“Unwiring old habits in a bid to establish new ones needs to occur on a more individual scale.”
“This is precisely why I spend so much time at the inception of a change program conducting a full employee survey,” says Marsden. From C-suite to the most junior recruit, the aggregation of these insights “form a personality for the organisation, demonstrating how the internal culture of an organisation can differ from its espoused corporate values”.
A recent change program helmed by COMUNiTI for human resources, industrial relations and organisational psychology practice, Mapien, in Brisbane, demonstrates the degree of positive impact such immersive behaviour-focused change programs can bring. “For Mapien, the keyword was ‘family’,” Marsden remarks. “Spatial utilisation was highly evident as teams were segregated across the floor with little to no areas to collaborate. Plus, a new merger was on the cards.
“With each team member occupying an individual office around the floorplate perimeter, internal office spaces quickly became secondary, lightless and unoccupied. Chance encounters were rare – and so, for an organisation that truly understood how important genuine team camaraderie was for its own clients, there was a high degree of awareness that evolving to newer, more agile styles of working would encourage teams to meet their full potential.”
Mapien’s change journey from a traditional workplace environment to a truly agile hub saw the coalescence of various aspects of the organisation’s business activity. This included diverse interior architecture and an appreciation for the equity that all team members played in shaping the Mapien employee and client experience. And it bore significantly dramatic results.
According to Mapien executive director, Nadia Taylor, “For the first six months after we moved into our new premises we had the highest performance on record in our 35 years in business. We attribute that to the way the newly-designed workspace enabled our different teams to engage and come up with multidisciplinary enhanced solutions for our clients.”
Both Marsden and Sri agree that the shocking data from McKinsey & Co suggesting approximately 70 per cent of change programs fail, indicates that change initiatives need to be implemented more sensitively.
“We are cognisant that the rate and form of change we drive,” says Sri, “has to be balanced with the rate of change that not only the organisation but also its broader industry, can move with. Regression, impediments and frustrations to the change process arise from change programs being disassociated with broader business programs and imbalanced emphasis placed on certain workforce demographics – whether these be hierarchical, generational, departmental, and so on.”
Clearly reflecting the more human-centred values of our current design moment, in the case of significantly inter-generational workplaces – or indeed, any workplace with whatever degree and type of diversity – only multifaceted approaches are going to work. “Unwiring old habits in a bid to establish new ones needs to occur on a more individual scale, and well and truly before moving into the new workplace.”
Sri reminds me, here, of the World Health Organisation’s recognition of “change fatigue” in the broader workplace burnout complex. Now included in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the syndrome’s increasing prevalence might go a long way to explaining the S&P 500’s corporate death vortex. Change isn’t a survival tactic, it’s simply just the future.
Tell your #workwife.