The story is told about an organization that was planning to institute change in its working hours. From the usual 8:00 am-5:00 pm it would be changed
to 6:00 am-3:00 pm. For the past thirty years it had always been 8:00-5:00 and
the employees were used to that already. So the employees union resisted and
told the management that they would not agree.
What are you going to do when there’s resistance to change? The
first action to do when there’s resistance to change is to call for a meeting
among the parties involved. In this case the employees union and the
management. In that meeting the fuzzy issues should be threshed out. Employees
resist change because they have no clear understanding yet why is there a need
for that change.
Therefore the component of listening and flexibility are very important
here. Management and the employees union should listen to each other’s
viewpoints and be flexible if need be. There would naturally be initial
disagreement about the change that is to be put in place. But there are also
some valid points that both parties could agree.
For this reason, focus first on the points of agreements after that focus
now on the issues of disagreement. Why is this so? Because when both parties
focus first on the issues that they could agree it immediately creates an
environment of calm. Which is very conducive as a starting point to begin
threshing out the issues of disagreement.
The thorny part when an organization wants to implement change are the
issues of disagreement. Therefore, management must not push its weight around
it should extend its patience to the limit. This means that meetings and
dialogues about the change that is to be implemented should continue until the
nitty-gritty details of that change are ironed out.
It’s not easy to implement organizational change however change is
needed for an organization to evolve, upgrade and grow. Therefore change must be
implemented for nothing is permanent in this world except change. – Marino J.
Dasmarinas
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