In The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni, a leadership and organizational expert, talks about the underlying factors that make a job miserable. These attributes are even more critical to address during the emotional turmoil that introducing a corporate change will have on your employees:
- Anonymity - feeling like the employee is not known nor their contributions to the company understood
- wC answer: This is why we develop communities of practice, to make sure the employees feel that their voices are being heard and that they are able to help design the changes to their roles that are needed to make the change a success.
- Irrelevance - the employee not being able to see that the work they do matters to anyone
- wC answer: This is where the communication plan becomes critical: keeping the employees informed throughout the change effort, and constantly reinforcing the reasons for the change.
- Your human resources department will also be a key participant in ensuring that the people impact of the change is being appropriately addressed.
- Immeasurement - not being able to gauge the employee's progress or level of contribution to the company
- wC answer: This is where the assessments of the current world and future world come into play: mapping out how the company used to operate, and sharing the vision of how it will be different once the change is fully operational. This vision includes all changes to people, process, services, and technology.
- The training plan also plays a role: assessing the skill sets of your employees today, and determining what support, training, mentoring, etc. they will need to adapt their skills for the future.
- The biggest measurement comes from the definition of success that drove the case for your change: showing how the company will measure the adoption of the change, and being able to translate that down to the specific role that the individual employee will play in achieving those metrics.