Change is hard… Does it have to be? | Business BeyonDIY | 008
Overcoming Resistance: Effective Strategies for Change Management in Small Businesses
In this episode of 'Business Beyond DIY,' host Steve Krausse discusses the common perception that 'change is hard' and explores whether it truly has to be that way for small businesses. Steve identifies factors contributing to resistance to change, such as discomfort with unfamiliarity and perceived threats to job roles. He offers practical strategies for motivating employees by aligning their self-interests with business goals, suggesting mechanisms like profit sharing, improved working environments, and better tools. Steve emphasizes the importance of ensuring that the benefits promised to employees are actually realized to foster a positive attitude toward change. The episode concludes with an invitation for small business owners to share their experiences with change management to shape an upcoming comprehensive online program.
00:00 Introduction: The Myth of 'Change is Hard' 00:51 Welcome to Business Beyond DIY 01:50 Why Do We Perceive Change as Hard? 04:05 The Necessity of Change in Business 04:52 Overcoming Resistance to Change 07:07 Motivating Employees for Change 09:10 Creating a Supportive Work Environment 10:06 Implementing Effective Change Processes 12:57 Training and Leadership Development 15:54 Conclusion and Call to Action
Change is hard… Does it have to be? | Business BeyonDIY | 008
Overcoming Resistance: Effective Strategies for Change Management in Small Businesses
In this episode of 'Business Beyond DIY,' host Steve Krausse discusses the common perception that 'change is hard' and explores whether it truly has to be that way for small businesses. Steve identifies factors contributing to resistance to change, such as discomfort with unfamiliarity and perceived threats to job roles. He offers practical strategies for motivating employees by aligning their self-interests with business goals, suggesting mechanisms like profit sharing, improved working environments, and better tools. Steve emphasizes the importance of ensuring that the benefits promised to employees are actually realized to foster a positive attitude toward change. The episode concludes with an invitation for small business owners to share their experiences with change management to shape an upcoming comprehensive online program.
00:00 Introduction: The Myth of 'Change is Hard' 00:51 Welcome to Business Beyond DIY 01:50 Why Do We Perceive Change as Hard? 04:05 The Necessity of Change in Business 04:52 Overcoming Resistance to Change 07:07 Motivating Employees for Change 09:10 Creating a Supportive Work Environment 10:06 Implementing Effective Change Processes 12:57 Training and Leadership Development 15:54 Conclusion and Call to Action
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Steve Krausse:
I bet you've heard it. You've probably even said it. Change is hard. We hear people say it, and when change feels hard, we remember it and it validates that perception. We keep believing that making changes to our businesses is hard.
Steve Krausse:
When we hear a colleague share a setback in their business, we might even comment that change is hard. I can't even count the number of changes I've made in a business over the years. Some worked, some didn't, and some felt really difficult. The more I've thought about it, the more I wonder if it has to be that way. Is changing your business really hard, or have we all fallen for the popular zeitgeist so deeply that we've simply made it true?
Steve Krausse:
Hi, business owners. Thank you for being the backbone of the economy, and welcome to Business Beyond DIY. I'm your host, Steve Krause, a passionate small business veteran of over 30 years. I help owners like you DIY what makes sense or when needed, DIYH, do it with help, to make practical, actionable, sustainable changes to your business so that you can increase your happiness, your impact, your profit, and company value. Business beyond DIY will help you get the most out of your entrepreneurial journey whether you're a one person show or a 50 member ensemble.
Steve Krausse:
If you're a regular listener, thank you for that. If you're new to the show and the content sounds valuable, consider subscribing so you'll never miss an episode. Now let's roll up our sleeves and get to work. Let's talk a little bit about why change is hard or why do we perceive it to be hard. The first thing is that we perceive it to be hard because of either the effort we have to put in to make it work or the fact that we put in effort and it doesn't achieve the results that we were looking for.
Steve Krausse:
And that makes it feel hard. What's really happening is we simply are putting effort into something that isn't achieving the results that we want. So how is that happening? Change is unfamiliar. By its very nature in a business, change takes the familiar and shoves it out the door.
Steve Krausse:
And humans are not super fond of what is unfamiliar, for better or worse. So that unfamiliarity makes us uncomfortable. And that discomfort ends up causing disruption in our lives, in our work, in the norms of our office, in the culture, in our building. So the norms of our our business become threatened by the concept of whatever change we're trying to implement even if it makes sense. And if it makes sense to you, you assume, based on a myriad of cognitive biases, that it makes sense to everyone.
