Help Your Workers Deal With Their Resistance to Change

Any manager is ever challenged by pressure of many tasks taking place in an organization and at the same time facing stiff competition from other companies.

These situations make them spend much of their time in planning and reacting to change.

Reacting to change comes after they have created it or effects of uncontrollable external environment generate it.

Dealing with these changes may be painful but if the vision is meaningful, then the managers will be willing to sacrifice for a better future.

But how about the employees- the vehicles the managers expects to use to make that change a reality?

Workers normally resist alterations because of so many reasons that may include:

They fear loosing their jobs- in the process of formation and implementation change that involves a technology that they are not skilled in for instance being declared redundant is at time obvious.

Should this happen, many workers who have families to care for would not know what to do to support them.

Fear of the unknown-basically needs to restructure or introduce new systems originates from the managers and employees are at times caught in surprise.

Monetary implications-changes often come along with extra spending and managers may be forced to alter even the salaries of the workers to salvage cash to implement it.

This is something that can not be welcomed easily by workers who may even be required to work overtime with no pay for sometime till change is fully executed.

Suspicion of bad motives- employees may dare to suspect that managers have bad motives for requiring them to support the move towards change thus may resist it.

Vested interests- a change directive from the superior power like the chief executive officer to a junior manager may be seen as threat to power by those middle managers.

They may fear that the junior might step higher than they are if he or she does implement a functional change strategy.

Threat to values and beliefs-a change focusing on social aspect of the organization may be seen as a threat to the long existent values and beliefs that employees are used to.

Supposing for example, shifting a worker to a different department with new faces may break the social bond he or she had created with his coworkers for years.

As a manager, where should you start?

As a manager, it is crucial for you to start from this point of knowing why your workers are resisting the changes.

It is vital to note and identify that workers resist changes for both competing forces; some are for and others are against it.

The restraining forces are the ones to be minimized while reinforcing the driving ones by doing the following:

Provide more information to put some sense in the minds of those rejecting the importance of change.

This you can do by involving all those whose alterations would affect, in advance, so they can participate right from the time change is conceptualized until it is completed.

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