Making Change Happen and Making It Stick
Five factors make the greatest difference in fostering the new behaviors needed for any type of transformation. All of them reflect the basic importance of people in
implementing and embedding change.
➊ Understand and spell out the impact of the change
on people. A prerequisite to any viable change program
is a clear-eyed assessment of the impact it will have on
various constituents.
Is Web Surfing
Distracting Your Staff?
➋ Build an emotional and rational case for change.
Many leaders excel at building the rational case for
change, but they are less adept in appealing to people’s
emotional core.
➌ Ensure that the entire leadership team is a role
model for the change. Senior managers must be not
only “on top” of the change program, but also “in front”
of it, modeling the new behaviors they are asking their
staff to adopt and holding one another accountable for
the initiative’s success.
➍ Mobilize your staff to “own” and accelerate the
change. The blunt truth is that most change initiatives
are done “to” employees, not implemented “with” them
or “by” them.
➎ Embed the change in the fabric of the organization.
Investigate how to engage and involve staff over the long
term and how to institutionalize best practices to capture
the full benefit of the change and any future changes.
www.strategy-business.com, December 20, 2010
© ISTOCKPHO TO
Anumber of studies suggest that U.S. workers waste between one and two hours a day web surf- ing, costing their organizations billions of dollars in
lost productivity. In response, some employers have banned
private Internet use at the office,
a practice that might come back
to bite them in other ways,
according to new research.
By banning web surfing,
employers are essentially
asking their workers to resist
temptation until they can go
home and surf on their own
time. The rub: studies show that
people asked to resist tempta-
tion in anticipation of reward
became less productive and
make more mistakes in their
current tasks. Harvard Business
School Research Fellow Marco
Piovesan and colleagues found that the act of resisting temp-
tation distracted subjects enough that their work performance
actually suffered.
Researchers found that subjects exhibited a decrease
in productivity when they were tempted to watch a
funny video, but then told not to do so. Comparatively, subjects who were allowed to watch more video were
more productive.
Researchers also indicate that prohibiting private Internet
use at work can actually diminish employees’ productivity.
That effect could be especially critical in jobs where small
mistakes could mean a big difference in performance.
The findings have clear implications for how office
environments are designed. If an organization is not able to
completely remove certain temptations such as access to the
Internet, companies should enact policies that minimize the
distraction on employees.
