Managing Change without Employee Loyalty

??Author Narrated with Commentary (13 minutes)

I've never been laid off by a Culture. I don't think others have, either. Read on to find out how to manage Change when staff feel little if any loyalty to a company.

Backstory

Aki Ito wrote an excellent story in this month's Business Insider about the decline of workplace loyalty in America. The article was a follow-on from a piece she wrote in January 2024.

She initially portrayed a generational divide between older, supposedly more loyal employees, and their disillusioned younger counterparts.?

She admitted in the follow-up that she had gotten the divide wrong. Both generations are equal-opportunity in their disgust with the disingenuous ways of corporate.

Older readers, particularly Gen X and boomers, expressed dissatisfaction with being labeled as pro-loyalty. Instead, their comments about the first article Ito had written emphasized their decades-long experience of corporate betrayal, benefit cuts, and deteriorating conditions.?

The feedback revealed a shared frustration among employees of all ages, challenging the assumed generational divide.

The piece struck a chord with older workers who still witness corporate leaders urging unwavering dedication despite minimal reciprocation.?

Contrary to the initial narrative, they observed younger colleagues falling for corporate rhetoric. Older workers in the commentary to Ito's first article prompted a call for millennials to adopt a more cynical and demanding stance.

The workplace, it seems, houses not just disillusioned younger generations but also Gen X and boomer counterparts, suggesting a widespread discontent with corporate treatment.

Ito's conversation with a software engineer, Gabriel, laid bare the evolving expectations in the modern workplace. Gabriel, laid off from his first job, now only seeks fair treatment in the form of his agreed-upon salary, rejecting any notion of going above and beyond.?

This reflects a broader trend where employees, both young and old, are adapting to the changing dynamics of the employer-employee relationship, characterized by a lack of reciprocal loyalty.?

Without loyalty, can organizations have genuine change with enduring results that benefit stakeholders — not just shareholders?

The End of Culture

Forbes Magazine defines corporate culture as: "the collection of unwritten norms, beliefs and collective attitudes that shape how things get done within your organization."

Instead, it seems the lived reality of enterprises is more akin to mazes mice are placed in to run around, with "observers" changing the walls, rewards, and penalties for misbehavior every now and then.?

Call it the B.F. Skinner interpretation of corporate norms.

Corporate culture as a concept did not come into vogue until the 1980s. I imagine management consultants picked it out of academic obscurity to dress up the newly brandished corporate objective of "shareholder value" that had become de rigueur starting in the Reagan years.????

Which brings me back to my initial statement of I've never been fired by a culture.

I lived and worked in China for more than 10 years, and worked in a half dozen more throughout Asia. I've also worked in several European countries.

Though more often than not accused of being "American," at no time did Mainland Chinese take me as Chinese, though I speak the language and know the customs.?

Indeed, I felt myself more American than ever living and working outside America. Never at any point as an expat was I anxious I'd be fired by the United States.

I accept culture as the learned expression of a group's relationship with its environment and within the group. Art, religion, mythology, language and even society are the result of well-defined cultures.

Not once in other countries (except the UK and Canada) have I heard the word "culture" mooted by corporations.

Temperament Not Culture

Which brings us to the word Culture and its misuse by American business. And it is a specifically American construct.

The concept as HR has been promoting the idea is that staff hired into a company are joining something greater than them. The entity will endure even after the employees leave it.?

Pretty thin gruel.

I prefer the term "temperament." Is the corporate temperament mercenary, like the consulting and finance sectors ("Up or Out!"). Is it collegial, like many family businesses? Is it high-pressure and low-gratitude, like many healthcare facilities?

Most staff are increasingly finding enterprises to be intemperate: there is no emotional contract, as Ito calls it, to bind a company to staff and vice versa.

Overnight, an individual can go from being a corporation's most important asset to being out on the street the next day.

Companies have no compunction about laying off hundreds and thousands of staff who had invested in Potemkin cultures.

Cognitive … Here He Goes Again

The root of resistance to Change in the corporation is the cognitive dissonance between what an employee hears from an enterprise and what actions they witness by leadership.?

Again, if they witness the exile of people they know who were "valued," then they suffer cognitive dissonance.?

Cultures only ever expulse their own when members of the tribe have done something unforgivable. The expulsed become liminal: suspended between life and death, as their identity is bound up in a culture that has rejected them.

Humans experience terminal shame when the group with which they identify ejects them. The expulsed experience rejection.

Why Resist?

Resistance to Change is the time and effort it takes staff to release the friction between what they hear and what they see, like the sparks that fly from train wheels when they need to round a bend on train tracks.

The train wheels shoot off sparks because they need to release energy from the deceleration a change in direction has wrought.

What has traditionally been labeled resistance in orthodox Change management frameworks is staff working through the distance between what they see (and therefore feel) in the workplace and the contrary actions they experience around them.

Resistance does not occur because of facile leadership (and management consultant) explanations:?

"oh, humans have always feared the unknown …" (and so they are silly)

"oh, people have always feared new technology…" (and so they are luddites)

"oh, they're just interested in what's in it for me — WIIFM…" (so all we need to do is horse-trade with staff)

Remove Cognitive Dissonance to Remove Resistance

Once a Change initiative has demonstrated Alignment throughout an organization — within leadership and between leadership's actions, promises, and its staff — change flows like water through a hose that's been un-kinked.

Engagement in the form of communications with staff — dialog between staff and leadership — make Change effective and results enduring.

To create cognitive dissonance within an organization and then to patronize the staff that desires resolution to the dissonance sabotages Change programs.?

Any results from a Change program rooted in unresolved dissonance that may occur will be short-term. The results may even damage the organization's brand in the experience of staff and customers.?

Arbitrary layoffs are a case in point.

Directors who own Change programs, and management consultants, would do well to look at the causes and effects of staff cognitive dissonance.?

Work out ways to moderate dissonance, and then facilitate transitions that bridge those contradictory artifacts to build change that resonates with staff beyond the next earnings call.??

?William Dodson works with Corporate Directors to troubleshoot Change Management programs. He is creator of the REAP4Change? action plan for successful organizational change management.

He is a former Organizational Change Management senior consultant for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, BearingPoint, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Cap Gemini-Sogeti.

His most recent books include:

"Artificial Intelligence for Business Leaders: The Essential Guide to Understanding and Applying AI in Organizations (2023, Cosimo Publishing, LLC), 100 pp. ISBN 979-8-9884070-7-2. In digital format and Amazon Kindle.

"The New 'Teacher's Pet': A.I. Ethical Dilemmas in Education and How to Resolve Surveillance, Authenticity, and Learning Issues" (2023, Cosimo Publishing, LLC), 77 pp. ISBN 979-8-9884070-8-9. Kindle edition: https://bit.ly/3TMrwDA

Message him on LinkedIn about your Change Management and related corporate communications issues.