Last week I had the opportunity to present at an HR Conference for the American Association for State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) in Portland, Oregon. So I prepared my talk and loaded up the car for a little road-trip down to Portland.
My presentation was on Change Management (CM), and in particular how HR and Training leaders can help organizations embrace CM not just as a tool but also as an organizational competency. In short, I think that there is a great opportunity for HR professionals to not simply manage change from a project management standpoint, but to help their organizations become more flexible, more adaptable, and better and rolling with change as we either make it or deal with it when it is foisted upon us.
So the presentation went fine and it seemed that the participants were interested in the subject. So I came home (weary but elated) from the conference, and have been musing on some of the feedback I received.
First of all, I got some feedback which was essentially "This sounds all fine and good - but we don't have the time to go through all this process. We need people simply to do what we tell them to do." This feedback is not surprising, because I know I've been there myself. However it did get me thinking.
The reality is that we don't always have the time and freedom to engage our employees. Sometimes we will engage them, and sometimes we will deliver instructions. Yes, I believe that if we don't take the time to engage our employees with change up front, we are likely to waste more time in dealing with the resulting resistance. However constraints are real, and whenever I talk about engagement with a group of leaders, the concern about time always comes up.
"We don't have the TIME to engage people!"
I think this is a real and valid point. We often don't have the time! So what can we do when time is short?
First, we can accept the reality that if we hurry people through a change, we are likely to encounter resistance. Nothing in life is free, and there are trade-offs in all aspects of business. One trade off of low-engagement change strategy is that resistance will slow you down.
Secondly, we can realize that it is possible to pick and choose. By selecting which initiatives really need employee commitment, we can prioritize our time. For example, a manager may decide that implementing a new billing system absolutely requires employee commitment, while the new safety program could be implemented quickly with relatively low resistance. When we prioritize our time, we can use engagement where it matters most.
Lastly, by building our competency for change we can gradually increase the ability of our workforce to "roll with the punches" when change happens. We'll talk more about change management as a competency in future posts.
So, time is probably one of the largest barriers to effective change management. But using it strategically can help us manage this critical resource. Do you have any ideas about how to balance the issue of "not enough time" in your organization? If so, let's talk about your experience.
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