Tag: complexity

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Embracing the Four-Day Work Week

The concept of a four-day work week is stirring up significant interest globally, challenging traditional norms and promising a revolution in work-life balance and productivity. As we navigate the post-pandemic world, the push towards this model has gained momentum, with various countries pioneering the change and reaping its benefits.

Historical Shifts and Modern Productivity

The evolution from a six-day to a five-day work week marked a significant milestone in our pursuit of balancing work and life. With Henry Ford’s endorsement in the early 20th century, the five-day work week became a standard, heralding a new era of employee welfare and efficiency. Today, we stand at another pivotal moment, as studies reveal a 400% productivity increase since the inception of the five-day work week, challenging us to rethink how we can achieve even greater efficiency and well-being in our professional lives.

The Global Perspective: Lessons Learned

Countries like Spain, the UK, New Zealand, Belgium, and Japan have led the way in adopting a four-day work week, with remarkable outcomes. A Bloomberg study highlighted a seamless transition for over 70 UK companies, with a majority reporting substantial success in this new schedule. Closer to home, PRAXIS, a Toronto-based marketing communications agency, joined the 4-Day Week Global trial, aligning with 59 other North American companies to explore this model’s potential.

Tangible Benefits: Beyond Wellness

The shift to a four-day work week transcends employee wellness, offering substantial business advantages. From Perpetual Guardian’s 20% productivity boost in New Zealand to Microsoft Japan’s 40% productivity increase and significant reductions in operational costs, the evidence is compelling. This model not only promotes employee well-being but also drives efficiency and sustainability, presenting an attractive proposition for businesses and employees alike.

Managing the Shift: A Strategic Approach

Embracing a four-day work week requires planning and change management. Here’s how I propose to navigate this transformative journey:

The first step is understanding the current state of your organization. This involves assessing cultural readiness, existing workloads, and operational efficiency. It’s about asking the right questions: Are we operating at peak efficiency? Can certain tasks be automated or streamlined? This phase sets the groundwork for a successful transition by identifying potential barriers and opportunities for optimization.

With a solid understanding of your organization’s readiness, the next step is detailed planning. This involves setting clear objectives, defining success metrics, and developing a roadmap for implementation. Planning should also include stakeholder engagement, ensuring that all levels of the organization are informed and onboard with the proposed changes.

Before a full rollout, a pilot program is essential. This controlled trial allows you to test the four-day work week with a select group of employees, providing invaluable data on its impacts. Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be monitored closely, including productivity levels, employee satisfaction, and any operational challenges that arise. The pilot phase is crucial for fine-tuning the approach before a wider implementation.

Armed with insights from the pilot, the launch phase involves rolling out the four-day work week across the organization. This should be done gradually, allowing for adjustments based on departmental needs and feedback. Communication is key during this phase, as is continued monitoring of the same KPIs tracked during the pilot.

Finally, the sustainment phase focuses on embedding the four-day work week into the organization’s culture. This includes regular reviews of KPIs, continuous improvement initiatives, and maintaining open lines of communication with employees. The goal is to ensure the change is not only successful in the short term but is sustainable and beneficial in the long run.

Looking Ahead

As we stand on the brink of a potential work culture revolution, the four-day work week promises a future where efficiency and well-being are not mutually exclusive but mutually enhancing. The global and local evidence underscores the feasibility and benefits of this model, offering a blueprint for organizations ready to embrace change.

For those intrigued by the possibility of a four-day work week and seeking to understand the intricacies of such a transition, including insights from leaders who have embarked on this journey, I invite you to listen to our latest episode of Reroute Reflections. Join us as we delve deeper into this transformative topic and explore how your organization can navigate the path to a more balanced, productive, and satisfying work life.

For a deeper dive into the intricacies of this transformation, including personal insights and listener questions, I invite you to listen to our latest episode of the Reroute Reflections podcast. Join us as we explore the future of work and how we can collectively navigate these changes for a brighter, more balanced tomorrow.

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Mastering Change: Effective Communication as the Key to Change Management

Change is often challenging for individuals because they tend to prefer a comfortable and predictable state. While this minimizes risk, it also can disconnect us from the present moment. We become less receptive to change-related messages. We’ve all felt this before; have you ever arrived at a destination without consciously considering the route? Perhaps missing a more efficient path. This automatic mode (or “auto-pilot”), while comfortable, often blinds us to innovative possibilities and hinders our ability to adapt to new, potentially better ways of doing things. This auto-pilot state is evolutionary in nature, it allows us to dedicate less cognitive effort and frees up capacity for other activities, talking with your partner in the car and listening to music. We like our auto-pilot state, it’s why people resist change so much. Change requires a significant amount of cognitive effort and introduces feelings of discomfort, unfamiliarity, and fear of the unknown. We associate change with loss and added effort, no wonder we resist it.

