Change management: encouraging employees during seasons of change
One of the things we learn as we get older is that change is often necessary and can lead to great things. But whether you’re 16 or 36, change can be scary.
A business client of mine was in a season of change: employees were being asked to change roles, to participate on different “teams” (similar to departments), and also experiencing a physical move – the office space was being re-arranged to accommodate the company’s new approach. The employees were seriously stressed.
Why does change cause stress? Often, it’s fear of the unknown which creates lots of questions, like these: Will I be good in this new role? Will my pay change? What’s my career path from here?
Change Management is one of Millennial Guru’s areas of expertise, so the company hired us to help their employees understand that the motives behind the change were well-intentioned and, in the long run, would be good for everyone.
In a previous post, we talked about using theater tactics to improve sales. For this company, we employed some of those theater tactics to help employees understand two things:
That management had the company’s best interests in mind, which also meant they had the employees’ best interests in mind, and
While management was making the decisions on all of the upcoming changes, the employees were in control of how they reacted to the changes.
During the workshop, I assigned each employee a character, described their personalities (one was meek, one was a fireball, etc.), and designated their role in the mock company. In the scenario I developed, they were all employees of an international company who’d worked at home for years, one in Sweden, one in Spain, one in Germany, and one in America. Now, the manager was mandating that all employees work on-site in the U.S.
After silently reading the scenario, the descriptions of their characters, and the script, the employees read the script aloud, as they sat around a table. Afterwards, they stood up and physically acted out the entire skit.
They did a fantastic job of embracing their characters and respective roles. When they were finished, we debriefed. We talked about how it felt to play a particular character. I’d assigned non-managers to manager roles and vice versa, helping create empathy for the responsibilities and decisions that came with each role. Each of them said that playing roles different from the ones they had in real life, helped them consider things from a different viewpoint.
In addition to discussing the skit scenario, we discussed their real-life experience with change. We talked about why it was happening and what the positive outcomes could be. During our discussion, one employee commented, “I have a different perspective now on how hard it can be to tell people about change.”
She explained that, in her character role as a manager, she tried to make the change as easy as possible for the employees in the skit, but they still complained and were angry. That was an eye opener for her. Beforehand, she hadn’t thought much about how difficult change could be for managers, as well as everyone else.
This type of empathetic reaction wasn’t unusual. Across the board, the employees talked about having more perspective. They were able to consider their response to the change in a different way, because it helped them understand that the changes the company was enacting were to try to help the company, which would also provide better job security and career prospects for them.
Everyone agreed that they had a new outlook on how difficult it was for everyone to manage change – even the decision makers – and they felt more gratitude and appreciation that the company was focused on improvement, even though it meant working through change. Doing this workshop didn’t eliminate fear but did help with understanding and perspective, which are powerful forces for managing change.
Millennial Guru And Change Management
If your company is considering or currently experience a season of change, Millennial Guru can help. We don’t sugar-coat it: change isn’t easy. But we can help your employees, at all levels, gain valuable perspective on why the change is necessary and how it will benefit the company, and thus employees, over time.
Schedule a free, no-commitment meeting today to find out more about how we can help your company with change management and help your employees remain focused and productive throughout the process.