How a digital-first culture helps you overcome resistance to change

Digital transformation can fundamentally change the way your people carry out their daily tasks. It can even extend to the way they interact with other individuals internally or externally. That’s why you need to create a digital-first culture that’s willing and open to transformation (or change, depending on the extent to which your organisation is transformed).

By prioritising culture, mindset alignment, stakeholder engagement and all of the other aspects that add up to a change management strategy, you can:

• Accelerate decision-making – the right mindset and technology empower your people to make quick and well-informed decisions
• Deliver faster results – having access to the right information at the right time allows your organisation to move quicker
• Attract more (and better) talent – people are drawn to digital leaders because of the promise of cross-departmental and hierarchal collaboration and greater autonomy

This ultimately means your transformation initiative stands a much better chance of success. But how can you create this culture? And how do you manage resistance to change to begin creating this digital-first culture?

1. Expect resistance

Even if your solution appears to be the ideal improvement to a problem, there will always be resistance. This is because people often don’t like change, regardless of whether it’s best for them and/or it’s something they’ve been asking for.

So, spend time before the project launches to identify areas where you’ll most likely see resistance (and the form it might take). This will help you deal with the resistance quicker and prevent it from impacting the project.

2. Apply change management from the start and follow a structured plan

Resistance can be avoided if effective change management is initiated at the start of the project. This is something that organisations can forget, which ultimately results in the project not delivering the expected benefits of value. The fault doesn’t lie with the change – it lies with how that change was managed.

Examples of effective change management tactics include:

• Planning for the change by understanding the business context and project agenda
• Building and sustaining awareness across the business as the project progresses
• Aligning the mindsets of your key stakeholders and assessing the impact of change (this includes answering the “what’s in it for me?” question)
• Creating change journeys and plans tailored to impacted stakeholder groups
• Building a change management team with a mix of internal and external resources

3. Pinpoint the root causes of resistance

To truly manage resistance, you must dig into the true nature of it, not just focus on the symptoms. It’s about discovering why someone is resisting, rather than how that resistance is manifesting. What employees resist is typically not technical change but social change – for example, the change in their human relationship that normally comes with technical change.

Meet with your stakeholders and identify:

• Their motivations
• Their pain points
• Their fears

Knowing these root causes can help you prepare a compelling case for the need for change, which your leadership and senior management should then communicate to the rest of the organisation.

4. Earn buy-in from your key stakeholders

When it comes to managing resistance to change, you need your leadership and senior management on side. Employees decide whether they think change is important by looking to senior leaders. If they aren’t clearly engaged, employees will likely follow suit and resist it.

Senior leaders can mitigate resistance by:

• Demonstrating their commitment to change
• Making a compelling case that supports the need for change
• Showing how much they support the change

Successful transformation requires a strong culture

Attitude and mindset are key to any kind of transformation. And in the case of business-related digital transformation, that applies to the utmost. After all, there are various parties involved and the changes can be tectonic in nature. The sooner you recognise and tackle this, the more likely your transformation will achieve its intended outcomes.

In our report, produced in association with Business Reporter, we look at the internal and external impacts of digital transformation and how it connects to customer experience. Download it today by clicking here.

By Ian Kingstone, UK Director – Strategy & Change, Columbus