Steve Krausse:
And that is a different video, but we're gonna talk today about how we can identify some of the problems that cause us to have, a lack of, engagement when it comes to change and how how we can overcome those and why it doesn't have to be as hard as maybe it's been in the past. So our norms are threatened because of disruption and the discomfort of the idea of change. So this threat to norms makes people think that you might be questioning their performance and their value to the business. The last thing we need to remember about change is that it is absolutely necessary for the long term health of our business. Even if our business started 20 years ago and has been solid for many years, the economy and the environment and the competitive landscape is always changing.
Steve Krausse:
And we have to adapt and and update to make sure that we stay competitive. So how do we counter this kind of change resistance in our team? And it could be our coworkers, it could be our employees, it could be partners who don't recognize the same thing that you do in order to take a business to the next level. What's important to remember here is that resistance to change is not a character flaw. It's human and it's okay.
Steve Krausse:
So I wanna cover a few things that don't necessarily motivate employees to implement change. First of all, higher profits for the owner, higher business value for the owner, those things don't necessarily motivate change in employees because they don't translate into something that the employee gets to benefit from. The other one that used to work maybe years ago is but I'm the boss, and you need to do what I said. But the reality is that employees are able to move from business to business with a lot more fluidity than they used to because we have gotten used to it as a culture. Once upon a time, if you had what we call good work ethic and you worked for a big company, they would keep you and you could feel secure.
Steve Krausse:
At least, that's the myth that we tell ourselves. And whether that's true or not statistically is not the point. The point is that people are moving and are willing to move from one job to another much more fluidly than they used to, which means that we can't count on people to simply sit at their desk or do their job and change and improve because we said so, because of the threat of not having a job. The unemployment rate is simply not that high. So we have to accept the reality of where we are as business owners and realize that actually us having to compete for good employees is a benefit to the marketplace.
Steve Krausse:
It might be stressful as a business owner to try and figure out how you can do that, but it is important to a high quality competitive market. So what do we do about it? What can we do to motivate employees to implement change? I touched on this briefly, but employees work for their own self interest. So the implementation of successful change must take that into account.
Steve Krausse:
So we can't lean on what we used to call work ethic. Because work ethic is a self motivated behavior based on an internal view of internal in here, an internal view of the future and the world. I behave this way, and my employer will behave in a commensurately positive way. That isn't guaranteed anymore, and maybe it never was. But we certainly know now that that relationship is more tenuous than it's ever been.
Steve Krausse:
So the first thing that I always suggest to people to at least think about when we're talking about how do we motivate people to improve the business that we are trying to run is to incorporate some kind of profit sharing. This may not be right for you, but it's an example that we can use to talk about how do we make the the effects of change valuable to our team so that they can realize some kind of benefit when we wanna implement a change. So we wanna make this change, and if we do and it's successful and we need employees' help, the benefits will be partially distributed back to the team using this mechanism. One thing that's very, very important about this is that that mechanism cannot be overly complicated to the point where it's never actually realized. A benefit that isn't realized will immediately be recognized by your employees and your team, and it will turn into a demotivator rather than a motivator.
Steve Krausse:
Maybe profit sharing doesn't work for you. Or maybe it's part of a comprehensive plan that you've come up with that would include something else. Maybe demonstrably improved working environment would help your employees. If we implement this change and we change the financial outcome for the business, we can improve the business as a workplace with more comfortable chairs, a lower workload. So that would come from improvements resulting in increased efficiency, better hours, work from home, flexible working hours, and these things can all be combined or used in part from one another so that you can create a more effective work environment for your team, but it still has to be successful.
Steve Krausse:
So we have to implement ways that we can gain success in the with those tools or with those concepts. So if we want to work flexible hours or we want to have work from home, we need to have a few things in place such as asynchronous communication, things like Slack and other asynchronous communication tools. We may need consolidated data resources, Google Drive, for example, or other shared data sources. And so we can put these things together so that our employees can gain benefits. Now, those things in themselves may be an improvement to your business, Or they may just be part of the structure we put in place once we can financially engage it so that employees get the benefit of another improvement.
