Even the best transformation strategies can fail without employee buy-in. Engaging your workforce is the key to turning plans into action and achieving lasting success.
Why it matters:
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During technology and culture transformations, mergers and acquisitions or other times of change, leaders must juggle their usual responsibilities. At the same time, they also oversee new business strategies. It’s easy to become so consumed with a project that other success factors fall by the wayside.
Leaders often grapple with strategies that look great in PowerPoints and spreadsheets but fail during implementation by neglecting best practices for company-wide change adoption. By collaborating to build a more engaged workforce, you can increase the likelihood that your changes succeed and unlock more bottom-line benefits. According to a 2022 Gallup report, business units in the top quartile of workforce engagement saw 21% higher profitability than those in the bottom fourth.
With such clear benefits related to employee engagement, why do many organizations fail to integrate this collaborative approach into their change management plans? Here are five common missteps leaders make, along with best practices to realize the ROI and objectives of their transformations.
Leaders frequently spend too much time finalizing change plans but expect employees to quickly adapt. Implementing a strategy before teams understand can set your project up for failure. Moreover, people need time to process change. By not fully communicating an initiative’s details, leaders highlight the disconnect between creating a strategy and activating it.
Best Practices: Your people need to understand the reasons for change and believe in the strategy. The level of detail you give them should correspond to their role. When you help employees understand and embrace the why, what and how of a change, you are more likely to meet your targets.
Psychologists and neuroscientists confirm that people’s hesitancy to change comes from uncertainty. SCARF®, a neuroscience-based status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness model, establishes that a main driver for collaboration and influencing others is needing certainty or believing in what the future has in store for us. Uncertainty creates a strong alert response in our brain, which is why we speculate — we’d rather create a story than face the unknown. If your leaders aren’t upfront and honest about what’s coming, rumors can take off.
Communicating well doesn’t mean moving slowly. Just because you don’t have all the information yet, don’t let it stop you from communicating your plan’s vision and milestones. You want to tell a clear and compelling story about the importance of the changes ahead.
Employees who resist change are still essential to bringing a strategy to life. When you understand why some people are nervous and address those concerns, it boosts employee engagement.
If employees are not properly incentivized, they may feel torn between sticking to familiar routines and adopting new approaches that lack clear rationale or motivating factors. This can lead to confusion, frustration and even unintended turnover.
Best Practices: Shifting mindsets begins with reassuring your employees about the value of the change. Offering temporary or long-term incentives can further motivate and encourage them to embrace new approaches. When employees understand how they fit into the bigger picture, they take more responsibility and gain more meaning from their work, driving the success of your strategy.
A frugal organization might question the importance of employee engagement as it relates to the bottom line. However, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report, highly engaged employees are 18% more productive. Highlighting the benefits of change and building strong connections with employees motivates them to embrace change and even go the extra mile.
As change management leaders say, a mediocre strategy communicated well is more effective than the perfect strategy communicated poorly. Therefore, it’s important to shift the employee mindset from, “This is happening to me, and it’s out of my control” to, “I need to change because I understand the importance of making it happen.”
Without clear values and aligned responsibilities rooted in your company’s strategy, employees can become confused by conflicting messages and spread thin by competing priorities. Even worse, their anxiety spikes as they’re left in limbo, aware that change is coming but unsure how it will affect them.
Best Practices: By explaining what will stay the same and what will shift, you can reduce employee anxiety. When they understand their role amid change, employees feel more in control and empowered to adapt.
Leaders must be transparent, live company values and model expected behaviors. Clear, consistent messaging reduces confusion and reassures staff. Celebrating positive behavior and values motivates employees to uphold higher standards.
The human resources team’s role in transformations is often limited to handling training and administrative functions. This approach overlooks HR’s strategic expertise in managing training programs and understanding employee needs, concerns and the personal impact of change (workload, priorities, expectations, etc.). Neglecting these areas can impact engagement, turnover, the status of the employee lifecycle and more.
Your strategic change may make all the financial sense in the world, but if you don’t give HR a seat at the table, operational risks may go unaccounted for and jeopardize the intended benefits of your initiative’s rollout.
Best Practices: User adoption is critical when introducing new technology or processes. Your HR leaders can help your workforce access the tools they need for change, communicate effectively and measure talent KPIs to track risks and progress throughout the transformation. By elevating HR to a strategic role, you can unlock a holistic view of talent, incentives, performance and behaviors. HR can also provide space for employees to ask questions and voice opinions, unlocking opportunities and visibility to risk other departments might miss.
Including HR in your transformation process from the start is about taking a more integrated approach to implementing change and embedding that critical link between strategy and execution.
Perhaps the biggest leadership misconception is that employees don’t care or can’t understand business complexities. By explaining concepts and figures, including financials, in a digestible way, you can help all employees accept the reasons your company needs to change.
Leaders frequently assume they understand what employees think, know and feel, but research shows there’s an inverse relationship between leadership level and the ability to empathize with employees. This can result in wrong assumptions about employees’ feelings toward change, engagement levels, views on leadership and understanding of strategy, values and their role.
Best Practices: Without direct employee communication and other feedback mechanisms, you have limited knowledge about your workforce. Anonymized surveys can help you gather insights, help employees feel heard, prevent issues and speed up change.
Employees generally appreciate when leaders listen and offer transparency, boosting their willingness to act on change. On top of increased productivity, organizations with a highly engaged workforce see 41% less absenteeism and 24% lower turnover, according to Gallup.
Employee engagement is vital to transforming a strategy from a mere idea to a sustainable initiative that achieves your transformations objectives. In short, it’s the cornerstone of successful change management because when you increase company-wide buy-in, you inspire your employees to fully commit to and support change.
Prioritizing employee activation boosts productivity, improves efficiency, reduces turnover and increases profitability. Without organizational alignment, strategic changes risk failing and waste your investment. Strong change management that promotes employee engagement ensures successful initiatives and a more secure future for your organization.
It’s not easy to change minds and processes, but a strong change management approach can make all the difference. Learn more about how our Strategy & Transformation experts can help you drive impactful change, boost employee buy-in and adopt change successfully.
Reach out to our experts to begin solving your organizational challenges and crafting a strategic roadmap to ensure a more successful, efficient future state for your business.
