Employee Engagement Strategies During Change Management

The failure rate on change initiatives in the workplace is commonly reported at 70%, however I’ve recently seen a study showing a lower figure of 44%. Either way, it’s still a risky undertaking.

Unfortunately, we can’t just choose to put our heads in the sand. The corporate world is always going to require change management: mergers and acquisitions, new leadership, new sales channels and new processes are big adjustments that naturally alter the dynamic of your culture, and smart stakeholders will get ahead of it with a plan to align daily behaviours with the financial objectives.

There are a handful of factors that can cause an initiative to fail, but there are two that consistently occur across all the research: communication and leadership management. This is actually good news though – knowing your obstacles can help you create a strategy that increases your likelihood of success.

Employee engagement best practices

Start with the end in mind: what is the purpose of the change initiative?

• Business objectives
• Typically measured financially in terms of increases in turnover, profit, shareholder return or decreases in cost
• Performance objectives
• Measured in terms of the human impact of the business such as sales, new customers, repeat customers, customer satisfaction scores, process adoption, quality, accuracy, safety, efficiency, development, training or productivity

Improving engagement with communication

With clearly defined objectives, you can create a communication strategy. Make no mistake – this is as important as any external marketing campaign you would launch to drive sales.

• Use a web-based “hub” to communicate consistently across all levels of the organisation:
• Accessible on any device, any time
• Top-down, bottom-up and two-way conversations to drive transparency
• Solicit feedback and encourage idea generation to solve problems throughout the initiative
• Answer the questions “why is this happening” and “what’s in this for me?”
• Define the behaviours and actions that individuals perform to achieve success
• Share progress towards milestone and goal achievement

Improving engagement with rewards and recognition

Once you’ve build a communication foundation, empower employees to act. Because change can be stressful, a reward and recognition program can lift employee morale and motivation:

• Demonstrate what “good” looks like
• Acknowledge role-models
• Define how it affects the team, company or customers
• Encourage repetition of the positive actions
• Thank those who are early adopters, going above and beyond, showing leadership, filling gaps or taking on additional responsibilities
• Connect emotionally on an individual level

Levels of engagement

Finally, your initiative will still fail if leadership is not committed to the human side of change – that is, they’re focused on the business objectives and not the performance objectives. Leaders cannot assume that someone else is taking ownership of the communications, recognition and rewards, i.e., the human resources team. To be successful, they need to:

• Be prepared
• Be accessible
• Lead by example
• Be transparent with consistent messaging
• Get their “hands dirty”
• Have a realistic view of staff’s capacity

These aspects of leadership are firmly tied back into the communication strategy – a classic ‘which-comes-first’ scenario. Regardless, both are needed to avoid an epic fail.