Ep 6: Practical Tips to Implement Change, Part 3

Welcome back to “Harmonious Workplaces,” the podcast where independent consultants Rich Cruz, Ben Kleinman, and Cheryl Volpi dive deep into corporate culture and organizational change management. In this sixth episode, we join Rich, Ben, and Cheryl for the third installment of their “Practical Tips to Implement Change,” focusing on the crucial role of employee motivation and incentivization in embedding new behaviors and ensuring long-term success.

A Quick Recap: Laying the Groundwork for Change

Before delving into motivation, the hosts briefly revisited key tips from previous episodes, emphasizing that successful change implementation begins with a strong foundation:

• Early Stages:
  • Clear Communication is paramount, especially at the executive level, to clarify the “why” and ensure alignment throughout the organization.
  • Intentional, Open, and Honest Communication fosters psychological safety, allowing for co-creation and transparency about what is known and unknown.
  • Stories are a potent tool to make change resonate emotionally and intellectually.
• Sustaining Momentum:
  • Continued Use of Stories helps highlight positive behaviors, celebrate successes (or significant learnings from failures), and frames individuals as “heroes” navigating challenges.
  • Intentionality is vital for setting a regular cadence for check-ins (sharing and gathering information) and defining clear metrics for tracking progress.
  • Multimodality for Messaging ensures information reaches diverse audiences through various media and formats.
  • Evolving Messaging acknowledges that the “change of the change” may shift contours as the initiative progresses.

The Missing Piece: Employee Motivation

Cheryl Volpi highlighted a critical realization: while much of the discussion had been from a “top-down perspective”—focusing on leadership’s planning, communication, and measurement—the true test of a change initiative’s effectiveness comes down to the employees “set into the wild” to apply their training and information. Without understanding what truly motivates employees, even excellent and expensive training and support can fail to yield the desired results. Thus, the core theme of this episode emerged: motivation and incentivizing desired behaviors to ensure they become deeply embedded in the organizational culture.

Cultivating a Motivated Environment

The consultants explored several key strategies for generating and sustaining employee motivation:

• Sustaining Psychological Safety (Again!):
  • This foundational element resurfaced as critical for continuous motivation. Employees must feel fearless to share feedback, admit when they need retraining, or acknowledge difficulties.
  • A lack of psychological safety can lead to anxiety, fear of failure, disengagement, and prevent leadership from getting honest data, potentially causing an initiative to fail despite perceived adherence to best practices.
  • Maintaining this safety is a two-way street; individuals must be motivated to “breach that gap” even if they don’t initially feel safe, often driven by the desire for rewards or to maintain performance. Leadership also needs to explicitly assure and communicate that it’s okay to make mistakes.
• Vroom’s Expectancy Theory: Aligning Effort and Reward
  • Cheryl introduced Vroom’s Expectancy Theory (Victor Vroom, 1964) as a framework to understand motivation.
  • The theory has three simple parts:
    1. Expectancy: The belief that effort will lead to successful performance.
    2. Instrumentality: The belief that successful performance will lead to a desired outcome or reward.
    3. Valence: The value or importance an individual places on that outcome or reward.
  • The theory suggests that motivation to sustain a change is directly tied to an employee’s expectation of reward for their effort and performance.
  • This necessitates agreement on expectations between those championing the change (e.g., leadership) and those implementing it (employees). Employees often need to see “what’s in it for me” if the change demands extra effort or steps outside their comfort zone. The success of this conversation is contingent on the level of psychological safety within the organization.
• Strategic Incentivization:
  • Incentives can be long-term (e.g., promotion, salary increase, team expansion) or short-term (e.g., kudos, small gestures like gift cards).
  • However, incentives are “trickier” because they are not always predictable, and what motivates one person (e.g., financial gain) may not motivate another.
• Goal Setting and Co-Creation for Engagement:
  • Rich Cruz highlighted the importance of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-constrained) and Locke and Latham’s Goal Setting Theory.
  • Crucially, when individuals are allowed to set their own personal and professional goals (e.g., professional development, career advancement) that are tied to organizational objectives, it becomes a powerful motivator that makes the change stick. This co-creation of goals, while resource-intensive, is deemed “so worth it” due to its motivational impact.
• Healthy Competition and Gamification:
  • Cheryl cited an example from Gary Latham’s work, where healthy competition among teams in the lumber industry inspired increased productivity.
  • Ben Kleinman introduced the concept of gamification, where teams compete in a “healthy” way for symbolic rewards (e.g., a “CEO bobblehead” or “gold star of the month”).
  • This approach can be sustained long-term and fosters team building and fun engagement beyond the initial change implementation.
  • These visible rewards become “artifacts”—physical representations that associate with the organization’s desired values and culture, aiding in the “inculturation” of new behaviors.

The Co-Creation of Change

The overarching theme that emerged was the need for change to be not just “leadership down,” but also a “bottom-up” or “grassroots” push. It involves a co-creation of change mentality and incentivization, where individuals take ownership of their involvement and commitment. This shift in responsibility ensures the change sticks and becomes a truly “fully bought in” cultural element.

The episode concluded with the consultants noting that while they’ve delved into motivation and embedding behaviors, there’s still more to explore regarding the “refreezing stage” and the long-term sustainability of change. Until next time, remember that motivation, when fostered collaboratively and incentivized strategically, is the key to creating harmonious workplaces where change truly thrives!