Embracing Change in Your Workplace Culture.

Keep your team engaged.

Inspiring your employees to embrace the changes and opportunities offered by workflow automation involves a combination of clear communication, proactive engagement and continuous support. Here we offer some strategies to help you keep your people onside during a change management project. 

1. Communicate clearly and often. You need to explain the reasons behind the automation and how automations will be positively impacting the organisation and people. You should address concerns about job security up front by focusing on the reasons automation is being adopted. These reasons should include reducing mundane tasks, increasing time for higher value activities, improving accuracy, boosting productivity among others. 
2. Involve your people early in the automation project. Engage people in the process with brainstorming sessions, pilot projects, workflow diagramming and design and ‘lab’ sessions allowing people to see the technology in action. 
3. Training is essential in any change program and particularly in automation projects since these impact the daily work that individuals will perform once the automations are implemented. We recommend a combination of in-person and online learning. We can provide some ideas on what kind of training is most effective during a workflow automation project. 
4. Use success stories and case studies from other companies to help people understand the process of change and the positive impacts that will be accrued once automations are active. Using examples from other organisations will also demystify the technology and may improve adoption. 
5. The leadership team of your organisation must actively be engaged in the workflow automation project. Leaders must communicate positively and regularly about the project, its status and how the project fits in the strategy and vision for the organisation. 
6. The leadership should focus on empowering other managers to foster and sustain a culture of innovation. Ideally the culture is supportive of new ideas, testing ideas, success and failure. 
7. Celebration of wins and milestones will go a long way to keeping the enthusiasm for the project alive and sustained. Celebration also helps to spread knowledge and enthusiasm in a larger organisation that may have multiple sub-cultures. 

If you can plan your workflow automation project with these strategies as a framework, you will enhance the positive impacts of your project while fostering more positive attibutes in your workplace culture.