Steve Krausse:
So if we do something else that makes the business better, we are able to put some time, energy, and resources into some of these other programs to make the work environment more effective for employees and more effective for us. Employees like to know they're winning. So some of the changes, some of the benefits that you might reap after this or be able to implement once you have, of performance improvement, you might be able to share with the team clearer standards of success, better document control, formal review processes, demonstrably improved work processes that facilitate success, better tools, job specific tooling, for example. We've been doing this piecemeal for this customer this way, one at a time by hand for 10 years. But if we spend a little bit of money, we can get a fixture so that it can be done repeatedly and more quickly.
Steve Krausse:
That's better for your team, and it's actually better for productivity. We might be able to bring in better tools, a programmable c and c, a 3 d printer for prototyping. The list goes on, and it's not the point of this this video to explain, you know, every situation. The idea is for you and your team to to collaborate and figure out what would benefit you and your team as a result of increased financial stability for your organization. Clearer work instructions and inspection criteria allow it allow your team to know exactly what's expected of them and when they've achieved that.
Steve Krausse:
That is a huge boost in confidence for the people who are doing work to provide value to your customers. So let's take this a step further. Once we have a great work environment and we have the tools and processes in place that can help people succeed more effectively, now we can back up and use the financial benefits from the change that we made in the first place to begin training and helping employees improve themselves in their careers, and they become better employees and become more more effective in in doing their work for the business. Now we take it a step further. And now that we don't have to micromanage every little thing because our processes and our systems are improved, Now we can take some time to improve as business leaders.
Steve Krausse:
And when we learn, we become more effective leaders, and we can improve our businesses even further. We've talked a little bit about what causes people to become uncomfortable with change and how they proceed to go from discomfort to resistant. And as we communicate with them, we need to understand those things so that we can bring that information into our change process and say, we are going to make sure that people feel comfortable with this so that it isn't a threat. It's a benefit. So we're gonna take away the threat, and we're gonna offer the benefit of the change in some way, whether that's profit sharing, improved work environment, better processes, or any number improved, benefits, any number of things that might be something that our employees would value.
Steve Krausse:
Then we take the value that we reap from the benefit from the change. We make absolutely sure that we keep our word, that we distribute the benefit as we said we would. Once that happens once or twice, your team is going to begin to realize that change is not a threat, and that when they participate in that change, they realize a benefit from it as well. Change doesn't have to be hard, But it is always going to be work, and it may not be the kind of work that you're used to. And that's okay.
Steve Krausse:
Remember to use the outcome of any change to provide benefit to those whose behavior or action we'll need to change to implement it. Incorporate the input and participation of the right people at the right point for the right reason. And I wanna mention here, and this is something that I will cover in another episode, but I wanted to just cut kind of touch on it. Remember that input is not the same thing as participation. But again, we'll talk about that in another episode.
Steve Krausse:
So why this episode on change management? Well, it came up because I'm in the middle of developing the material for a comprehensive online program that explains a structure for change management that is designed specifically to achieve results for small business owners. If you've checked in to change management or maybe you've already been involved with change management at an employer, before you started your own company or, in some other capacity, you're gonna find that a lot of those programs are designed and, taught around organizations with large structures, with a lot of resources, perhaps with line production that's continuous. And as a small business owner, we often don't have continuous production. We don't have a lot of resources to throw at a change management program.
Steve Krausse:
And so we have to incorporate it into our own workload, and we have to pull from the team who is doing the work usually to make it happen. So we need to figure out how to do that effectively, minimize the amount of cost that we put into it, and maximize the amount of benefit. I would love to hear what parts of change management have been challenging for you in your small business so I can incorporate those into this upcoming program. There'll be a link right here in the video or not a link, there'll be a web a web URL right here in the video, for you to go ahead and go to if you'd like to, participate in that. There'll also be a link in the show notes for this video on YouTube and on the podcast episode, the audio version.
Steve Krausse:
Also, I will be very clear about this. I use Mailchimp to do my surveys, and this particular survey is just a few questions and it does not ask for an email address. I'm very interested in your opinion and experience. And if you wanna join my email list or you wanna get in touch with me, that's fine. But that's not part of your participation here.
Steve Krausse:
I really wanna hear from you, and I want you to do it without any strings attached. Below, you're going to find a link to an article about why change management fails. It was an interesting read and it kind of goes into the same sorts of things and adds a little context that I didn't have time to cover in this video. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Business Beyond DIY. If you're already subscribed to the show, thank you.
Steve Krausse:
What are you taking away today? Please consider leaving a 5 star review on your favorite pod catcher and let me know. Reviews have a big impact on making Business Beyond DIY visible to other owners. And remember that doing it yourself doesn't have to mean going it alone.