User psychology can lend a helping hand with change management as it relies on understanding the needs and concerns of end
users/ employees to help navigate the challenges.
When it comes to change management, people may tell you that implementing a new system or fundamentally changing the way employees work is an individual process with unique characteristics and challenges. However, user psychology might lend a helping hand as it relies on understanding the needs and concerns of end users/ employees to help navigate the challenges of change management.
A company that understands the importance of this is Oracle systems training provider Fudgelearn. Having invested time and resources to integrate change management into their user adoption solutions making change management more easily digestible, as discussed in a recent webinar on the matter.
Shelley Harper-Lee, senior ERP trainer at Fudgelearn, shared that in her experience, sometimes even the best intentions from change management teams appointed for training can go to waste if employees are not briefed on the changes in their role and don’t have sufficient time to process it.
“I’ve been in a situation in my early career where I was drafted specifically to deliver some training to a team with new system skills based on a change in their role. It turned out the first time they really understood the additional tasks and the changes to their roles was when I arrived to deliver and train them on the new skills,” she recalled.
“Given that this was the first time they had been told about the changes”, Harper-Lee said, “that in such circumstances training cannot be as effective because staff feel distracted, frustrated and uncertain”.
For this reason, Nick Rowley, director of business consulting for Hitachi Digital Services, a Fudgelearn partner, which helps enterprises digitally transform their business, urges that it’s important to consider “all aspects of an ERP implementation about your users, and particularly what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling and also understand how and why they’re acting in a certain way.”
Amid a myriad of modern techniques to choose from, ranging across communication, stakeholder and leadership engagement, what organizations should really be focusing on is the user at the end of these different approaches.
“If you don’t consider the user community when you’re applying those tools, then you’re not going to get the desired results,” as Nick Rowley stressed on the webcast.
Ways of responding to organizational change
Nick Rowley advised that in situations where initial communication and intentions have already been set, the change management team can lean on some tried and tested approaches like the ones popularized by Peter Block in his book Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest.
According to Peter Block, there are four different types of personalities users can adopt when it comes to change management – The victim, The cynic, The bystander and The navigator, all approaching organizational change through a different lens:
● The victim – often feeling disadvantaged and frustrated with the upcoming change
● The cynic – expressing doubt that the change will work and be beneficial
● The bystander – watching from the sidelines without committing to anything as they doubt change is even possible
● The navigator – someone fully onboard and looking at ways of how they can support the change
However, while acknowledging that some people are more resistant to change than others, Nick Rowley assured that archetypes like The victim and The cynic also play an important role in the transformation because “if you can convince them that actually this is good and it is going to work, then they can redirect that energy to help you achieve your goals in the change and training,” as well as impact others in the organization.
At the same time, the panel reminds that these change journeys are not linear, with people likely crossing back and forth through the different stages. This is why stakeholder engagement is a continuous process, and “you need to constantly be assessing it to check that people are where you want them to be,” Nick Rowley reminded during the webinar.
Ultimately, both the transformation partner and the organization need to understand that while a digital transformation starts with the company itself, both sufficient collaboration and mutual understanding play a key role in any successful transformation project.
With change management and ERP implementations often being tricky to get right, understanding people’s motivations, what drives them and how change would impact their work might be some of the first steps to ensuring the journey is a smooth sailing one.
