Why Agency Helps Employees Cope With Change
Support employees dealing with destabilizing change by giving them more control and autonomy.
Marie Montocchio/Ikon Images
Change is frequently destabilizing to employees and can result in low morale and reduced productivity. Leaders must give their employees the time and support they need to process their responses to a disruption to how they are accustomed to working. Focusing on ways to help employees gain a sense of control can help them better manage their emotions and more readily accept, and contribute to, new initiatives.
Workplace developments like hybrid working and artificial intelligence have brought a cascade of sometimes destabilizing changes that many people have struggled to keep up with. Such changes can leave employees feeling as if the rug has been pulled out from under them. How can leaders stop change from undermining workers’ morale and productivity, and help their people regain a sense of control?
A good place for leaders to start is to question whether they are pursuing the right objective. A leader who was involved in planning a particular change, for example, will have had time to come to terms with it well ahead of most employees. Once the change has been widely announced, their objective might be for team members to accept it as easily as they did (overlooking their own head start) and quickly return to their usual levels of productivity.
However, this perspective can undermine effective communication. If a leader mistakenly believes that everyone is on the same page they are, they might feel that a few simple notifications are all that’s needed to keep things ticking along. The risk here is that basic updates don’t acknowledge people’s underlying concerns — the kinds of reactions that prolong change and delay the return to productivity.
To better manage change, leaders should shift their objective to helping people reclaim a sense of control so that they find it easier to adapt. Granting people a measure of personal freedom makes it more likely that they will feel invested in the process of change and be able to accept it more readily.
Examples of agency include allowing someone to choose which tasks they’ll prioritize or to select the tools and methods to complete a task. They can also be asked to participate in the decision-making process or help improve workflow, or be given more leeway in creating new sales opportunities or a greater say in recruitment. However, which options a leader should offer employees comes down to what’s important to people — as discerned by the leader through effective communication. That begins with attending more closely to individuals’ emotional reactions.
Recognizing Emotions and Reactions
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our clients found that asking their people to work from home created sudden, profound change.
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Stuart Roehrl