By: Xieli Lee, Singapore. Humanresourcesonline.net
Singapore – Instead of focusing their effort on individuals who would embrace and help lead the change, HR professionals are wasting too much of their time on employees who are resistant to organisational change.
Needless to say, every HR professional knows having clear communication and high employee engagement levels are key to successful change management. Yet it is implementing and targeting the change strategy to the right employees that’s giving HR the biggest headache. As it turns out, 80% of HR managers are still spending most of their time on breaking down employees’ resistance to organisational change, says Andrew Calvert, AchieveGlobal’s organisational strategic change manager.
Instead of wasting time on “dragging naysayers who want you to fail along with the change”, Calvert says it’s much more effective to focus on people who support change. “If you can get an innovator or an informal leader in the workplace to help you sell the change, then coaching them is way more useful than arguing with one person how they are wrong.”
Introducing a change initiative usually divides the employee population into five key groups: Innovators, Early adopters, Pragmatists, Sceptics and Traditionalists. “At any given time, somebody is going to be positive and upbeat, or cautiously optimistic or negative or they hold back,” says Calvert. “Understanding where somebody is on that continuum means you can spend time with them or not focus your time on them.”
To seek out these innovators and early adopters, Calvert says HR must learn to identify informal leaders who may or may not be managers. They could simply be individual contributors in the company who connect well with everyone in the company and whom people listen to. “If they are on your side, you can use them to bring lots and lots of people into a positive view of change. Once they do that, most of the resistance is gone.”
