How to ease changes in the workplace

Question:

How can I get my staff to be more accepting to a change in procedures?

Answer:

For a change to be accepted, there needs to be some conversation with the person or persons who need to make the change.

It’s when employees don’t know change is coming, and they’ve never been involved or had any ownership in the change—that’s when it is not going to be very successful. You’re going to have to push them, and there’s going to be resistance.

A better approach that I have found successful, is to say to employees, “I need your help in solving a problem that I’m seeing.” So then, you haven’t talked about a change in procedure, you’ve talked about a problem—a bottleneck, food being cold, food not arriving on the floor in time, whatever the case may be. We have a problem, and we solve that problem together.

I like the Plan-Do-Check-Act model. It’s a process-improvement tool. You make a plan [together]—”Here’s the problem, and here’s where we failed.” Then you execute the plan, you see how it’s going and then you take action if it’s not going well or if it’s going well.

If you think of change this way, as a process that takes time, that will build trust in the employee. It will build in a feeling that management respects me for listening to me. It will build credibility and ultimately it won’t be a change, it’ll just be, “Gosh, we had a problem, and I got to help solve it.”