Newswise — As company's rebound from major restructuring, management must develop plans to enable confidence-shaken employees to recover and adapt to the changes
American workers are seeing it more and more. Companies, pounded by declining revenues and market shares and higher costs, are downsizing, restructuring and merging with increasing frequency in their efforts to remain competitive. Each announcement is accompanied by intentions to cut jobs and close plants and offices.
Recent examples include General Motors, Ford and Merck. The U.S. Department of Labor said there were more than 100,000 announced job losses in June and July alone. Typically, the Labor Department reports about 500,000 job losses annually resulting from reorganizations and downsizing.
"Clearly businesses are facing challenging times. Many have experienced multiple waves of transition, involving voluntary early retirements, then a round or two of involuntary layoffs, followed by restructuring, Others face changes in corporate culture, leadership and strategies," says Mitchell Marks, a San Francisco-based organizational consultant who has been involved in more than 100 major organizational transitions.
While leadership focuses on the financial side of transitions, they often do not take into account the heavy psychological toll on workers. "Employees become disillusioned with the company and over time build up a residue of anger and distrust," Marks says.
"In the end, it is the people involved who have the greatest bearing on the success or failure of a merger," says Marks, adding that nearly 75 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail to meet their financial or strategic goals. "More needs to be done in managing the people side of mergers because these events can be very traumatic to workers."
So, what can companies do to allay the fears and concerns of its surviving workers? A well-planned workplace recovery program will help eliminate the negatives and emphasize the positives, says Marks, whose recent book is Charging Back Up the Hill: Workplace Recovery after Mergers, Acquisitions and Downsizings.
Unfortunately, leaders rarely provide time or resources to help employees work through the many unintended negative consequences of a merger, downsizing or restructuring. They assume that employees are ready to move forward.
Ironically, executives, who have been planning the transition for months before the workforce learns about it, have already dealt with their own psychological reactions to the changes.
One of the first things, management must do is convince surviving employees that the changes will improve the company and make it more competitive and that they will still have jobs and important roles to play.
That is easier said than done, Marks points out. "The transition has already made people wary and that is usually accompanied by some measure of distrust, cynicism, lowered morale and reduced loyalty. Employees question why leadership did not stave off workforce reductions through some alternative course of action, rather than blame external forces, like the increased price of oil."
In short, management has a great deal of fence-mending to do to win back the confidence and trust of the remaining workers.
A well-planned workplace recovery effort can revive an organization and its employees by instilling new life and energy following a disruptive transition. "The idea is to rebound with a workforce that has an enhanced capacity to operate competitively," says Marks.
Change is not all bad. In fact, to remain competitive, companies need to continually adapt to new ways of doing things in response to economic, legal, technological and consumer changes. They also need to eliminate unnecessary work.
Employees can use transitions as a personal form of renewal by recognizing that in crisis there is opportunity, Marks points out.
However, that seldom happens. "Reports of mergers, acquisitions and downsizing rarely describe productive and regenerating results. Instead they depict transitions as painful, wrenching and bloody," says Marks.
It is less discomforting for employees to buy into the changes if they can see business success as a result. "Change is much easier to accept if everyone believes they are going to be on a winning team and if they can share in that success. Part of the leadership role following a difficult transition is to help employees see a direct link between their own contributions and overall company success," Marks notes.
Employees must understand not only what is changing, but also why changes are being made and how the changes will contribute to both business and personal success, he adds.
To produce an effective workplace recovery program, Marks says leaders must:· Convey empathy for their employees by acknowledging the realities and difficulties of workplace recovery, supporting workshops to raise awareness of the transition process and using symbols, ceremonies and forums to aid people in letting go of the old,
· Free up time and other resources to help employees find ways to get their work done more efficiently. They must improve communications with and involve people in diagnosing and eliminating barriers to change.
· Clarify the vision of a new and better organization and nurture an environment that provides people with incentives to experiment and embrace new ways of doing things, create opportunities for short-term wins and give people sufficient time and support to adjust to changes.
· Align systems and operating standards with new organizational realities, involve people in bringing the vision to life and measure and track the development of the new organizational order.
The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is an international group of 6,000 industrial-organizational psychologists whose members study and apply scientific principles concerning people in the workplace. For more information about SIOP, including Media Resources, which lists nearly 2,000 experts in more than 100 topic areas, visit http://www.siop.org
RSS