HR behavioral change is sometimes easy with employees and usually difficult with managers. Modern employees enjoy access to self service systems, but are sometimes lukewarm towards service delivery and call center environments they are not used to. Managers on the other hand often want as little HR work as possible and any HR change is viewed as more to learn and less time to spend on profitability.
There are some amazing books out there about behavioral change, and I can’t cover the whole subject matter here, but I’ll give a couple of quick hints. The key to behavioral change is identifying the “wins” for each individual population. Employees may see greater access in self service as a win over paper processes. I’m the perfect example of how an employee would immediately change his or her address in self service, but in a manual process I probably would not bother changing it until W-2 time. Changes in service delivery are sometimes tougher if the employee population has gotten comfortable calling certain people.
Managers are tougher and require more handholding and communications. Certain HR processes such as hiring employees are frequent processes and rationale for management time investment may be the key win for most managers. Figuring out new hiring, interview and background check processes is a headache, and finding the right reward is crucial.
The communications strategy should target these wins for each population and generate excitement and anticipation. Additionally, communications is not all in trinket, print and web forms. Core groups of employees can be utilized to publicize and generate excitement if they are respected users. Providing incentives will also drive those first few transactions. If the goal is quick buy-in (and it often is), Incentives can come in the form of give-aways, cash, merchandise or whatever to drive people to new technologies and processes, but they should be meaningful in terms of the project and they should be successful in changing behaviors.
Obviously if you are not actually going to a better process, there is no true win, even though you might communicate what you hope will be a positive change. The end result for unsuccessful projects is… failure. Not every project is the right thing, but most are if implemented well, and adopted by the affected populations.
2 responses to “PMO – Behavioral Change with Employees and Managers”
PMO – Behavioral Change with Employees and Managers June 22, 2006 on 2:00 am | by Systematic HR HR behavioral change is sometimes easy with employees and usually difficult with managers. Modern employees enjoy access to self service systems, but are sometimes lukewarm towards service delivery and call
systematicHR – Human Resources Strategy and Human Resources Technology » PMO – Behavioral Change with Employees and Managers
Couple of points
1) On my blog I have asked for ideas of how social media can help with change and strategy…any ideas would love to hear?
2) Behavioral change comes from within the individual. To enact it, there is no short cut to involving the people in the process. Explaining the company vision and then each person asked to think about how they can help create that vision. Managers need to be developed in listening skills to help this process….but inclusion is the key. I came across a 6 “P” appraoch to change which is excellent on http://mabelandharry.blogspot.com worth a look, think it is a great summary.