***This article is part of a series on employee engagement called Capitalizing on Culture. The series follows Richmond Hill, Ont.-based Trimark Sportswear Group and its quest to improve company culture.
Week five: Handling resistance to cultural change
In theory, the process of evolving a good corporate culture into a great one, as Trimark Sportswear Group president Will Andrew is trying to do, should be relatively straightforward and easy. After all, who wouldn’t want a workplace to improve – particularly if it meant a better bottom line?
But because human beings are involved, it’s not quite that easy. Changing isn’t something many of us do with ease.
“In the best of cultures, you can assume there’s going to be a low of 5 per cent to a high of 15 per cent of folks who are having a difficult time with culture change, and that’s because of the second word,” explains Marty Parker, president and chief executive officer of Waterstone Human Capital and founder of Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures program. “Change requires them to act differently than they have in the past, and that is either extremely difficult or impossible for some people to do.”
So, assuming that whatever change a company is going through is going to appeal to some and not others, now what?
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“The big question is, are you able to understand where each individual employee sits or not?” says Neil Crawford, leader of the Best Employers in Canada study at Hewitt Associates. “Do they belong in the new world?”
No matter the eventual outcome, it takes time for employees to figure that out. Even the most effective culture change is rarely complete in 18 months. In the tougher cases, says Mr. Crawford, “it takes a lot more work, a lot more time and change may not go as far as you’d like it to go.”
In the meantime, a major challenge for employers is determining who is not on board with change, and why.
“They are sometimes snakes in the grass,” says Mr. Parker. “They’re not always jumping out and communicating, even in the most open environment, because what they have to say is ‘I don’t understand it,’ ‘I don’t like it’ and ‘I don’t know how to get there.’”
Often, those who are most silent in a changing climate are the least happy, keeping a low profile so they’ll go unnoticed. “But they will be noticed if they’re not, over time, putting their energy and weight behind it,” he adds.
Employers might see a negative change in an employee’s performance – another possible indicator of unhappiness or confusion. Perhaps they don’t know how to fit in, and in some cases they might not ever be able to. In others, however, they will.
Another typical scenario is workers making the mistake of resisting change in too open a way, often because they’re not certain how else to do it. “‘Do I do it with management? With HR?’ Even in the most open of cultures, it puts them at risk,” Mr. Parker says.
