No One Cares About Your Change, and There’s Nothing You Can Do To Make Them

 

Harsh, but true. No one really cares about whatever change you’re trying to champion, they care about their own.

Let’s look at an example

The factory in which you manage a production line is purchased by an overseas company. In order to allow easier communication between your location and the main office (now an ocean away), the new main office is shifting their hours one hour later, and your factory is shifting to one hour earlier for all standard operations. They’re asking that your day now shift from 8am-5pm to 7am-4pm.

Overall, it makes sense – now you’ll all have overlap hours until after lunch, opening schedules for calls and efficient communication with the main office. Sounds great!

Your leadership rolls out a series of change communications, discussing all sorts of positives that focus on the people rather than the company:

• Offset hours change drive times to be outside of peak rush hour, shortening commutes.
• Leaving at 4pm allows for more evening time with family before kids go to bed.
• Earlier hours can shorten childcare needs like babysitters and daycare, saving money.

This is a great start! Leadership is considering the needs of their people, not just those of the organization.

But what about you?

• Your commute is short and involves mostly back roads, so rush hour has never been much of a bother.
• Enjoying more daylight hours is nice enough, but not particularly critical as most of your hobbies are indoors.
• You don’t have kids, so family time and child care don’t impact you at all.

The official ‘positives’ are pretty neutral for you. And then there are the negatives:

• You have a Wednesday night poker game that goes fairly late, so getting up an hour earlier will be a challenge.
• Your dog is used to a schedule and resistant to change (talking to the dog, no matter how effectively, will not improve this fact).
• Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you go to the gym before work. The gym opens at 6am, which currently allows you a 45min workout, a shower, and breakfast in time to drive to work and arrive at 7:50am (or 7:52am if the train is running late and you get stuck at the tracks).

The new schedule will throw off your whole routine (not to mention your dog’s important schedule).

In light of all of this happening to you, do you really care about the positive changes for other people? For the company? Nope. You don’t care at all.

So what makes you think that anyone cares about your change initiative?

Nothing I’ve said here shows that the leadership team in our example did anything wrong. Their goal is (and should be) to do what’s best for the company. They also created a communication plan and made an effort to talk about positive impacts for their employees. This is all great.

What else could they have done?

• Allow flexible work arrangements such as offset hours or working from home?
• Casual dress codes?
• Job sharing?

Perhaps these would work for the overseas office, but you work in a factory and manage a production line. In that role, you have to be onsite when the line is operating, so a flexible schedule isn’t an option. You already dress fairly casually, and you always have to follow safety regulations, so it’s unlikely that a dress code change would be impactful to you. Job sharing could be an option, but that would involve reducing your hours (and your paycheck) by half, which is not terribly practical for you.

So what can your leadership really do for you? They can listen. They can respect that this adjustment is hard for you. They can give you plenty of warning so it doesn’t happen suddenly.

And most of all, they can let you choose how you will proceed.

When you’re rolling out a new change initiative, you can take every possible step. You can send out surveys and carefully plan communications. You can implement training and offer incentives. You can listen and talk about options and answer questions and provide any number of support tools.

In the end, change is individual. It's not about the new hours or any new initiative; it's about the direct impacts on our lives.

In our example, perhaps you could shift your poker game to earlier in the evening, start going to the gym after work, and deal with a few weeks of a confused dog (he’ll forgive you, you’re sure of it).

Or you could look for a new job. That may seem excessive to some, but what if your poker game is the only time you see your best friend, and she already arrives late because she works until 6pm? What if your gym is so full after work that a workout takes twice as long or longer? What if your dog…? Ok, you can probably deal with the impact to your dog’s schedule.

The key takeaway is that change is individual, and each individual decides how to deal with it. No matter how effectively you roll out a change initiative, some people will simply not want to come along with you. And that’s OK.