How to Make Organizational Change a Win-Win for Everyone
by Tom Hanlon / Mar 7, 2024
Organizational change is inevitable and necessary for both organizations and their employees. Jennifer Nelson is exploring the pitfalls of making those modifications and how to successfully navigate them.
Change is a constant in life. But to enact it successfully, particularly at the organizational level, is far from easy.
In fact, the oft-cited success rate for organizational change is 30%.
Which leads to the pressing need to study organizational change, to learn from past failures, to see what works, to navigate the tricky but necessary waters of change.
That’s exactly what Jennifer Nelson’s research is about: helping organizations and leaders manage change and turn it into win-win situations for the organization and for all employees involved.
Organizational Change in an Academic Setting
Nelson, an assistant professor in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is in the midst of researching organizational change in an academic library.
“I chose a library I could travel to in person because I wanted to be able to observe participants and job shadow,” Nelson says. “I stumbled upon gold because this particular library has about three hundred employees, they do interesting work, and it fit everything I was looking for in a rich research setting.”
She has presented her first paper, on the impact on employees of multiple changes taking place simultaneously within an organization, at four conferences. She plans to have that paper out for peer review by early fall.
She has two other papers in the planning stages, one on constructing a positive occupational identity for employees through intrinsic rewards and the other on strategies related to autonomous work performed by experts and the recognition (or lack thereof) that they receive for that work.“Since I’m a sociologist [she received her Ph.D. in sociology from Emory University in 2018], I’m interested in issues of equality,” Nelson says. “I wanted to know how change is experienced by people located at different levels of the hierarchy.”
Findings
Among Nelson’s many findings are:
- Mutual respect is important. “Respecting the expertise of lower-ranking colleagues is essential for preparing those same colleagues to want to participate in future changes,” Nelson says. In addition, “People who are on a higher level of the hierarchy need to act as allies or advocates for lower-ranking employees.”
- Employees want to be heard. “Issues of equity are prominent during change because for employees, there’s always the question of ‘will my voice by included or will they just say they’re listening, but they’ve already made up their minds as to what they’re going to do.’”
- Past negative changes impact future changes. “If you have implemented an earlier change that was experienced negatively by lower-ranking employees, that same group of employees is set up to not want to participate in the next change, even if it’s unrelated to the prior negative change. They’ve learned to not trust leadership.”
- Demands for attention and adjustment can make change challenging. “Sometimes, the reluctance to change is simply that employees are dealing with so much that they’re not in a position to contribute to any change.” Nelson recalls one employee telling her that a change being implemented felt like “the house is on fire because there’s so much going on.” That type of situation “creates workplace dynamics that feel a bit chaotic, which can feel daunting and even destructive,” Nelson says. And that will cause employees to go into survival mode and stay as close as possible to the status quo, she adds.
- Ongoing change is difficult. Related to workloads and cognitive demands stemming from changes, Nelson notes that “Organizational leaders and managers need to be attentive to the cascading domino effect of one change after the next. To ensure the success of a change, you need to be attentive to what happened right before it, even if it seems unrelated.”
- Multiple changes should be cohesively implemented. “it’s difficult for organizational leaders to get different types of changes to be coherent,” Nelson says. She uses the example of undertaking a cultural change, such as a DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) intervention, with a structural or technical change, such as closing or merging a unit or adopting a new technology. “These types of changes are often treated separately by organizational leaders, but if they weren’t, the changes probably wouldn’t create the difficult work dynamics that can happen when they are treated separately.”
- Resource allocation changes are tough and require transparency. “Any change to do with reallocating resources brings up issues of equity,” Nelson notes. “People want to know that what they’re getting for what they put in is proportional to what the next person is getting for what they put in. When you’re reallocating resources, such as space and employees, there’s always going to be winners and losers—some units that had more space now have less, and vice versa. A lot of the participants that I spoke with took this very personally, how those decisions were made and the extent to which leaders were transparent and the procedures were fair.”
Surprises
Nelson enjoys the element of surprise that she finds in her research.
“I love it when you think you know what you saw, but when you’re being really systematic about it, you see that it’s not what you originally thought,” she says. “Or you go in with your research questions and discover things you didn’t anticipate.”
Take, for example, the case of a unit being closed. “I assumed the civil service employees—many of whom were reassigned to units with limited choices because of a merger—would have a negative orientation to the change all the way through,” Nelson explains. “But by the end, the negative relational dynamics they were experiencing with other employee groups had largely dissipated.”
Another surprise: “I came in wanting to look at relationships across the hierarchy but in a few of the changes, the within-group dynamics had more conflict than the dynamics between different groups.”
And while her study has not been focused on why DEI initiatives in organizations are often challenging, she did discover some reasons behind that.
“The current research on this topic mostly focuses on incumbent resistance or backlash to cultural change, or implementing trainings without new accountability structures, as the main reasons why DEI initiatives often do not lead to more diverse workplaces,” Nelson says. Her findings suggest that concurrent or prior changes besides the DEI intervention, which are “issues that are usually treated as unrelated,” could be another reason. This can lead to inconsistencies between DEI changes and the other changes, as well as to employees not having the bandwidth to react, she adds.
Adding to the Literature
Nelson hopes that her research adds to the literature on organizational change.
“A lot of times we see studies on organizational change that focus on one change,” she says. “I’ve only come across one other paper where a researcher studied two changes taking place at one time. My study can strengthen that small group of studies that points out that real life in organizations is more complex than one change at a time. It can help highlight the things that organizations do, even if unknowingly, to undercut some employees’ sense of value. It can help leaders be transparent about decisions and procedures and to recognize the contributions of employees at all levels. How leaders approach implementing change can help employees balance out their being upset with the structural losses they’re dealing with, with a sense that at least the procedures used for making decisions were clear.”
Organizational change is unavoidable, Nelson says. No organization stands still—or can afford to. The trick is to make that change work for the organization.
“My research will show leaders what causes employees to engage in a change versus resisting it,” she says. “I’ll be able to show the effects of multiple things happening at once on that ‘engagement versus resistance’ scale and help leaders of organizations make their changes go off well.”