With Reflection, Comes Growth...

The true authentic culture of a business is exposed when it is stress tested. Like people, when businesses are faced with adversity it’s the response that matters. COVID19 meant that organisations were impacted in ways that could not have planned for. When organisations are put under stress and strain it impacts their core, the DNA, its authentic self, shines through. Decisions will be made based on what is important at that moment in time, decisions will be made quickly, and those decisions will have a lasting impact on each employee. Your business will be remembered for how you responded.

Whether change is something as significant as COVID 19 or a simple office move, and we all know how much animosity they can incur. Change should never be underestimated. The impact of change can be significant and never more so when we are in a place of comfort and then our metaphorical blanket is removed.

Change without acceptance is change imposed on us. Are we suddenly effective? Have we taken the change and ran with it? Most likely not. But change with acceptance is a different ball game. We have just accelerated towards the end game, all because we’re there! You have us, you explained the why, we saw the value, the benefit and we adapted because of it.

And it is as simple as that change, regardless of the degree or scale of change, it requires a level of acceptance. The level of acceptance determines the level of effectiveness. If there is significant change and little acceptance then there will be little effectiveness. The question here is: How do we get acceptance? And what is the role of the organisation? How change is handled will be a clear indicator of the organisational culture and the organisations attitude towards the people who work there.

Where a business creates change and it acknowledges that the change impacts people they will have plan that engages and in doing so accelerates the level of acceptance, which ultimately gets them where they need to be in the fastest time possible.

Do change well. We have all been in a situation on a night out where someone, maybe you, maybe me tried to cajole the rest of the group of people to go to the latest hotspot, but half the group don’t want to, 2 want to go home, 4 want a curry and so on, but the instigator is relentless and eventually your all there, the music is deafening, the atmosphere tepid, the latest hotspot has been flooded with wannabees and really its quite dire and as the group disbands, they are already resenting the ￡10 they had to pay to get in and the second cab of the evening to go back to the place they really wanted to be.

We tried to make a change, there was no acceptance – it was completely ineffective, actually it worse, it was damaging. Nick from accounts got so intoxicated he made advances at Mary from payroll which has now resulted in a sexual harassment case and everyone being interviewed which is a real drain of time and resources and poor Mary who is clearly suffering from this chance encounter.

We don’t like change being ‘done’ to us. We naturally like to be ‘part’ of the change. It is much nicer and Nick and Mary might not have ended up in this tragic situation!!

 If the business chooses to make a change 9 times out of a 10 there is a plan, a business plan, a list of actions that need to take place, by who and when. What’s typically missing is a well thought through ‘Change People Impact Analysis’. A plan that looks at how the change will impact people, a stakeholder analysis that captures the impact if the change, along with what the steps of engagement need to take place per stakeholder group, what communications are needed, the testing log, training that needs to be delivered and to who, awareness to ensure that the implementation is accepted, review of comms and the process to sign off from an employee impact…… and breathe.

 As I mentioned where there is little acceptance this is equal to little effectiveness.

In large scale projects the implications of not doing this well; productivity will suffer, political game playing will become prevalent, commercials will suffer and so on. The change, whether a new system, new processes, new structure, redundancy situation, they will all be criticised. Time will be lost; engagement will be lowered, and costs will hit.

Enabling business change though focusing on increasing acceptance, will increase productivity, morale and engagement. Organisations need to recognise that what may be seen as a small change to some (Project team), may have major consequences on the people it affects, people have very different levels of acceptance so don’t fall ignorant to taking the stance that something insignificant to some can be hugely significant to others.

Let’s look at this in real terms, we have been faced with a Global Pandemic, it had an immediate impact on how we work, our economy, the health and well being of the world, the resilience of the organisation and the employees. This will impact and change how we work now and, in the future, forever more.

It will also have impacted our view of which organisations strived, not just in a commercial sense but also in a cultural sense. Which organisations got stressed tested, weathered the storm and maintained their culture and therefore the employee engagement. Which ones appreciated the impact and significance of this on their colleague and their country? And which organisations were altruistic, keeping an eye only on the commercial impact, the bottom line and have ultimately suffered because of it.

We saw examples of organisations who made early decisions to introduce home working, established new working practices and supported their people in the change curve. And then there were those who operated as long as they were able to before finally closing the door and informing the employees, they would now be redundant.

The pandemic and the change incurred here was external, it could never have been prepared for but change in any business happens continually, therefore if you have a culture of delivering change effectively then you already know the impact on people and you are prepared for that, you know and understand the steps to engage your people on the journey that accelerates their level of acceptance and you have an engaged community because of it. But if you don’t then it is worth looking at how you do change and creating a methodology that is used in all instances, whether the change is internal or in this case, external.

