most boring of work environments tasks can be enlivened and strategies for job enrichment, enlargement and rotation can have beneficial effects.

Fifthly, ensure that there is a work – life balance. The stresses and strains of many workplaces suppress or even destroy the inherent potential for job satisfaction. These days too many managers are incrementalists, that is, they look at shaving a cost here, squeezing a little bit more out of workers there. In itself, these continuous improvements or kaizen as the Japanese call them, are not such negative things; the problem arises when this continuous squeezing results in a disproportionate increase in pressure and stress on employees to reach sometimes unattainable targets. The consequence of continuously ratcheting up the targets may be to demotivate and disengage the workforce – as was the case with Tom.

Lastly, ask staff what they think would enhance workplace motivation and job satisfaction. Much of this is not rocket science and drawing them into the conversation shows that you care about their wellbeing and career development.

Why bother?

There is increasingly strong evidence that employee engagement provides higher innovation, increased customer satisfaction, reduced absenteeism, higher retention, lower health and safety issues, higher performance and higher income growth. What we need now are thoroughly engaged leaders and managers to influence the whole workforce.

There is no place for macho ‘I don’t give a damn what they think just tell them to do it’ attitudes anymore. To drive someone like Tom to quit is the clearest sign that the business is doomed. Focusing on engagement is not just a nice thing to do, it’s commercially a no-brainer.

Dr John Wilson & Dominic Irvine © 2014 All rights asserted

Read of our experience in Engaging Leadership with one of our clients here.

To find out more about the range of employee engagement and leadership workshops Epiphanies delivers for blue chip organisations across the globe, get in touch through the.team@epiphaniesllp.com or +44 (0)1943 430164.