Change is the fundamental rule of nature, and, like other things, it applies to business organizations. But when it comes to introducing a positive change to your company, inertia can be a roadblock to it. Due to it, you may face challenges in aligning your company with internal demands or the business environment.
There are many practical challenges in their mission for growth and survival. Prominent among them are technological advancements, globalization, and changing market trends. According to a research report, organizational change is paramount to dealing with these challenges. If you face resistance, you would want to know how to overcome resistance to change.
A resistance or unwillingness to change in an organization can be due to many reasons. The business relationships of employees with each other or the company can be one of the reasons. Read on to get detailed insights on what causes resistance to change.
Reasons for Resistance to Change in Companies
A change in your company can give birth to two possibilities. It may bring in a sense of safety among your company’s staff members. Or, they may also get into anxiety, fear, depression, frustration, and anger due to it. In both situations, the outcomes of the newly introduced change depend on employees’ psychological transition.
According to a report, the unavailability of management support or employee resistance negatively influences about 70% of a company’s objectives. To bypass the negative effects of resistance on your company goals, you need to have a strategy in place. It will help you mitigate both the risks and risk factors of resistance in an organization.
To mitigate an effective strategy in this regard, you must know the handy resistance mitigation tips. Besides, you also need to know the reasons for it. Here are a few of them.
- The Negative Image of a Change
Typically, professionals follow their own approaches to make a good impression in the workplace. Besides increment, achieving growth in their job role is also a motivation factor for employees, who put their best efforts to achieve this objective.
If staff members feel that a change may cut off or minimize their job role, they will resist it. They would do their best to maintain the status quo and prevent job loss in 9 out of 10 instances. They can go to any extent to succeed in it.
- Availability of no Rewards for Adapting to a Change
Staff members need to tweak their approaches to better adapt to new changes. They must remain relevant. Before preparing themselves for it, your employees would also want to know about their rewards.
It can be a game-changer if you have a plan for rewarding your employees. Rewarding a task motivates employees to find new ways to deal with every challenge. On the other hand, the lack of a reward can have a diagonally opposite effect.
If employees feel they must adapt to a new change without a reward, they may resist it. The lack of a reward system is a significant reason employees resist company changes.
- The Fear an Unknown Change & Lack of Ongoing Communication
According to WSJ, there has been a surge in the use of business communication tools due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This highlights how important communication is for remote employees. It is all the more critical for in-house employees.
Do you wish to tweak your company’s work culture or business processes? If yes, you must communicate it well with your company’s stakeholders beforehand.
Keeping some employees out of the loop while making a change can lead to resistance later on. Keep your employees posted about a new change and keep them abreast with the updates to avoid this situation.
- Peer Pressure
Whether your employees are introverts or extroverts, they are humans. As such, they are bound to be social creatures like other humans. If the stakeholders of your business organization have some interest in a group, they will try to protect it. In doing so, they may try to prevent a change that can affect their interests in the group.
In companies, some team members try to prevent the job loss of others. In most cases, senior executive officers find resistance from the managers who report to them. They generally do so to prevent the job loss of some of their team members to whom they attach importance.
Peer pressure is one factor that prevents any change from taking place in an organization in the desired way.
- Lack of Trust
Sometimes a new change fails to yield results, no matter how meaningful or positive it may be. Usually, it happens when the staff members of a business organization tend to mistrust one another.
If you want a change to be fruitful, ensure your employees trust each other. Find out whether or not there is a lack of a desired level of trust to make a change successful. If necessary, think of ways to promote trust and rebuild it in your organization’s workforce.
- Organizational Politics
Your plan for a change may be simply fine. You may also take all the steps to overcome any resistance to it. If you still come across resistance, it can be due to organizational politics.
Ask two basic questions before you plan your next move. Are you opting for the right change that would benefit your company? Have you taken all the steps to implement it? If yes, work out a strategy to counter resistance to your change due to organizational politics. Implementing your strategy will be important.
Final Thoughts
A feeling of unwillingness to let change happen in an organization can occur for many reasons. Find out the reasons for resistance to a change in your organization. This will help you address the problem by working out a practical solution.