Fairness in the Change Management Process

I am a big fan of evidence based decision making. And fortunately - there is a group that dedicates itself to answering questions about business management problems by reviewing the literature and publishing an Evidence Summary of what the literature says works.

The website Science for Work recently published an Evidence Summary titled: Why you should consider fairness when designing your change management process see: https://scienceforwork.com/blog/fairness-change-management/

Fairness in the workplace has many different metrics - but it's associated with justice. According to the summary it is indeed beneficial to consider fairness in your decision making. "While the research we reviewed does not support causal conclusions, it does indicate that there is a noticeable relationship between different types of fairness and a variety of organizational outcomes."

Or to put that in plain English, "In addition to moral or ethical reasons for seeking fairness during an organizational change, you may also want to add effectiveness to your argument."

Another key finding is that, "procedural fairness is the strongest predictor of many outcomes, and particularly stands out in relation to work performance." Procedural fairness is whether the decision making process is fair or not.

If you want to help people feel more satisfaction with outcomes, you will want to make sure there is distributive fairness meaning the outcomes of the decision are seen as fair.

Finally - "when unpopular changes are made, a fair process may help — particularly when explained to those who are impacted."

Fairness is a matter of morality. Don't ignore this when making business decisions. It's why humanistic management is good management. 

Problems with Implementation Planning

A little bit ago I posted an article about how to avoid change management failures. (see: https://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2017/12/change-management-failures.html) Today I want to talk more about the implementation and planning process so that you don't have failures.

This comes from an interview I did for a reporter.

1. Given your past working on organizational planning, how do you describe the difference between it and implementation planning? Additionally, what is the relationship among strategy, implementation, and execution?

Organizational planning is the structure of the organization. What work needs to be done? How does it related to the other work that needs to be done? Who is responsible for getting it done? How are the parts of the organization going to work together to accomplish shared objectives?

Implementation planning has to do with specific project and processes. For instance organization may have an HR department – that is organizational planning. Implementation is when the HR department  rolls out a new set of benefits or a new health care plan.

In order to successfully roll out a new product or process you should have a strategy as to how you plan to implement it and then – the execution is actually implementing it. So the strategy is the plan.

2. Why is implementation crucial to project success? What are the main benefits?

If you don’t implement your plan – you don’t get anything done. So – implementation is crucial. If you have the best plan in the world it’s totally irrelevant if you don’t put the plan into action.

3. What are your tips for implementation planning best practices, or for writing an implementation plan?

Make sure your plan is reality based. You need to know what problem you really should be solving so that you don’t end up solving proxy problems (problems you think are your problem but really aren’t – an example of this is praying for rain when your real problem is you need water on your field.

You need to know what is really going to impact your problem so that you don’t pray for rain which doesn’t affect anything.

And finally you need to know what you really need to do to get the work done. What resources do you need? Do you have the resources you need? Can you get the resources you need or not? If not- your plan won’t work.

4. How can software tools aid in implementation planning? Do you have experience using any tools, and how did they benefit your initiative?

To be honest – I’ve used programs of my own design to get work done – but I’ve never used it for planning purposes.

5. If you have any examples from your own career where implementation planning greatly improved your success, please also share!

When I was in acquisition and mergers we had to coordinate 5 departments into one acquisition process. We had people who had to work with the lawyers and hold the sellers hands. We had people looking at the financials. We had people looking to make sure we had title. We had people looking at the equipment to make sure it was working and we had our buyers.  We creating a software tracking system to allow us to coordinate and track each deal to make sure everyone was on the same page.  The process involved us getting together to narrow down our focus into what really mattered so we weren’t wasting time on tasks that didn’t. We then had to figure out how best to make sure each segment was able to track their unique work needs while integrating into the whole. And it had to be user friendly so that staff would actually populate the system with information.  We did organizational planning – moved on to process planning and then used that information to create a custom software system we could use that would work. Then we had to implement it and get staff using it. This last bit was tricky because departments have a tendency to hoard their information as information is power and we wanted them to share.  We did this through collective rewards – Even though there were 5 departments – we are were all on the same team and rewarded based on how many deals we closed and how good the deals were.

