Imagine: your management team wants to see an improvement in quality, an increase in quantity, and a decrease in time to market. So you spend a lot of time and work with a lot of resources to research, plan, design, build, and implement a process plan that you are confident will help your production team be more efficient, make fewer mistakes, increase output, and get the product to market faster. The management team is excited about this new process and is eager to see it in action.
With great confidence, you present this new process to your employees. Instead of cheers and pats on the back, you get pushback from those who have to work with this new process. You explain in great detail how this process will improve production and increase revenue. But your shiny new plan is met with resistance.
Why?
There are many reasons that employees may be reluctant to adopt a work process. This can be disappointing and frustrating for managers, especially if a lot of time and money has been thrown at the project to implement new procedures.
Here are some of the reasons you may get pushback on a new process proposal.
- Creatures of habit: Humans are creatures of habit and generally don’t like change. If your employees have been doing their jobs a certain way for a long time, they’ve developed many layers of work-related habits that are hard to break.
- Doubts about the necessity of a new process: If your employees already believe that they are doing a good job, they may wonder why you want them to change and worry that a new work procedure will slow them down.
- Fear of added responsibilities: Employees may feel like they don’t have the training or skills necessary to take on new responsibilities, a feeling that can lead to fear of failure.
- Confusion or misunderstanding of the process: Your employees may not understand how certain roles fit within the process. Complex processes may need to be rolled out in small, incremental changes to reduce errors and increase success.
- Lack of understanding about the impact on customers: Employees who don’t have contact with customers may not understand how the proposed process changes will impact the final product and customer satisfaction. People may not follow processes because they don’t think that their work has any kind of impact on customers.
- Inefficient processes: This may be hard to accept, but employees could be working around your processes because those processes simply don’t work. Maybe crucial steps were missed in the planning stages, or you don’t have the right people assigned to the right tasks.
- No support from management: You may have created your business process at the request of company leadership. Sometimes, however, these same leaders are not fully supportive of process implementation and are not willing to wait for results.
- Conflicts with other demands: Sometimes employees may need to deviate from a process to meet a special request. For example, some resources might be pulled from your process to meet the demands made by another process.
What challenges did you face while implementing a new process? Please comment.