We can all agree that communication is the cornerstone of engagement, yet it is often met with resistance. We have to remember that our employees come from different backgrounds, departments, and levels of experience, they are individuals, unique in every aspect, including how they prefer to receive information. Some might favor direct emails, while others might respond better to interactive platforms like Slack or Teams. Furthermore, the tone, format, and detail can resonate differently across these groups. Recognizing and respecting these nuances is crucial. For instance, a young, tech-savvy team might appreciate concise digital updates, whereas a more traditional group might value detailed reports or face-to-face meetings. Tailoring communication strategies to suit these diverse preferences is not just about delivering a message; it’s about ensuring the message is received, understood, and acted upon. When change initiatives fail, it’s often not due to the change itself, but rather to a gap in how and what we communicate to those who are being impacted. Ultimately, the goal is not just to check a box and send out information timely; it’s about fostering a deeper understanding of what is going to happen and inspire action amongst those who are being asked to change the way they do things moving forward.

The most important messages to communicate depend on a number of factors. It depends on who you’re communicating to, what you’re communicating about, the internal and external landscape that is surrounding the change and so much more. It’s why here at Reroute Consulting we advocated for a targeted approach to how we communicate our messages. We spend time getting to know the business, it’s stakeholders and those who will be impacted by the change. Does it take more time? Yes. Do we always get the intended results? Sometimes. We are after all dealing with people, there is no such thing as a guaranteed solution in managing change. This concept of complexity is explored in more detail in our article, Complexity and Change Management.

While there is no playbook we can follow, there are some guiding principles based on several years of research. In general, employees want to hear organizational related messaging from the top, from the CEO/President of the firm. However, personal messages, such as how my day-to-day activities will be changing as the result of a change, not surprisingly require a personal touch; employee prefer to hear these messages from their direct supervisor/leader.

When we consider the messaging, employees typically want answers to five fundamental questions:

  1. How will this change impact me?
  2. Why is this change happening?
  3. Why should I care?
  4. What will the future look like?
  5. How will we get there?

Leaders, including our senior leaders. want similar messaging, with one additional piece: what will their role be in managing the change. In other words, what are they expected to do to help support the change. This has many facets to it, it includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  1. How and what should we communicate to our employees?
  2. What are the key messages we should be sharing with employees?
  3. Where do I go to get the information I need and who do I contact for support?

These are things you can control; identifying your audience, targeting the message to a particular group, identifying who is best to send it out and determining what the message will say. The difficulty comes in trying to encourage motivation, understanding and engagement about the change, This has always been a challenge and it’s getting harder over time. There are so many distractions today, while many of us in the field seek to achieve 80% readership, we’re lucky if we get 20% of our readers to read a message we send in it’s entirety. It’s our firm belief here at Reroute Consulting, that the challenge lies not in the change itself but in how it’s conveyed to employees. We don’t think that people hate change, full stop. People are far more complex to enable us to make such a prevailing assumption. We think the gap is in how we approach communication strategy that needs an overhaul. In our experience, less formal messaging, with the primary goal of encouraging collaboration and transparency yields the highest likelihood for success.

Are you feeling a bit discouraged, feeling like there is no such thing as an effective communication strategy; there are just too many variables that need to be considered and who has the resources to ensure that we dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t.’ You know we wouldn’t do that to you. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and a two actionable solutions to help you design, develop and deliver effective communications.

First, effective communications requires the support of our people leaders. Leaders are crucial to helping customize the messaging to meet the specific needs of their employees, they are best equip to tailor a standard message to their team so it resonates. They are also better equipped to provide employees with the space they need to express their concerns and questions, and this space is crucial to driving engagement. Leaders should be receptive to their employees concerns, even resistance, ensuring that they feel comfortable to share their grievances so that they can tackle them head on instead of having these feelings linger in silence only to come up later, stronger and more disruptive in nature. There are many tactics leaders can use to help manage employee resistance.

Second, given the inherent unpredictability of change, it is also important that we continuously monitor, learn from, and adjust our approach to managing the change as necessary. This includes how we communicate details of the change. This process is easier said than done, it requires a willingness to receive feedback from employees and, more importantly, actually do something about the feedback received. It isn’t always easy to operationalize, but giving employees a voice will work wonders to drive the level of motivation, understanding and engagement we all want to see when introducing a change, an investment in maintaining open lines of communication, transparency and collaboration will always yield dividends, if you can commit to taking the necessary action based on the information received. This means sometimes going back to the drawing board and starting over.

Change will never be flawless, and employees may never fully embrace it. However, by altering the way we communicate change to our employees, can have a significant impact on our ability to introduce a successful change.