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The best course you can take to help you with your planning processes is Reality Based Decision Making for Effective Strategy Development. It really will help you understand how to ask the right question so your strategy has the best chance of success.

https://humanistlearning.com/realitybaseddecisionmaking/

Examples of Change Management & Employee Engagement in Action

Last week I wrote about how to use science to successfully manage change processes. Today, I want to give you an example of how this works from my personal experience.

My first real job out of college was as a volunteer manager. I was brought in to fix a toxic volunteer staff relationship at a rather large non-profit. Toxic is an understatement.  We had 10 volunteers who thought it was their job to spy on the staff and report them being bad. For obvious reasons, staff didn’t want anything to do with the volunteers and were refusing to work with them.

The first thing I did was I talked to staff to find out what they hoped volunteers could do that would be helpful.  I didn’t assume I knew the answer, I found out, from the people who were open to the idea that volunteers could be helpful what they wanted volunteers to do and more importantly would allow volunteers to do. I didn’t force the issue. I just said – if you have a volunteer that actually wanted to help, what would you ask them to do?

I had 3 staff members who were willing to experiment with volunteers in a limited capacity. We agreed that volunteers could do 1 thing for them that would actually be helpful if it was done. We wrote a job description for this work so it was clear what a volunteer’s responsibilities were and who they reported to and why.  I created a new volunteer intake process that involved an application and screening process and training on the work we wanted them to do and we put all our existing volunteers through the process. 8 of the existing 10 volunteers agreed to go through this process and most confided that they had hated the old system because it was very negative and they had volunteered because they wanted to be helpful.

At this point, I only had a few staff members who were willing to work with the volunteers, but we assigned volunteers to them, gave them training and I worked closely with the staff to encourage them and help them mediate any problems with their volunteers. Basically, I had to train both the staff and the volunteers how to work productively together. This process took a couple of months.  Once those few staff members were working productively with their volunteers and their relationships had improved, other staff starting asking if they could have volunteers to help them too.
With every new request for volunteers, we wrote up a job description, created a training and recruited people into the system, worked closely with the staff and volunteers for the first few months to ensure that the system was running the way we wanted it to and that the relationships were positive and helpful.

We eventually grew the program to 500+ volunteers donating over 20,000 hours per year in every department in the agency.

This doesn’t mean it was smooth sailing. One of our pre-existing volunteers had a major blowout (which is a behavioral dynamic that occurs as part of the change process. Most times this is mild, but in some cases, it can be a – blowout).  This woman was the ringleader of the “old guard” spying project. She stayed on, but then continued to be horrid. I had to fire her 2 months into the transition as she was refusing to do the work we were asking volunteers to do. She launched an attack on me to try and get me fired. But by this time, I had allies in the organization that REALLY liked how things had changed, so the attempt to get me fired failed and after that – it was smooth sailing.

Our volunteers corp grew to include youth volunteers, law enforcement volunteers, adults with dual diagnosis and more. And we did all that while reducing our accident rate to the point our insurance company gave us a refund.

To recap the process, I used:

I started small and proved the concept by nurturing and promoting it over time. This is the key to effective change management.  Well, that and not being freaked out by the resistance. Plan for it. In advance. I didn’t fire the problem volunteer right away even though I knew exactly who she was and why she was a problem. I gave her an opportunity to change and gave her the benefit of the doubt. Only once the new system was in place and working well and she was an outlier, did I move against her. And honestly – firing was not my first choice; I had really hoped she would get with the new program.

Change is a well-studied phenomenon. Behavioral scientists know how to create change and what will happen when change is introduced to a group or an individual. If you want to be effective at it, use science, it works.

To learn more – check out this course: Why is Change so Hard

Employee Engagement and Change Management

Using science to help navigate the change process

I teach behavioral science applied to change management. Specifically, what we know about how learning and unlearning occurs and how that impacts change management processes.  I teach a course – Why is Change So Hard? that explores this.

What can organizations do to understand and manage employee engagement during times of change?

Organizations, if they want to be successful at creating change, need to learn how exactly people adapt to change and learn and unlearned new work habits. If you don’t have a good grounding in the science, a lot of what happens will catch you off guard. For instance, resistance to change is predicted to occur and is a natural part of the process that should not freak anyone out. Plan for it instead. Give employees time to adjust and adapt to the change. This is mostly about the mindset of the managers in charge of the change process and their expectations and how they deal with the resistance, which again, is normal and predicted.

