Change may be constant, but not everyone adjusts to it with ease. In organizations, change is often met with resistance. This opposition can be subtle, such as procrastination and lowered productivity. But the signs of resistance can also be glaring, including frequent heated discussions.
For leaders, achieving smooth organizational transitions might feel like trying to move an iceberg. It’s slow and impossibly challenging. Resistance doesn’t make things easier, and it usually happens because teams aren’t aligned with what’s happening. They aren’t clear on the goals, the purpose, or how their roles fit into the bigger picture.
To keep employees aligned, you need a strategy. Managing transitions without one will almost ensure the figurative iceberg’s win. Here are four approaches to keep teams in sync during organizational change.
1. Communicate Priorities From the Top Down
Change can feel chaotic to employees who are caught off guard. They haven’t had time to prepare. Consequently, they don’t know their priorities and how to act. A lack of communication about why a transition, such as a merger, is underway can be even more frustrating. Employees may not understand their responsibilities, get caught up in gossip, and constantly probe leadership for answers.
This scenario isn’t the way you want change to go. Instead, teams must understand their priorities and why they’re ranked in a specific order. You want employees to be able to take the ball and run with it. There’s a communication failure when they repeatedly ask for clarification or what projects they need to work on.
When leaders implement strategy alignment, they communicate the team’s priorities. In addition, they state why it’s more important to work on project A before project B. There’s no confusion about workflows, individual responsibilities, and authority levels. People have the map and the purpose behind the desired destination. When top leadership removes the uncertainty factor, organizational change becomes less threatening and confusing.
2. Establish Feedback Loops
Communicating a few times isn’t enough when it comes to change initiatives. One of the reasons organizational transitions fail is because of ineffective communication. Bringing everyone together for a meeting may get the word out. It might allow team members to raise initial questions and get some answers. A couple of follow-up emails could address additional concerns.
If there’s not a constant feedback loop between leadership and employees, though, old patterns can take over. Say your company is part of the insurance industry, and your claims department is overloaded with work. Employees can’t realistically manage all the tasks they’re given, causing customer service and satisfaction levels to drop. You communicate the organization’s strategy to address the issue, including changes to claim handling processes.
While you have the team attend a training session on newly designed workflows, you don’t establish feedback mechanisms. Employees don’t have a way to express whether they’re struggling to adapt. Claim handlers revert to their pre-training habits since they are comfortable using them and more in control of their results. Feedback loops like regular check-ins and anonymous surveys can help leadership assess whether new mechanisms are realistic.
3. Clarify Everyone’s Role
Getting a new boss is an example of an organizational change that can be unsettling. A fresh face at the helm usually means structural shifts, including changes in who does what. Roles within the company can be eliminated, combined, and transformed.
Resistance from inherited teams usually happens because people worry about their futures. They might have to job hunt for the first time in 20 years. Someone may be given responsibilities they won’t like or don’t think they’re equipped to handle. And some employees may be uncertain of how they fit in with a new leader’s vision.
If you change a team’s structure and roles, you want to ensure every person understands those transitions. Role ambiguity is linked to job stress, burnout, and turnover. Teams stand little chance of getting in sync if they don’t know how to finish what’s on their plates. Worse, they may not even be aware of their new responsibilities. Rework and inaction both increase.
Say you decide to change a front-line supervisor’s role. They’re no longer an escalation point and the first contact on the chain of command. The position now focuses on quality control and back-end processes. Team members will be confused if you don’t clearly define the new role and its responsibilities. They’ll still go to that person as if they were their supervisor, and the individual will experience more conflict.
4. Leverage Technology
A sign of misalignment is the need for meetings about meetings. Or you task the team with a deliverable, and a meeting with the relevant decision-makers is held afterward. Your employees must then scrap what they did and try to accommodate conflicting instructions.
Yet another sign is email chains with a few people making decisions that impact others’ work. The problem is the others don’t know about an issue until it’s too late. Frustration and conflict surface because they have to rush or modify their contributions. Using centralized tech tools is a way to prevent this, as they can clearly delineate project responsibilities and task handoffs.
Any change initiative requires ongoing group communication to be successful. When everyone’s in the office together, you gain the advantage of real-time feedback. Even then, a lack of project management and communication tools can hinder progress. In remote and hybrid teams, these tools become instrumental in establishing cohesiveness. Otherwise, tasks and perceptions get misaligned.
Effective Change Management
One of the toughest aspects of leadership is change management. Transition attempts can fail when teams get out of alignment with company goals and initiatives. Misalignment is also a sign of insufficient communication, understanding, and resources. Uniting everyone around the organization’s cause is necessary for leaders to manage change well and overcome resistance. Strategies such as establishing clear priorities and leveraging tech tools can strengthen your efforts.