How Can I Help Employees Cope with Change that Requires New Skills and Practices?
Change usually demands the acquisition of new skills and implementation of new practices. Daily routines must be reprogrammed. While this is happening, employees will feel threatened, questioning their competencies (skills, abilities, and knowledge).
Under these circumstances, you need to assume the role of coach to help your employees develop the skills they need to survive the change. As a first step, ask yourself, "Given the modifications we are attempting, what new knowledge or skills will my staff need?" Then ask yourself, "Which of these do they already possess?" Measure the answers to these questions against each other. Identify the gap between your staff’s present understanding and those things it needs to know to manage the new practices or procedures. This will reveal what training objectives should be introduced. It will also help you to calculate how long it will take to fill the gap. For example, if employees in your shipping department have used bar code devices to scan outgoing orders, using a more sophisticated system with microchips is only a few steps removed from their present duties. However, if they have been performing this task manually, they will need more time to adapt to the new system.
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Share your perspective of the learning curve with senior management so that it doesn’t expect wondrous transformations to take place overnight. Insist that your staff be taught the appropriate skills and be given the resources they need to implement the change plan.
If the change affects the entire department, then group training is the perfect means for closing information gaps and building new competencies. Hold such sessions in any environment that encourages a free exchange of questions and ideas. The skill training, however, should be done on site, in the workplace.
So far, you have identified what your employees need to know and you have determined what knowledge gaps need to be filled. Now you have to decide how to teach your employees.
Depending on your own training skills, you can outsource the responsibility or you can assume it yourself. If you decide to assume it yourself, begin with the familiar. Whenever possible, use your staff’s current skills and knowledge as a framework to help them understand what they must stop doing, start doing, or do differently to implement the change.
Present new information to your staff sequentially. Our human brains resemble hard drives in one respect: They can crash. Don’t overload your employees’ with new information. Feed them information in logical, ordered bites—the smaller, the better. Allow your staff sufficient time to absorb each new element of the process.
Of course, give them the opportunity to practice what you have taught, and practice again and again. Repeat new activities until your staff members are comfortable with them. Repetition sustains memory. The more frequently your employees practice recently learned skills, the more quickly they will settle into the new routine.
Offer positive feedback. Do not demand perfection during the early stages of the transition. Be patient with mistakes. Focus not on the error at first but rather on what the employee did right. Then identify how the employee went awry. Never ridicule an employee for making an error. Focus, too, only on those actions that affect critical aspects of the new task.
When employees admit to making an error, compliment them for their candor. Let them know that these errors are a vital part of the change process. They teach us what to do by illustrating what not to do. Of course, compliment employees when they show progress in correcting any slipups.
Throughout this learning process, encourage questions and never dismiss any queries as "dumb." If an employee is asking the "wrong" question, it is simply a sign that he or she lacks adequate information. See that he or she gets the information essential to do the task correctly.