People and institutions alike are stubbornly resistant to change. Everyone will say they love constant change but in reality we like change until it affects us. In some cases, a big challenge is finding a common language to discuss innovation with partners and employees.
Most SME employees aren’t business experts, but they are crucial to implementing change. Business owners need to take the time to guide them in understanding what a business model is and what are their roles.
The 3 biggest obstacles to successful change management are risk aversion, the absence of metrics, and the lack of collaboration.
Risk aversion
The old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” betrays a fear of experimentation. It takes courage to take a decision that will change your current business plan. A wise decision can disrupt an entire market.
Lack of metrics
Business metrics can help you guide your decisions and influence behaviour. If you’re focusing on achieving specific goals, you’ll be more open to chase market opportunities and analyse how each business decision impacts your bottom line, client satisfaction, market share, employee engagement, etc.
Lack of employee collaboration
Change can’t happen if it’s not embraced across your organisation. All stakeholders must completely understand your plan for business innovation and work to transform it into reality.
Surely you’ve read those articles titles announcing the end of work as we know it. It is true, work is changing. Companies are stepping towards the future. To do so, they had to address their change aversion. Things can change even more in the following years.
Trends can help us make an educated guess about how people will work in the future. Some concepts are entirely new, others sound familiar, but all of them represent new ideas about work and society.
Mobility. Until a few years ago people would work on the computer they received at work. People needed to actually go to an office to work. Now we’re talking about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), distributed teams, VPNs, video conferences, virtual assistants. Work can happen almost anywhere. People can collaborate no matter if they are in the same room or 8,000 miles away.
Coworking spaces. The rise of coworking spaces proves that people are mixing and matching their activities and whereabouts, in order to balance making a living with networking and professional growth. These spaces might have started as small hubs dedicated to entrepreneurs and various independent experts, but now they offer even daycare and after-schools programs, so moms could bring their kids with them while working next to other professionals.
Job polarization. Technological advancement leads to the disappearance or routine jobs, so employment becomes increasingly concentrated in the highest and lowest-skilled jobs. With further technological advancement, cheaper solutions for automation and outsourcing, routine jobs will continue to disappear.
Reading, writing, coding. The business sector needs even more software developers. It is estimated that by 2020, there will be with 1 million more jobs than computer science students. Learning computer programming has become highly important but Western nations are far behind Asia in computer science teaching. (For example, it is believed that a Vietnamese 11th grader already has the necessary programming knowledge to pass the technical interview at Google.)
Culture management tools. With employee engagement reaching a new low, some software companies started focusing on a new class of products – company culture management tools. RoundPegg, CultureIQ, Waggl, and TINYpulse are keeping track of employee morale, identify problems and ways to boost engagement.
Embrace change and make sure you’re implementing it the right way so it would drive business results, allowing you to improve your bottom line and be considered a prime employer.
