A Pandemic for change?

Alvin Toffler, a futurist, said, “Change is not merely necessary to life. It is life.” 

I think, ‘change’ is as simple and yet very important as breathing is. We breathe change as the time passes seconds by seconds. Or as our days transform from daylight to moonlight, or, from summers to winters. To cope with new external and internal forces of change, we have always sought to fundamentally alter the way we live and work. 

Right now, we humans, we all are living through a scary disaster which has literally provoked us to change the way we see lives. We are witnessing global harmony which is not only desired at the moment, but also for the times to come. Upto fair recently, the suffering of the world had very little to contribute to an understanding of the harm which we have done to the society. But now we see how, if we really want, we can transform the ways and make a change for the good. The organisations have understood that human life is the most important and that it is absolutely fine to slow down for a while. We all did wonders when we had to improve customer experience. Now, it is the time to really care for your own employees and give them a rich employee experience. Everyone can keep people happy when the profits are green; but during such a crisis, it will really display a clear picture – who is loyal and who isn’t; whether it is the organisation or the employee. 

The famous Boiling Frog phenomenon is a classic example to understand the value of simple yet profound changes which can alter our lives in no time. One of the frogs die because it really doesn’t sense the change and the other survives because it was sensitive to the changes in the surrounding. Let’s become sensitive towards the small things in our lives; it will only help us to understand things in a better way.

Kurt Lewin, a psychologist, gave a three level model of change: unfreezing, change, re-freezing. What we are witnessing now is the whole of first step (unfreezing), and a little bit of second step (change). We need to make better use of this pandemic and make profound changes in organisations which will make our place a better place to work. The Management needs to understand now is the time to change their policies, systems, and processes for good. The last step of re-freezing will happen eventually because people aspire for the betterment, always. We just need to make a push and showcase the good calling!