The Pandemic has already changed the working world and it will continue to change the future considerably. Businesses have been affected by something so significant that going forward this will be a consideration. Some organisations will have feasted through the pandemic, business performance exceeding all forecast targets. Supermarkets, corner shops, healthcare will have seen volume like never before, the teams fatigued with the pressure of workload, the pressure of stress ridden customers and peers, new processes, new operating models. Performance wise they will have excelled but at what cost to the employees of those businesses. What measures were put in place to that their health and well being was a major factor in maintaining the service they were providing to the nation? And how were they rewarded, and their efforts celebrated?

Now's the time to reflect...

There couldn’t be a better time for businesses to reflect and look at how they handle change, where are your people and the culture of the organisation on the list of priorities? Organisations will never be the same again, the pandemic will not only have taught us a lot about the board by the decisions they made it will also have opened the eyes of many employees as to whether this is the place they want to be going forward. This is a time where data is key, go back, look at what the data is saying, what impact has there been on turnover, amend your engagement survey, ask pertinent questions. How did we do? Will you be here in a years’ time? Are you proud to work this company? Find out what engagement is like and ask the questions to understand what you could have done better, what you should learn from this? Ask your employees which organisations they saw that fared better and why?

Complete a lessons learnt, share with the business, with every single employee. If you made bad decisions in hindsight, then explain why they were made and if you have gone back on those decisions then explain why. This is your only opportunity with the employees you have at this given time to show that you are a business willing to learn and evolve. Recovery is the best and only solution, ignorance to the events will only demonstrate that you are no longer interested in the impact it had on your employees and you have moved on. Your employees however will not, they will be scarred, impacted and disengaged long after. It is the duty of the business to help your employees move forward and with guidance and support that you can and should provide.

What business are you really in?

Is the business you are in reflective of the culture you want it to be. How did it stand up to the stress test, how did the business balance bottom line, keeping the doors open and the welfare for both the employees but also the public? Are you proud to be part of your business, one you advocate and one you will remain loyal to? Are you a people business?

Remote working now more prominent than ever, techucation (Technology Education) has happened without the support of HR. Overnight the entire world has now become technically savvy, video calling and conference calling the norm. Digital platforms rose in their popularity and are here to stay. The online pub quiz which rippled through the nation showed that we can still be connected and made all the tools more accessible and they have become the norm.

How did you re transition your people back into the workplace? Did you find that some of your employees were anxious about re-introduction to the office? How did you ease that pressure? How did you welcome back those that were furloughed? Was it business as usual or did you welcome them back like a long lost friend?

As a business what is your expectation for your team going forward? How will you remodel what your expectation of your people is? How and what will the purpose of offices be going forward? How do you recover from this change, how do you ensure all your employees celebrated the challenges they overcome and how are you or will you build the business of tomorrow? It will never go back to as it was, too much change has happened for that to take place, don’t ignore that, don’t expect that when change occurs you can go back to before it happened. You can’t, face into it. Build a new business, one that harnesses the new technology skills, the agile workforce and the resilience developed.

Removing the ability to work remotely and re-implementing 100% attendance back in the office will be faced with challenge. Trust will be broken, when the elasticity of people’s skill have been tested, which they have, then why would you allow it to snap back to before. Keep exercising their new skills allow them to use it, trust in your people and reap the rewards of having new and developed skills. To return to as it was before, is to unwittingly say that you did not trust their performance during the most challenging time. That it wasn’t good enough.

We changed. We changed not only because we developed new skills, we multi tasked in ways we never knew possible, but we also learnt to appreciate the smaller things in life. We slowed down, we took stock, we spring cleaned like never before, we noticed the change in seasons, we learnt to play, we learnt to educate our children, we learnt to care more about people and the world and less about things that used to keep us wake at night that no longer seemed important. We changed.

An organisation will thrive and rebuild faster than its competitor if the above happens firstly and secondly the acknowledgement that the ‘Manager / Leader’ of tomorrow is not the Manager / Leader’ of today. The needs have now changed, we need managers who can lead remote teams, who connect the disconnected (physically), that have the emotional intelligence to recognise that performance, confidence and unity has suffered and it is their role to help their people get back to a place they themselves are content with again.

Managers need to understand stress, stress in others and stress in themselves, how to recognise stress remotely, what stress indicators are, and the lasting imprint it can have. The empathy they need to help guide their people through the daily challenges and to recognise that people have seen suffering; people have supported others in the most admirable way and sadly there has been loss. We all felt it, how do you rebuild with a stronger culture than you had before. What lessons can we take from such significant change that allows us to realign who we are as a business and who we want to be? And how to build the leader of the future?