Empowering Leaders, Engaging Employees: Change Management as a Competitive Advantage
Data tells us that businesses are seeing an impact on engagement and organizational productivity due to employees working for "bad bosses".
These challenges don't just stay at work either. Workers are also seeing an impact on their sleep, stress levels and drinking behaviors outside of the 'office'.
But, with employees 1.7x more likely to be fully engaged when their leaders are excelling at developing people, effective planning, managing change or sharing a compelling future vision, there are table stakes ripe for the taking.
UNLEASH is recognized by SHRM to offer Professional Development Credits (PDC) for SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification.
Perceptyx benchmark data from the last five years reveals a surprising trend: How organizations manage change is now the key differentiator of a great employee experience.
In this exclusive UNLEASH webinar, Perceptyx Senior Director and Head of Center for Workforce Transformation, Emily Killham, broke down some key findings from the vendor’s research.
Over half of the surveyed employees reported hearing about organizational changes from their leadership, however, managers are more positively perceived by employees in handling change compared to senior leaders.
Ultimately, Killham explained, consistent change management leads to better employee engagement, productivity, and well-being.
An audience poll asking what the most important leadership skill in driving employee engagement during times of change is found that communication (45%) and empathy and emotional intelligence 32%) were vital.
“For me, it’s always about communication,” remarked Dan Fiedler, Director of Employee Engagement at Comcast.
Working with our employee opinion survey data or our lifecycle data in general, it’s all about communicating results, and creating that feedback loop. Communication is always key, because it’s easy to mess up.
Dan Fiedler, Director of Employee Engagement at Comcast
Mia Odulana, Director of Learning & Development at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, added that empathy and emotional intelligence is a crucial element for leaders, as…
“…you want to understand where people are coming from and not just assume you know how this change may be impacting them.”
Mia Odulana, Director of Learning & Development at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
Leveraging employee feedback
When seeking to understand how change management is impacting on employees, Fiedler explained how a conglomerate with numerous business divisions employs a range of employee feedback methods.
“We run many survey programs throughout the year – we run pretty much all of them. There’s always this expectation, and it’s ingrained in the culture, that if our employees are going to take the time to respond to our surveys, then we as leaders have the responsibility to act on that feedback.”
Meanwhile, Odulana highlighted the role that 360 surveys are playing at Carefirst: “That hones in even more on the employee feedback specific to their leader, getting it from their direct manager, their peers, their direct reports.
“We’ve been seeing a lot of that really influencing how our people leaders are wanting to develop themselves.”
Perceptyx’s Killham also noted that 360 reviews function to connect all communications within the organization and bringing data together to “draw out what’s most important.”
“Perhaps that 360 will lead you to do some really good development and if you can personalize that at scale across your organization, you can really give the managers the coaching they need,” she explained.
Emily Killham, Senior Director and Head of Center for Workforce Transformation, Perceptyx
Key takeaways:
“There are so many things that go on and that our team get involved in at Comcast, and it just boils down to communication. We work with our comms teams all the time on various initiatives and how best to communicate. Whatever change that we’re going through with, our employees can’t communicate enough.” Dan Fiedler
“Change is hard. Many, if not all organizations are dealing with some type of change, likely continuous change. Give yourself time and space to process. It doesn’t have to be a big bang change that you’re implementing at your team level, it can be incremental, and remember to celebrate those small wins.” Mia Odulana
“Effective leaders need effective leaders themselves. Just because someone has been promoted into people leadership at your organization doesn’t mean they don’t still need development, they don’t still need support, and they don’t still need their own safe place to deal with how the change is impacting them personally.” Emily Killham
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