The Importance of a People Perspective in Implementing Organizational Change

It should be of little surprise when employees retort, "here we go again" when they are told about another impending change that has been developed without their involvement and will likely deliver results that are only short term. To avoid this happening, employees, including those on the frontline, should not be treated simply as mere conduits for top-down decisions, nor as mediums for ensuring compliance to the implementation of a transformation. Instead, their engagement and involvement should be sought, whenever feasible to do so, from the inception of a business transformation. Unfortunately, too many senior executive conversations and plans for change underestimate the people element and either miss it out altogether, or delegate it to HR or the OD team to sort out.

So why should you involve your employees in organizational change and ensure that their perspectives are included?

Empowering your employees with agency

Traditionally organizational change has been something that has been undertaken by leaders, managers and consultants, with employees positioned as the recipients of change and depicted as relatively agentless. However, many employees no longer want to be merely passive actors in business transformations but instead want to be proactive in mobilizing their own part in the process.

The most important way that organizations can help employees to do this is by empowering them to act with agency and choice over what they do. Employees who feel that they have autonomy and control are more likely to actively create their own engagement experiences with business transformations. This approach is in juxtaposition to the traditional assumption that organizations know best about how change should be imposed on people and then micro-managing what people do.

However, as the pandemic has taught us, change can be done quicker and more agile when employees are allowed to take more initiative. Giving people a voice in transformations helps organizations act more dynamically and quicker. In contrast, top-down strategies based on identifying business needs, followed by finding or developing interventions to address them, and then imposing those solutions on frontline staff, will always be slower and less inclusive than approaches that allow employees and other key stakeholders to make decisions based on their experience and knowledge.

Involving your employees in change also enables your organization/team to be more adaptable and agile, that is to swiftly turn decisions into actions, to implement changes effectively, to focus on customers and to optimize the value of employees’ knowledge and innovation. To achieve this necessitates asking: Can we enable more effective decision making about business transformations by pushing decisions to the edges of the organization and creating an environment that empowers people and creates agency?

Implementing the change

The process of a planned transformation will be much smoother if people are engaged early with it and asked for input on issues that will affect their work. This can also help to stimulate innovation. Frontline employees, especially, tend to be rich repositories of knowledge about where potential issues may occur, what technical and logistical challenges need to be addressed, how customers might react to changes and what could be done differently and more innovatively to improve overall efficiency and wellbeing. In addition, the early engagement of frontline workers can help to ensure successful implementation, whereas their disengagement can make implementation difficult.

The benefits of engaging with change

Employees who are engaged positively with a transformation are likely to experience higher levels of wellbeing and display positive emotions at work, such as enthusiasm, cheerfulness, optimism and contentment, rather than negative emotions, such as feeling miserable, worried, anxious, gloomy, tense or uneasy. People with higher levels of wellbeing are also likely to take a more positive approach to their work and their relationships with colleagues and are less likely to see transformations as threatening. Having higher levels of engagement can mean that individuals are more likely to have positive wellbeing, be more enthusiastic about it, accept the changes it brings more readily and see it as an opportunity.

Engaging stakeholders

There a several ways to engage stakeholders, including top-down or via a burning platform scenario. However, both of these have limitations. An alternative approach is to encourage the co-creation of change, whenever feasible, which means constructing change with rather than for stakeholders. Co-creation is more likely to engage stakeholders in shaping a transformation and help to provide opportunities for innovation.

Engaging employees within and throughout the transformation process is a key element of people-centric change and can create conditions for more successful change outcomes. For example, a transformation is twice as likely to achieve its goal, and to sustain its benefits, when engagement is effective and starts early with key stakeholders. Identifying the factors which influence engagement in your organization is vital so that you can effectively engage stakeholders with a transformation.

Involving the whole organization

Although leaders and managers have the primary responsibility for creating engagement, employees also have their part to play as engagement flows up, down and across an organization. Instead of aligning people to the organization by shaping them to organizational requirements, while treating them as expendable resources, there should be a shift to inclusivity and equality with change so that people have the autonomy to engage in business transformations through co-creation in an inclusive and equal way. This will help to ensure that engagement is distributed and collaborative across the organization and has a positive impact on wellbeing and innovation.