How to Enlist Support and Overcome Resistance

You should be prepared to invest in meaningful stakeholder engagement at the start of the change cycle and continue, relentlessly, throughout. It will be worth it.

The biggest single contributor to success is securing the unwavering commitment of the senior change sponsors. Without this, the HR transformation programme becomes vulnerable to attack and disruption. We strongly recommend getting this in place early as a priority.

You may have to be creative to win an audience with the most senior stakeholders. If you can, arrange one-to-one meetings and use these opportunities to present a compelling factual case in support of the programme. If this is not possible, then gain access to the next reporting level and seek to influence this group of people so that they in turn can upwardly influence their superiors.

Whilst one-to-one meetings can be extremely impactful, think creatively about other channels:

• team meetings/workshops;
• invitation to a steering group;
• making sure the Personal Assistant (PA) includes a brief on the HR transformation programme in essential reading material;
• requiring a response through an auditable process, such as electronic tagging, so that the respondent is aware that simply refusing to reply will create an automatic elevation to the steering group or higher;
• using various Web-based tools to engender engagement, such as surveys, discussions forums, blogs and wikis.

Of equal importance to understanding how individuals or groups show their attitudinal stance for the change initiative, it is necessary to monitor and measure behaviour. You will almost certainly identify what we call 'secret subversives' — people who appear to be on your side, but then undermine the programme. They should be identified and dealt with as quickly as possible.

Developing a list of actionable items that demonstrate behaviour is essential. It should include:

• demonstrating that they are accurately communicating the change initiative to their teams;
• showing endorsement of the newly created HR processes;
• signing off on key documentation that allows financial investment.

It is important to stress again that investment of time and effort in the segmentation and characterisation of the stakeholder community, combined with techniques to understand their position on the resistance to commitment continuum, will repay itself in terms of dividend many times over. This is not a task that should be undervalued, misplaced or subordinated to a low level in the priority order.

Often in change programmes these 'soft' or human issues — which is essentially what stakeholder engagement is all about — become subordinated to the technical issues and considerations surrounding system choice and implementation. Beware of allowing the technical issues to take over for too long. Without the people on board, no system will deliver the benefits you promised in the business case.

Once you have mapped out the stakeholders, the next task is to understand where they lie on the resistance to commitment continuum, and this in turn will determine where effort should be prioritised.

The Stakeholder Topography

This is the means by which you can construct a view of the stakeholder population which allows individuals/groups/business units affected by HR transformation to be characterised in terms of their importance to the change process and how they are impacted by it. This is assisted by using the stakeholder mapping framework shown in Figure 1. A sample is shown in the following table:

Stakeholder group	Example impacts
Employees	Maintaining their own data rather than relying on HR administration to do it for them
Line managers	Increased people management responsibilities supported by Web-based HR rather than HR consultants
HR consultants	Move to added value business partner roles rather than administration comfort zone
HR administration	Expert support rather than re-keying administration
HR specialists	Demand driven by business partners rather than line managers
Payroll	Data from Web-based HR system rather than separate re-keying
External recruitment	Reduced number due to e-recruitment functionality

 Figure 1: Stakeholder mapping.

Those individuals or groups that are seen to display high impact and high importance are the most significant in terms of securing acceptance of the change process. Those positioned elsewhere in the matrix present different levels of significance. In these cases, it may be acceptable simply to achieve modest support or even neutrality.

To expand on these points, let us look in more detail at some of the stakeholder groups illustrated in the earlier sample:

• It is evident that line managers are both highly important to the transformation process and highly impacted by it. As such they warrant careful and considered attention. A failure to engage properly with this group and secure a good degree of acceptance to the transformation process will create significant issues, such as poor utilisation of Web-based HR and a failure to adopt more people-centred practices within their role profile. These will at best stifle the transformation process or at worst sabotage it completely.
• The HR administration team are important and may be highly impacted if the intention is to reduce headcount based on the assumption that more HR administration is performed by managers and employees using Web-based HR. This could raise morale/retention issues at a critical time when the new services are being introduced, requiring higher levels of support to users. In this situation, it may not be possible to persuade this group to warmly embrace the transformation process, but it will be necessary to move sentiment into the mildly resistive/neutral zone of the continuum in order to maintain decent service levels.
• The reductions in the number of external recruitment suppliers may antagonise those suppliers eliminated from the new list, but conversely may also provide an injection of encouragement to the group chosen to continue (and possibly enhance) their contribution. These different impacts need to be managed. Those suppliers who are expected to maintain their contracts post HR transformation must be clear and accepting about what is expected of them. The rejected suppliers need to understand the rationale for their exclusion, but may never be accepting of them. This will not impact the HR transformation process in the short term, but may be an issue in the longer term if you seek to re-engage their services.

These examples show the value of stakeholder mapping as a way of categorising the different groups, and informing you about the level of effort and priority that needs to be invested in ongoing activities to bring about desirable outcomes necessary to support the HR transformation programme objectives.

Stakeholder Engagement Tools

Resistance and commitment to change should be seen as a dynamic continuum. This is illustrated in Figure 1

 

Figure 1: Securing commitment.

Aggressive resistance is regarded as a destructive opposition, reflected in destructive behaviour such as purposely committing errors and spoilage, subversion and sabotage.

The neutral or apathy zone represents a situation where people are informed about changes, but their perceptions and attitudes regarding the changes are neutral and their behaviour is characterised by 'passive resignation', representing a transition between resistance and acceptance of change.

Pathological commitment represents the final phase of acceptance to change. In this context, it is characterised by passion for the change process, associated perhaps with obsessive and compulsive behaviours.

Between these poles are various 'shades' of resistance and commitment.

We believe this model provides a diagnostic framework to identify the extent of acceptance or rejection of change in your organisation. Mapping individuals, groups or business units onto the continuum may be difficult and should not be attempted lightly. But it is a powerful tool if used wisely. For example, following the use of one of the survey/measurement tools described below, you could map individuals or groups onto the scale. This provides a basis for meaningful discussion about what needs to happen in order to move those stakeholders into the more positive, commitment end of the continuum, if it can be shown that unacceptable levels of resistance are evident.

You should, of course, be prepared to justify the reason for any assumptions you have made when plotting stakeholders onto the continuum.