Change – a most feared word!

I was at a workshop a while ago and Change was the topic under discussion.  We did an exercise – you can do it now too:

Take a piece of paper and write the first 5 things you think about when you hear or see the word Change. Go on do it now.

You may have come up with:

• Fear
• Difference
• Challenge
• Problem
• Issue
• Uneasy
• Unfamiliar
• New things
• Help!
• Disturbing

Or possibly

• Excitement
• Look forward
• Something new! Yes!

It is likely that most people will come up with words in the first list and that there will be many more variations on the theme of a negative response to Change.

So imagine that you are about to change the way that your people work in a radical way. Instead of the familiar desktop computers, in house server and normal way of saving things, you are about to unleash Office 365 upon them. Office 365 brings with it a whole new way of working. Your people can now work anywhere so long as they have internet access. (and sometimes even when they don’t)  A new version of Microsoft Office is also on the cards and where documents are stored is changing too.

No wonder people are a bit anxious!

How can you help them deal with this change?

Talk to them. Start by explaining what is going to happen and if possible tell them why.  When people realise that this will save the organisation a significant amount of money from abolishing in house servers and the need to keep them up to date, to less time and money spent on in house IT Support they will start to see the benefits.

Show your people how the new way of working will make them more productive enabling them to get things done in less time especially when collaborating with each other.

Gone are the days of creating a document and then sending it by email to a colleague so that they can make changes then send it to someone else and so on before it ends up back with the original owner. Now you can have one version of that document stored centrally and everyone can work on it at the same time in a true collaborative way.

Encourage them to ask questions, raise issues and generally do some research around the change.

Remove anxiety – put a learning plan in place before you start – let your people know that there will be support available as the new system is rolled out. If they know and can book their sessions as soon as they need them, this will alleviate much of the anxiety.

Four things you can do when faced with implementing change:

• Explain the nature of the change
• Show them what the benefits are – everyone wants to know “what’s in it for me?”
• Encourage questions
• Support with Learning

If you are thinking of implementing a working change such as this, get in touch and talk to us now. We can help you put a plan into action from asking you the right questions, to presenting the benefits, to creating the Learning Plan.

Till next time…

Call us on 020 8203 1774