What happens to Employee Engagement during different types of change?

Whenever change occurs, what we are really discussing is the removal of reward. So one way of doing things worked, now it doesn’t anymore. This can occur when you change your operating system for instance or your email system. People will resist and get upset and complain. What is happening is like a grief process. There is resistance to the new reality, and eventually people accept the new reality because they have no choice. This is normal. Not something to be upset about if you are the manager in charge. Treat it like grief. Commiserate and keep gently encouraging people to adapt. No – we can’t go back.

Another type of change occurs where the old way still works. This is much harder to change because it means people can refuse to change. And if they can refuse to change, they will refuse.  This happens when you try to change the culture of an organization, or you try to get a harassment situation to stop, or you are asking people to use a new form but the can still use the old form and still get things done. What happens is that people resist, not because they are being jerks, but because – that’s just part of the change process. There are ways to help employees adjust. You can enable and empower early adopters, support them and use them to create a new norm. But mostly, you just have to stay calm and patient during the rebellion to change and let it play out while exerting pressure to change.

What really helps is to adjust your training so that instead of having a 1 time training and expecting change, you roll out your training over time.  For instance, my sister works at a company that changed their email system. They were given an initial training, then over the period of 2 months, the training department sent out daily reminders about the new system and how to use it and nudges etc. This was a brilliant way to address the change, because it took into account the fact that people had to unlearn the old system and learn the new system and that is inevitably a process that takes a month or so. So plan accordingly.  You are building a habit and that takes a month or so of repetition.

What influences Employee Engagement during periods of change?

The attitude of the managers is key. If managers view the resistance in negative terms, meaning they take it personally or ascribe motivation to the resistance that has nothing to do with what is actually happening, they can make the process way more unpleasant that it really needs to be.   If managers view the resistance not as an attack on themselves, but as a normal part of the change process, they can be a lot more compassionate to the staff who are resisting and this makes the whole process easier and helps with how they go about motivating employees.  Managers who take resistance personally tend to try and bully employees into change. Managers who take a compassionate approach are supportive. Most employees prefer supportive approaches to bullying approaches.

What types of companies are doing this well? 

I think one of the best examples is Morgan Stanley – a couple of years ago they changed their corporate culture successfully - http://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2015/06/can-bankers-change.html  Details at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/05/can-bankers-behave/389558/

What could companies be doing differently? 

When planning for change, they should take into account the natural resistance and plan for it. They should also understand that this is a marathon not a sprint. You can’t just do a training and have things be different. You have to manage the change process over time to be successful.

How do you implement a change management program that supports Employee Engagement?

 If the change is largely cultural, I recommend implementing the change in stages. Do a proof of concept with a smaller group and then fold in the rest in stages, building upon success. What you are trying to do is ensure that the change you want is solidified in the least resistant group and then using that group to help drive the social adoption which does require social validation. Each group brought in is given enough time to adapt and solidify the new behaviors before bringing in the next group.

If the change is structural, then you organize your training to take place over a period of two months and build in a LOT of repetition so that the new habits become – habits.

To learn more – consider taking my course – why is change so hard or have me do a training for your team.

Changing the System – Radical vs. Incremental Change

Change management is an ongoing concern for all management professionals. The problem is – change is not just hard to create, it’s also a slow process. Ignoring that reality can have some very unfortunate consequences.

I want to start this with a link to an essay in the New Yorker on Tunisa after the Arab Spring. See:  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/tunisia-and-the-fall-after-the-arab-spring 

I am sharing this because while the intentions behind the Arab Spring were good, what happened next has not been. Even though this is an election year, the point of this essay isn’t to blame anyone for what has happened.  Rather, the lesson I want you to learn is this: when creating change, it’s not enough to remove the people at the top. A societal’ s structure is multilayered and deep. To change the system, you can’t just change people at the top, you have to change the system. And to do that – you generally have to work within the existing system to reform it.

If you just get rid of the existing system and the people who used to run it – you create a vacuum. That vacuum will be filled by groups and people who are organized or who have the money to become organized quickly. In the case of Tunisia and other Arab Spring countries – that vacuum was filled by religiously extreme groups.

