There's no such thing as a bad change
Only a timeline that is too short
The boss walked into the office on a Monday morning. “People” he announced. “I am pleased to inform you that as a key step in improving the efficiency of our organisation, we will be cutting all pay, in all roles and all grades of seniority, by thirty per cent, with immediate effect. Your pay packets this month will reflect this deduction. That is all.”
The workers stalked away, disgusted at this violation of their rights. Some immediately resigned. Others posted disparaging accounts on their social media, denting the company’s reputation still further.
Across town, another boss walked into her equivalent office at around the same time. “Dear colleagues,” she declared, “I wanted to let you know that in order to position ourself securely for our long-term future, all pay for all grades will be cut by thirty percent. We will also be abolishing many of the perks you enjoy today, such as free parking, free meals and gym membership. However, we will not be introducing these changes until the year 2054.”
The workers looked at each other, shrugged, and got on with their day’s work. Most didn’t give the announcement a second thought. None posted anything disparaging on social media and there were no resignations.
In most circumstances, there is no such thing as a bad or a contentious decision, only a bad timeline in which to execute it. The way in which any big change you want to make is received, depends on how quickly you want, or need, to bring it in, and the amount of disruption (and work) you’re prepared to endure in order to do so.
If your employer announces that it will move its head office to the other end of the country in ten years’ time, you are very unlikely to care. Even if this means a significant change for you, there is plenty of time to either plan for the change, or to make the alternative arrangements that you need to in your life. It gives you a clear set of choices and the space you need in which to decide which way forward is the right one for you.
But if your organisation announces that it is moving to a completely different location next week, that is likely to be a serious disruption. At the very least it will probably cause you inconvenience, it may cost you money; you may even decide that working there is no longer viable. And you will probably harbour bad feelings towards your employer, and share those with people you know outside the organisation.
I spent a good part of the glorious summer of 1996 (#bestsummerever) working in a nebuliser factory in Northamptonshire. One day the local boss, himself a deflated, nicotine-stained husk, shambled on to the floor to announce that the whole company was moving to Harlow within a few weeks and that this factory would be closing.
I was lucky – I was moving to London soon for something better, but most of my colleagues were working there because it was the only place you could get a steady job for quite a few miles around. The new location was probably only 50 miles away, but it’s Harlow, as god-forsaken a town as you could wish to waste your precious years within.
Anyway, there was mutiny, but the boss fully expected this, didn’t care and had already lined up a new army of soulless drones to populate the new facility.
Following this logic, the only variable that really matters is time.
This doesn’t apply to everything. Ethically poor (or illegal) decisions are just that, whatever timescale you put on them. Introducing child labour or 70-hour weeks is not okay, however far in the future you set your finish line.
But in most cases, a change that is likely to cause concern or that will affect some people badly will cause less disruption, the more time you give people to get used to it.
It’s not unique to work situations – if you’re training for a marathon and it’s cancelled three months out you’ll be disappointed, maybe even annoyed, but the actual impact on you is limited, because you haven’t invested as much in the status quo (the original race) and you have plenty of pivot to something else (a different race).
It’s about avoiding nasty surprises for the people affected by the change. The more you can avoid that shock factor, the less you’ll have to do to land the change and the more likely it is to stick.
But you can’t just kick everything down the road to an indefinite point, just to keep people happy – you’ll never get anything done that way. So where is the sweet spot?
How much effort are you prepared to put in to land the business change and to smooth the objections, concerns and shock that your colleagues will feel as a result of this disruption that is being imposed upon them?
It’s a common refrain in any organisation, if it’s the kind of organisation that asks its people what they think, that employees often don’t feel that they’ve been consulted enough on change that happens. What they often actually mean is that their idea or preference wasn’t taken up – you can consult but still go in a different direction.
But generally, people want to have a chance to share their opinion, and that can take time (or cause problems if it’s not done).
There are a hundred different frameworks that can be used to guide you through a major organisational change. Many of them have the idea of getting people ready for the change at the start.
Today, everything is VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Everything is changing all the time, and most current situations are not ones that we could have predicted even a couple of years only. There is far less stability in a work environment, and in our world in general, and that rate of change seems to be accelerating all the time.
This means that change is constant and many of the premises that underpin business change frameworks are no longer valid. The idea that you can move from one stable, steady, constant state to another stable state by undergoing a finite and defined period of change, is largely outdated. Change is continuous.
The early stages of change – sometimes known as the Make it Essential and Make it Ready stages – still have value. Anyone involved in a change needs to understand why the change is happening, why it’s necessary, and they need to have had the opportunity to prepare for it, so that the intended benefits can be landed and enjoyed.
But there’s only so far you can accelerate that process – people are people, and some take more time to adjust than others.
Key questions
So now, if you are planning to introduce any kind of significant change, the only questions that matter are these:
What is the minimum and maximum possible time you can afford to take to implement this decision?
What is the maximum amount of hassle, disruption and unhappiness that you’re prepared to accept?
And how much work are you prepared to put into getting your people ready for that change?
Your plan then lies within those ranges. If it’s essential that this is a smooth transition, you’re going to want to make that timeline as long as possible. If you can’t afford to put in a lot of business change work, then similarly you’ll want to give people as much time as possible to get used to the idea, or you’re likely to face a lot of disgruntlement and ill feeling towards the organisation.
You can also use a longer timescale for hollow promises, like Net Zero by 2050. It looks great as a slogan but everyone involved in implementing it will have retired by then and no-one will remember that you made the promise because we’ll all be too busy flying around with our jetpacks by then – or otherwise AI will have confined us to our cells so we can’t see the global bin fire outside.
If you are less worried about how a change is received (perhaps because a high staff turnover is normal, or because there is no expectation of involvement in change) then you can probably afford to bring in the change more quickly.
And if you simply can’t afford to wait, then you will need to prepare for managing a lot of concerns by your people.
Although there is no such thing as a bad change, you’ll know from your people whether you tried to rush it through, and whether you put the work in to land the change properly. If they end up feeling that it’s a bad change, then your timelines or your effort investment was wrong.
But get that right and you can make every change feel like a positive one.