How to Make Workplace Change Stick: Real-World Examples

Jane Young:

Going down the change route for a minute then, you’ve obviously done a lot of work around workplace transformation and change strategy and these days everything is always in flux. Change is constant.

And there’s change at all sorts of levels, isn’t there? There’s the level of an individual mourning the loss of their corner office. Then there’s convincing managers who used to walk around the office to master all of this asynchronous communication with a hybrid team. And then there’s big change around things like portfolio right sizing, space design, hybrid policies, culture, well-being and meeting practices, tech adoption and guidelines around when being physically together matters the most. There’s the generational expectations. It’s just endless.

And for decades, loads of studies have found that about 70% of change efforts fail and I remember some Gartner data a few years ago now but it showed that 80% of organizations still were managing change top down – senior leaders make decisions, create plans and detailed implementation road maps, and then blast out communications to get buy in, but the data showed that this approach was not only failing to drive the understanding and commitment they were hoping for, but was actually reducing understanding and creating anger, anxiety and resistance.

The alternative is a more open-source kind of approach where leaders would help employees co-create those decisions and open communication and dialogue. It’s easy to say those things but not so easy to do them.

So I’d love to hear a bit about your experience of workplace change, transformation and successful change or unsuccessful change, what that looks like on the ground because everyone really wants to know what successful organizations are doing differently.

Mika Cross: I think your point is absolutely spot-on in terms of why many change management initiatives and modernization initiatives don’t end up landing the way that executive leaders hope for. I think that’s because change isn’t a waterfall. It doesn’t need to only come from the top down. It needs to be at all layers of the organization. It’s a series of solvable frictions really if you think about it.

So some of the best ways I’ve seen change adopted in large-scale, highly matrixed, bureaucratic organizations like the US government or military is when leaders don’t just sell the change themselves, but allow people to sell it back to them.

That might look like smaller test beds where you’re also equipping managers and team leaders to ask the right questions and institute rituals.  For example, inviting teams to give their top five reasons why this change initiative could fail, or designing countermeasures to offset the reasons why people feel like it may fail. Another is hearing how teams understand the initiative, the priority and the impact of what that change will result in.

Often there’s a misfire between the intent of a change strategy and people really understanding the impact and why it matters to their mission, sense of purpose, meaning of their job and importance of their time, energy and outputs.

A friction audit is a really important way to get at the crux of it. If you’re able map new workflows, figure out one friction point across the team and try to solve for that on a small scale, you’re creating these test beds of innovation at all levels where people are creatively helping to solve the problems, but also teeing up problem points where there could be places that need to be unstuck.

When you’re thinking about a regulatory implementation of change, people may feel fearful of making mistakes even when they don’t understand the change.

So often, that might look like an all hands, a town hall, or  strategy session where your CEO makes a statement to the workforce and asks, “do we have any questions?” and everyone’s shaking their head no. The default is “Oh, everyone understands, everyone’s on the same page.” That might not be the case. People might need some time to digest and come back later with their questions and have an environment where they’re able to flag those reasons why change might fail or identify friction points. 

The organizations I’ve seen do that best have an ecosystem of feedback channels across the organization—bottom up, top down and from the left to the right flank, as we would say in the army. And it is sometimes easier said than done, but really it can start by just teaching people how to ask better questions, and creating these cultures of curiosity. 

Instead of “does anyone have any questions?” ask, “What happens if we fail? What does it look like if we succeed? How can we learn from the mistakes that we’re making?”

Because organizations that do that really well in psychologically safe environments are the ones that outperform their competitors hands down time after time, and the research studies show that.