Read our follow up article for a list of the top 5 communication tactics and strategies we’ve used in practice to improve our ability to drive motivation, understanding and engagement for our clients.

The Evolving Role of Change Managers in the Age of AI

‘Augmented’ rather than ‘Artificial’ Intelligence to Overcome the Dreaded Blank Page
Image Credit: Nature

Nearly 50% say they feel scared and worried about ChatGPT and other large language based models (LLMs); while only 25% feel excited. As a change manager, I’ve been fascinated with the storyline surrounding ChatGPT. I can’t help but wonder if the advent of the internet was met with similar hostility, or if people embraced it with open arms, grateful they no longer needed to visit a library for research on a school paper.

The world has been evolving at a record pace, and the amount of information available has never been greater, continuing to grow exponentially every day. In just the last 39 years alone, the amount of data in the world has increased by more than 7,500 times. Let’s face it, the world is not what it used to be, and if we want to keep up, we need to evolve too.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has and will continue to play a crucial role in this evolution and while we often hear AI-driven disruption linked to fields such as healthcare, finance and transportation and logistics. I’d argue that it might be easier to list the fields that will not be impacted by AI-driven disruption than those that will be. I’d argue that the field of change management is an area where AI-driven disruption is imminent, and I for one can’t wait to add more AI tools to my toolkit.

AI has already begun enhancing many of the activities that change managers do on a daily basis, including analysis, training and communications. AI tools can sift through vast amounts of data, identifying patterns and trends to help identify people impacts associated with a change, it can help create clear, concise messaging to help draft standard communications to employees or other key stakeholders, it can also be used to help keep people better informed during times of change. For example, replacing our guides and frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) documents with a chatbot that can help answer any question an employee asks in real time. These are only a few examples of what AI technology, like ChatGPT can do to help free up capacity for us to focus on what matters; managing the complexity of the change in front of us.

Remember, change – by a function of the fact that it involves people – is complex in nature. This means that how we manage a change is constantly evolving before, during and after implementation. Managing a successful change requires us to identify changes in people’s attitudes, behaviours and beliefs as quickly as possible in order to reiterate our approach accordingly and manage the change effectively. Sound complicated? It isn’t, it’s complex and an AI tool to help us identify these patterns quicker will be invaluable to say the least.

Okay, so I’m a fan! However, it is crucial that we remember a few important things as we start to leverage this technology so that we do so in an ethical and responsible way. AI-generated content should be viewed as a starting point, rather than a finished product, and it remains the responsibility of change managers to verify the accuracy of the content, to maintain the empathy and genuine connection that we bring to managing change, and to not become over reliant on the tool itself. The experience and expertise we bring to the table can never be replaced by a machine. We are managing the people side of change after all. This can’t be done by a computer. However, there are elements of the role that can be done more efficiently by AI, so just as we wouldn’t go to a library to complete a school report today, let’s not fail to leverage what’s available to us to help us more effectively manage change and do what we do best; minimize fear and anxiety associated with change for the firm’s most valuable asset, their employees.

As we navigate the complexities of change management, it becomes increasingly clear that AI’s role transcends the traditional notion of Artificial Intelligence towards a more collaborative paradigm of Augmented Intelligence. This perspective redefines AI not as a replacement for human ingenuity and empathy but as an extension that amplifies our capabilities. In embracing AI tools like ChatGPT in change management, we leverage technology to enhance our understanding, decision-making, and efficiency, ensuring that the human element remains at the core of all transformations.

Moreover, one of the most understated yet profound benefits of integrating AI into our practices is its solution to the daunting “blank page” issue. The the challenge of drafting the first line of a communication or an initial plan, often hinders creativity and productivity. AI, in this context, serves as a catalyst, providing a starting point that can inspire ideas, spark creativity, and break the paralysis that the blank page presents. It’s about turning the blank page into a canvas of possibilities, where AI-generated suggestions become the first brushstrokes of what will eventually be a masterpiece refined by human experience, empathy, and strategic insight.

Breaking the Mold: Why Initiatives Fail

Why do change initiatives fail? If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught society anything, it’s that change is inevitable. If you cannot adapt to the ever-changing world, you will be left behind. If we know the only constant in life is change, why is it difficult to implement change management strategies? Organizations need to recognize the complexity of change more often. The factors that impact change are dynamic and constantly evolving. Research from McKinsey and Company concluded that 70% of all large-scale transformations fail. Change initiatives in organizations fail for several reasons, most notably, poor execution and planning.

Poor execution of a change initiative can lead to subpar results, or even failure. It is important to have a clear implementation plan and execute it efficiently. Failing to meticulously plan a change management strategy, such as identifying potential risks and developing a contingency plan, can lead to unexpected problems and derail the initiative.

