Information-led approaches to employee engagement are essential, but they are not sufficient! Martin Cook, Principal Consultant, Organisational Change, Bernard Hodes Group.
Organisational change has a patchy history. But over the last decades the management of change has been informed by great thinking in the work of, for example, John Kotter and Gary Hamel. These contributions from the academy, and many others like it, have had a real and lasting impact on the way we go about engaging people in organisational change. Alongside these advances there has been the rise and rise of internal communications as a discipline in its own right, successfully divorcing itself from an early association with internal marketing and PR. Additionally, there is now an employee engagement capacity in many organisations, with a far broader remit than surveying and reporting. Even organisation development, once a somewhat dark art rooted in the human relations movement, has come of age. Go into any large organisation nowadays and you will find internal communications, employee engagement and organisation development all represented, many in senior positions. You may even stumble across a director of culture.
So with all this supposed firepower, practical and theoretical, why do the statistics remain obdurate when it comes to change? Why does the oft quoted ‘ two thirds of change initiatives fail to achieve their objectives’, continue to resonate and characterise our day to day experience of change in organisations? I think that the answer is simple: information is overrated. Like everywhere, our world is dominated by information and the volume and breadth of information is rising exponentially. But when it comes to change, the reasons for employees to buy-in and get behind a new initiative are not based on rational choice alone. The idea of a rational organisational actor weighing up the information and making choices is as suspect as that of rational choice theory in economics.
People are disposed to act in certain ways according to how they feel as much as what they think and know, by the social contexts in which they operate as by their individual psychology, and by the symbols that surround them as by the information they encounter. Failure to acknowledge and manage this eternal truth, validated by social science over the last decades and put into even greater focus by modern neuroscience, is the Achilles Heel of a system that has an in-built bias to privilege the rational over other forms of life.
The arrival on the scene of the disciplines of internal communications and employee engagement has done little to shift the belief that information is the essential ingredient for successful change. Facts and data, compellingly communicated, are important, but organisations need to take equal account of and respond to the affective, the social and the symbolic if they are to create more enduring and sustainable change. Only by focussing on all four elements will we be able to draw away from the uncomfortable truths of underperformance and lost opportunities that have characterised organisational change since it came into the vocabulary all those years ago.
