Employers are failing to take into account staff needs - such as transparent career structures - when putting their organisations through change programmes, a situation that has the majority of HR professionals worried.
A new poll by HR news and information service HR Gateway suggests that a huge 62% of HR professionals are ëvery worriedí that change is not taking into account people management needs, with only 10% saying that they were ënot worried at allí.
Asked to choose their level of concern over the matter on a scale from A to D where A is ëvery worriedí, a further 20% voted ’B’ while the remaining eight per cent voted C, results that do not surprise the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD):
’We found similar findings during our Organising for Success project,’ said the CIPDís Rebecca Clake.
’HR people need to be more involved from a strategic position from the outset and people management issues need to be considered in more detail when organising a change programme. In fact, accountancy and IT concerns get twice as much attention as career management.
’More involvement is needed with the people who will eventually be affected by the change. As a result our findings suggested that half of organisations do not meet objectives and staff do not have the skills necessary to function,’ she said.
HR professionals also voiced concern over what they see as management skills ’black holes’ appearing in firms. The majority (49%) said that they were ’very worried’ that organisational change was creating these ëblack holesí as company memory is lost and training fails to keep up the pace.
Petra Cook, head of policy at the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) labelled the findings as ëtroublingí and was a situation she blamed on lack of training:
ëTraining is running to catch up but falling further behind. Greater responsibility is being shifted to the front line and the skill sets needed are changing. Firms need to realise this or they will lose quality managers,’ she said.
However, for Mark Crail, managing editor of research publication IRS Employment Review, the problem stems from one of loss of organisational memory or knowledge rather than skills:
ëMany managers of all levels have been removed from firms and with them has gone company history. These organisations are left with a discontinuity between past and present which causes problems when looking to move forward.
ëThe hard problems such as right-sizing, redundancy and cost reduction have been dealt with, it is now up to firms to deal with the soft issues. They need to take stock and reconstruct their identity so that they and their staff know where they want to go,í he said.
Staff needs sidelined by bosses during the cold wind of change
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