Smooth workplace changes help build a healthy, engaged team

Change is the new constant in our personal lives as well as our work.

Toni Rowley says preparing well with a forward plan for change is often the key to success.

Paying attention to beginnings and endings is critical in helping successful transition through change. Change is the new constant and happens in our personal lives as well as our world of work.

At work changes can be self-created through a switch in roles or a move to another employer, and sometimes changes are externally driven and outside our control. Preparing well with a forward plan for change is often the key to success and emotional safety.

Employers have a strong opportunity to support staff through workplace changes. To successfully engage and motivate talented employees it is important to have sound systems and values-driven approaches that not only attract and harness individual talent but also support new employees.

Paying attention to induction activities is critically important as this early experience is where confidence rises in the decision made to accept a job. Successful induction helps foster a trust in the relationship you are building. Getting this right also leads to an engaged and flexible workforce, which will increase organisational capacity through high performance.

In career coaching conversations, I have heard individual stories where there have been missed opportunities to pay attention to the early stages of a job transition, such as disproportionate amounts of attention paid to the recruitment and selection activity (where a potential employee builds a favourable connection with the employer), then very little or no specific effort to focus on induction processes — where there is so much more opportunity for the employer and employee to strengthen the relationship they tentatively have been building.

These scenarios rarely end well and hold a risk where one or both parties have a strong emotional response to the experience, which can affect an individual’s self-belief and confidence.

Organisational re-sizing has become a commercial necessity driven by external factors including reform agendas or efficiency gains from business improvements. Managing the emotional components of change is crucial to successful outcomes, particularly as not doing so can have an adverse effect on the health and wellbeing of individuals.

Employees generally can understand a business decision that may have resulted in people being displaced, facing potential redeployment or ultimately being made redundant. How an employee is treated and supported through the change is deeply connected to how a person feels about the outcome, negative or positive.

Paying attention to how it happens, and doing this well, will set people up with a continued belief and confidence in their skills, capability and the value they have to offer employers. Supporting an employee through change with their confidence intact is critically important irrespective of whether they remain, join a new company or are exploring the market.

Anyone experiencing a change should pay attention to the beginning and the ending of the process and evaluate the difference it makes in how they feel about the outcome.

If you are a senior leader choosing this proactive step on behalf of your organisation you will be joining a HR and business community taking a similar humanistic approach to ensure success, which leads to a healthy and engaged workforce confident in the value they are adding, and with high participation levels.

Toni Rowley is a fellow of the Australian Human Resources Institute and the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development.