Ten Actions You Can Take To Mobilize Your Workforce around Your Business Strategy - Part 6

6. Facilitating Change-Readiness

New research on change indicates a surprising reality about change. The greatest determinant of change is not an employee’s desire or motivation to change. It is their READINESS to change. The second Root of Engagement therefore is Change-Readiness.

Change is a constant. Furthermore, change that can be unsettling is more the norm than the exception. If employees are not ready to change, then when change does occur, they become disgruntled and disengaged. Alternatively, employees who are ready to change are more likely to be able to sustain higher levels of engagement. In other words:

Change-readiness goes deeper than change management. Change management focuses on organizational processes and gaining buy-in; whereas change-readiness focuses on the readiness to change behaviors and beliefs in order to support new initiatives. The research on change supports the challenges most organizations face when trying to implement change. For example, research on change indicates that:

• 90% of business process redesign initiatives fall short of producing intended results
  
• 80% of quality improvement initiatives don’t yield intended gains
  
• 55-90% of technology initiatives fail to achieve their full objectives
  

We uncovered little known research into change-readiness. We translated this research into a business-friendly tool—the Change-Ready™ model. This breakthrough model clearly elucidates several remarkable points about change-readiness:

1. Organizations often focus on “one size fits all” solutions when seeking to implement change. They fail to realize that different employee groups may be at different levels of readiness to adopt new approaches and they consequently fail to implement meaningful solutions that really work.
   
   
2. Employees and managers progress through five distinct measurable levels of readiness to change.
   
   
3. Certain level-specific and unique strategies can help teams progress through the levels of readiness more quickly. However, those same strategies, if used at the wrong time and not synchronized to the right level of readiness, will have no effect or even create more resistance.
   

The ability to help the workforce change rapidly to respond to internal and external business problems and opportunities equates with strategic agility. The greater an organization’s strategic agility, the more likely they will be:

• The first to market with new products and services
  
• The first to divest products/businesses that don’t grow the company
  
• Quicker to build competitive barriers
  
• Faster to satisfy client needs and therefore create market dominance
  

Ten Actions You Can Take to Build Employee Engagement – Actions #5-7 

#5 –Manage Change with Engagement Sensitivity: When seeking to implement new changes in your organization, recognize that the way the change is handled will go a long way towards building or eroding employee engagement. Don’t ask, “How should we manage this change?” Instead, ask, “How can we get our employees engaged in this change?” 

#6 – Focus on Behavior: When you want employees engaged in a business initiative, give careful consideration to the behavioral outcomes you desire. If you can’t define the behaviors to support the new direction that you want to achieve, then you run the risk that you will fail, as most organizations do, at translating vision to action. 

#7 – Center Your Attention on Readiness: Don’t ask, “How can we help our people change?” Instead ask, “How can we help our people to be more ready to make this change?”