Strategies for Listening and Leading Through Disruptive Times

The last few years have been particularly disruptive. In response, organizations are evolving the ways in which they service customers. They are adopting new technologies, pursuing digital initiatives, and leveraging AI in innovative ways. 

In parallel, there is an increased focus on cost containment as slower growth drives the need to protect margins. This drive to become more efficient and relevant is challenged by the fact that while most organizations are planning for growth, in many instances, they are not staffing for it. These factors, along with many others, are contributing to an accelerated pace of change across companies.

Change Uncertainty 

Change is no longer associated with defined projects or measurable end dates. It is now a constant in our workplaces.

This is putting considerable strain on leadership. So much so that our research reveals only 59% of executives are confident in how their organization handles change. This figure alone is concerning, but the situation worsens at the manager level. Managers, who are typically responsible for implementing changes initiated by senior executives, show even less confidence (54%) in the organization’s ability to handle change.

Roughly 4 in 10 employees don’t understand the reasons for changes taking place within their organizations and, perhaps more importantly, don’t understand how those changes will impact them. This is partly due to the fact that companies are shifting priorities and initiatives so quickly, it's becoming increasingly hard for employees to keep up. It is also due to the fact that managers are more overloaded than ever, as they struggle to execute the strategic initiatives of their leadership team while balancing the day-to-day tasks of keeping their teams afloat.

How Organizations Handle Change Matters

We looked at the greatest predictors and barriers to engagement across the organizations with which we partner. We wanted to understand what elements of the employee experience differ most between those who are highly engaged and those who are not. 

Across the organizations that Perceptyx partners with, effective change management and the ability of organizations to support employees in adapting to change are now the biggest barriers — and, by extension, opportunities — to sustaining engagement. Employees who are highly engaged are far more likely to believe that their company does a good job of managing through change, compared to their counterparts. Confidence in senior management is very much an extension of the above two, as employees look to their leaders for direction and support in managing through change. 

In short, how we handle change has always mattered, but it has never mattered more than it does today.

The Manager Squeeze

While the pressure associated with navigating change is impacting everyone, it is not impacting everyone equally. As a result of this ongoing transformation, organizations are experiencing a “manager squeeze,” with managers today more overloaded than ever before. Managers are so overextended that they lack the bandwidth to lead in the way their teams have traditionally expected — namely, by supporting the skills development and change readiness needed to future-proof the organization.

In other words, managers aren’t doing the things needed to support organizational transformation. This also highlights the need to further support managers, 48% of whom say that their job has become more difficult over the past year and 53% of whom report that pressure from senior leadership has increased over the past year. 

Listening Through Disruption

Organizations that are effectively listening through disruption are asking the right questions to align around a clear set of organizational priorities. Asking questions that are relevant and timely helps to yield the right data. The right data does not necessarily mean more data, but rather insights that help leaders “connect the dots” across disparate data points or listening events to tell a compelling story.

Leading Practices: What the Best Do Differently

1. Give all leaders permission to refocus and reprioritize.

Today, more than ever, we are hearing ab out executive leadership teams with dozens of “mission-critical” initiatives — areas in which they are determined to execute flawlessly over the course of the year. While their ambition is commendable, it often creates disorder among senior-level leaders who struggle to prioritize this many initiatives, let alone assign increasingly limited resources to them.

Contrary to popular opinion, the best organizations are not doing more with less; they are doing less with less. The most effective companies are defining their key business and talent priorities and making them widely known across all areas of the organization. They are using this as their “north star” to ensure that materials, equipment, and, most importantly, people are aligned to what will have the greatest impact on the collective success of their business.

2. Be nimble by adapting listening events to address challenges in real-time.

As the needs of the business change, so should the approach to listening. Economic factors and corporate priorities can shift rapidly, making it important to ensure that organizations remain nimble and can adapt their listening events to the needs of their business — in real-time.

A global organization partnering with Perceptyx was struggling with employee retention, particularly among new hires. As a result, they introduced onboarding milestones and found that 60 days marked a key inflection point in a new employee’s tenure. 

Due to that onboarding milestone, the organization learned that employees who felt the job they were doing accurately matched the description they were provided in the candidacy phase of their application were 5.5x more likely to stay through the end of their first year, when compared to those who did not. It turned out that a realistic job preview was the top predictor of new hire attrition. 

This information allowed the organization to quickly pivot to make changes to the candidate experience and talent acquisition process that resulted in meaningful impact. In this example, the organization was able to identify a problem (new hire retention) and move quickly to gain the insights needed to solve that problem.

3. Move quickly from insights to impact.

This is not a space launch! Listening events do not need to be perfect, but they do need to be impactful. Organizations are no longer waiting months or even weeks to cascade results. Nor are they waiting to have formal PowerPoint results presentations with their executive leadership teams. They are now working directly within the platform to share results in real-time and to dive deeper so they can develop a better understanding of their issues and opportunities. 

4. Ensure teams are well supported.

Transformation is a team sport. We need to unburden managers if we want to drive meaningful and sustainable change within our organizations. Managers simply cannot drive organizational transformation on their own. Organizations that are succeeding at supporting enterprise transformation at scale are unburdening managers by making transformation everyone’s responsibility. They are doing this, for example, by launching Perceptyx’s Intelligent Nudges directly to employees in the flow of their daily work so that everyone is able to actively participate in driving positive change.

These AI-powered, personalized nudges, backed by behavioral science, have proven highly effective in elevating leadership: Studies show 96% of nudge recipients reporting noticeable positive changes in leadership behaviors. By leveraging People Insights Platform capabilities like Activate, which includes AI-assisted Action Planning and Intelligent Nudges, organizations can empower managers, align actions with strategic goals, and unlock lasting organizational change by engaging all employees in the transformation process.

Go From Disruption to Transformation With Perceptyx

Ready to transform your organization's approach to change management and employee engagement? Schedule a demo with Perceptyx today.