Good Intentions Aren't Enough

Good intentions are never enough. If you want to be successful, you have to have a plan. This is especially true if you are fighting corruption or anything where a lot of money is at stake. If things were corrupt under the old system, they will be corrupt under the new system. Either you will just replace the people heading the corrupt system. Or, you will eliminate the system and the people with money, the people who are corrupt, will use their money and influence to create a new system that benefits them.

In order to successfully get rid of that corruption, you need to have a plan on how to replace and restructure all systems before you start.

This is also true of organizations. Organizations are multi-layered and deep. One change in one part of your systems can impact others. Nowadays you probably have a data management system. And it’s probably inadequate, but If you change some of it – you now have to work to integrate that change with all the other systems and processes that talked to the original data set.  There is a reason why people are still using windows xp computers despite Microsoft no longer supporting it. Changing to another system can cause so many cascading issues, most of us didn’t want to deal with it at all until we were forced to by say – our computers dying.

Getting Rid of Old Systems

But I digress. Let’s get back to the question of change.  If you just get rid of the old system – you can cause chaos. If you don’t have a plan for how things will get done – and a new system ready to go – people will create a new ad hoc system to fill in the vacuum created by the disappearance of the old system.  And this new ad hoc way of doing things will be just as ineffective and intransient as the old one.

I understand the desire for change. And I understand the immediacy of change. But if you have existing systems and aren’t building things from scratch – change will be slow and it’s best to accept that reality and work with it – rather than fighting it. Don’t fall prey to the new quick and easy fix. It’s a fantasy that will most likely result in bad things happening.

In politics, examples of radical change creating peace, stability and good jobs – is non-existent. Why? Because of the instability that getting rid of all societal supports creates. Without that support society devolves into chaos, and the vacuum is almost always filled by either corrupt new systems or ad hoc systems that don’t always work well.

Take it One Issue at a Time

In business, the same is true. My advice, if you want to create real change, take one thing at a time and change it. Don’t get bogged down in the grand overarching issues. Focus on one thing. Solve it. Work on the next, solve that. Just make sure that as you change things, you understand what other things are impacted by that change! And plan for how you want staff to deal with the process vacuum that is created by that change.

This is why - as much as we find policy and process wonks annoying, they make the best change agents because ... they understand how the existing system works and doesn't work and how to tweak things so that they can work better without creating a lot of disruption. Embrace your wonks. Become a wonk. Wonks can change the world.

If you want to know more about how to create a strategy for change that will really work - check out my course - Why is Change so Hard? https://humanistlearning.com/change1/

Problems Managing Change Management

We all resist change, and for good reason. We are habit based animals. Anytime you want to change a process, you have to eliminate the old habit and create a new one. And that’s REALLY hard to do because eliminating old habits, even habits you want to stop, causes an extinction burst.

We do this as individuals – for instance, anyone trying to quit smoking or stop eating ice cream while watching TV has withdrawals and fights it even if they want to change.  Magnify that resistance by however many people you have in a group and you can see what change managers are up against.

The key to being successful is to understand how changes in behaviors occur.

What you need to know is how the old behaviors are unlearned so that new behaviors can take their place. To cause unlearning the old behavior has to no longer work or be rewarded. After this happens people will resist and try to get the old way back. This is called an extinction burst. If they continue to not get the old way to work, they will eventually give up and start learning the new process.

Most organizations attempt change but fail to spend any time or energy on the unlearning of old behaviors and then are surprised when they meet resistance. The resistance is predicted to happen. It’s instinctual. It’s not people being difficult. It’s people being normal humans.

A good change process will take into account the need to cycle through an extinction burst as the old behavior is unlearned. Both the learning of the new behavior and the unlearning of the old behavior have to have equal attention.

One way that organizations can manage change is to understand that the level of resistance is a function of time and of frequency of reinforcement.  Some people will resist less and others more. It is possible to take advantage of these variable levels of resistance to roll out changes to groups least likely to resist. For instance the newer employees are less likely to resist as the habits are less ingrained. By taking a staggered approach with a group most likely to change we can prove the concept as working before rolling it out to other departments.