There are three approaches that have garnered some popularity in recent years to help address these gaps.

Agile, for example, is an approach that emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, and frequent iterations. This approach is particularly effective for complex and rapidly changing projects, where requirements are unclear or subject to change. Agile helps to manage change by enabling teams to work in sprints, focusing on short-term goals, and delivering value at every stage of the project. This approach encourages open communication, transparency, and regular feedback, enabling project teams to quickly adapt to changing requirements and overcome obstacles. One of the more popular agile frameworks is Scrum.

Chaos Monkey, is another, albeit extreme example of how companies have tried to close this gap. It is a technique used to test the resilience of systems by intentionally causing failures. This approach helps to identify weaknesses and allows teams to fix them before a real failure occurs, ensuring that the system is resilient and can withstand unexpected outages. Two notable examples of chaos monkey in action were at Shopify and Netflix; Shopify employees returned to work after the holiday break in 2023 to find their calendars stripped bare of recurring meetings. Additionally, Netflix created a program that turns off its production servers. The idea is to expose the company’s engineers to failure more often, encouraging them to build more robust systems.

Finally, the Lean startup methodology is an approach that prioritizes customer satisfaction and aims to eliminate waste and maximize value. This approach helps to manage change by encouraging teams to continually evaluate and adapt to customer needs to drive project success. In other words, it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “Big Design Up Front” development. One company that has used the lean startup methodology is Dropbox. Lean startup allowed Dropbox to gain high-quality feedback from target customers which the team subsequently used to shape product development in line with consumer needs. Dropbox has over 500 million users worldwide using its file hosting service.

Overall, change is complex and dynamic in nature, and Agile, Chaos Monkey, and Lean startup methodology are all approaches that can help teams address gaps in poor execution and planning. By emphasizing collaboration, flexibility, continuous feedback, and experimentation, these approaches help teams to manage change effectively, identify weaknesses, and deliver successful outcomes.

For more on the complex nature of change, check out Understanding The Connection Between Complexity and Change Management.

Complexity and Change Management

Copyright: © Daniel Biber, Germany, Shortlist, Professional, Natural World & Wildlife (2018 Professional competition), 2018 Sony World Photography Awards
Copyright: © Daniel Biber, Germany, Shortlist, Professional, Natural World & Wildlife (2018 Professional competition), 2018 Sony World Photography Awards

Change is the one constant in the world of business. In today’s interconnected, global economy, the rate of change has never been higher and while there are a host of frameworks available to help you get started, there is one fundamental truth about managing change. It’s complex.

This concept of complexity was first introduced to me by Rick Nason, a Professor of Enterprise Risk Management at Dalhousie University and author of the book, It’s Not Complicated: The Art and Science of Complexity in Business.

He explains the concept of complexity as follows:

A complex system is like raising a teenager, which seems to involve a random series of events with no set of rules, best practices, or recipes to follow. Raising two teenagers simultaneously in seemingly the exact same way can lead to very different results. Each teenager is unique in how he or she responds to various events and attempts at control; furthermore, their responses appear to change randomly over time. Raising teenagers can be a frustrating experience for a parent. (Teenagers gener­ally seem to be unappreciative of the process as well.) The best that a parent can do is to set a few broad principles for behavior and deal with each unique situation as it arises, recognizing that each teenager is an ever-changing mix of emotions and desires.

It’s Not Complicated: The Art and Science of Complexity in Business by Rick Nason

This is in direct comparison to simple and complicated systems.

A simple system is like cooking, you have a recipe or instructions to follow and there is a large margin of error; adding too much sauce often doesn’t make your pasta inedible. Conversely, in a complicated system, the instructions must be followed exactly to generate the desired outcome, such as getting an astronaut to the moon and back.

Managing change has traditionally and continues to rely on static frameworks which are more akin to managing complicated problems. However, we can’t forget that managing change, at it’s core, involves people and since people are complex, change management must also be complex.

Managing change is not about applying the right framework. It requires more flexibility and dynamism than that in order to manage the complexities effectively.

We must remain attentive and receptive to how the organization, employees and customers are reacting to the change over time, from the first awareness message to implementation and beyond.

Reactions to a change vary by individual and these reactions evolve over time which is what makes managing change so complex and why a static framework will never yield the desired outcomes.

This is not to say that the frameworks available today are not valuable, I use elements of them in my practice today. However, relying on any framework as anything more than a starting point can have disastrous consequences.

What’s more important in managing change is your mindset. If you approach change with a “test & learn” mindset and an understanding that change is complex, you can often avoid some of the common missteps that plague change initiatives today.

Interested in reading more about this topic?

READ OUR NEW EBOOK, MANAGING THE COMPLEXITY OF CHANGE.