Another way for organizations to manage change is to understand that habit formation takes repetition over about 45 days. This means that employees need to be reminded daily and encouraged daily and checked up on daily for about 45 days before the new process becomes a habit. This is especially important IF the old way of doing things still works, because if it does, employees will train on the new way and quickly revert to the old way if they aren’t watched and monitored.

Again, this resistance is normal. There is nothing wrong with the staff. Habits are really hard to break. It’s like telling an elephant who is used to going on a certain path to take a different path and then being surprised when it goes the way it has always gone. You have to retrain elephants and staff and that requires patience and consistency over time until the new behavior pattern is established and habitualized.

To learn more about how to manage the behavioral extinction process consider taking Why is Change so Hard at Humanist Learning Systems: https://humanistlearning.com/change1/ 

Can Bankers Change?

What does the continued problem with how our biggest banks are run teach us about change management?

The Atlantic published an excellent article about the banking industry – see: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/05/can-bankers-behave/389558/

The question asked is – can bankers behave?  The answer is obviously yes, but the structure of certain banks makes that change very very hard.

The article is ultimately a story about ethical habit formation and how change occurs. What I want to discuss here is the part of the article that focuses on the CEO of Morgan Stanley, James Gorman.

While we can debate the merits of the changes made at Morgan Stanley, what isn’t debatable is that Gorman was successful at making the changes he wanted to make.

Why was he successful when so many people struggle to create change within their organizations?  His attitude was if you don’t like the changes – leave. If you want to work at a hedge fund – do it – our core business is that we are a bank. And people did leave. And that was ok.

The mistake that managers wanting to create change make is in thinking – they have to make people change. The reality is that not everyone will change. Not everyone wants to. It’s ok if they don’t; they just need to find employment elsewhere if the fit is no longer good for them.

Change is hard. People resist it. That is normal. It’s a process that takes place over time and you will have early adopters and once the change is proven to work, mass adoption. And, there will be some holdouts that refuse to change. Sometimes you can drag them along kicking and screaming and they will become your biggest advocates. And sometimes, you just need to let them find employment that is better suited to them.

Accepting that you can’t be everything to everyone takes courage.  It takes courage to stand by your core mission as an organization. This is especially important if your corporate culture has allowed unethical behavior to propagate. Changing the culture to promote ethical behavior means, some people will have to go. Never allow people who want to be unethical to steer you off course and keep you from creating the positive social change you know is right.

FYI -  discuss the change management process in detail and how to use behavioral psychology to help this process along, paying specific attention to resistance to change, which in the behavioral model is considered an extinction burst and it’s predicted. Understand why and how that resistance will help you manage it when it occurs. (See:  https://humanistlearning.com/change1/)

Helping people manage change

New years is right around the corner. This means people all over the world are making resolutions to change. Most of them are going to fail. I don’t say this to be pessimistic. It is just that realistically understanding why people fail to change is the key to helping make sure that we, ourselves, do.

The first thing we need to realize is that change takes time. We can’t just decide to change and then change. We have to work on unlearning our old counterproductive habits and replacing them with new, improved and more productive habits.

Whether it is learning to eat better, or not being so judgmental about other people. Old habits are hard to break and to break them we need gentle reminders to do and be better. And we need those reminders to be consistent over time until the new habits are habitualized. 

The more we practice the new habits, the easier they become. If you a manager of other people and you are trying to help change the business practices of your organization, the most important thing you can do for your staff is to give them the time they need to adopt the new ways of doing things and to provide compassionate gentle nudges to encourage them to continue adapting to the changes.

Always remember, everyone reacts to change differently. Some people embrace change quickly. Some, like my husband, are more wary of change and they need to see others embrace it and succeed with it before they will even consider making the changes themselves. So stagger your change across the organization. Look for early adopters and get them going first. Then look for most everyone else to adapt those changes and finally, realize that there will always be feet draggers. They aren’t dragging their feet to be difficult, they just need more time to adjust and respond to change and they are often pretty stubborn so pushing them isn’t going to get them on board, it will only create resentment. They key to getting the feet draggers is to help them see how much happier and effective everyone else is now that they have embraced the needed changes and that they should too.

Remember, everyone responds to change differently. Your job as their manager is to help them adapt to change in a way that respects them for the individual they are and without treating them like a programmable robot.

Learn more about the science of change with this free e-course: https://humanistlearning.com/the-science-of-change/