it means for people to experience change. “It’s around looking at what happens to a human being when there is a change or transition. From a psychological perspective, research from neuroscience is showing us what happens to the brain in times of change. We know and understand that people in times of change invariably go into a threat response. What we need to do is build that level of psychological safety: giving some autonomy, some control and doing it in a fair way that helps to reduce that.” She told delegates at the 2024
CIPD annual conference and exhibition that organisations need to step through a number of areas when planning change. The first is trust and understanding if
movement is needed around this dynamic. Then it is accounting for the “two really important factors” of identity and organisational culture. “When you are trying to make
any significant change within an organisation, you have to work at an individual level in terms of the impact on that individual’s identity,” she explains. “Particularly working with leaders in the run-up to that change, I found has been really effective.” For culture, this is both
organisational and national. “Certainly for me, having now worked in Asia for the last 20 years, I’ve started to understand that silence doesn’t always mean acceptance. You have to find other ways to give your employees a voice. “I think one of my lessons is to
“ WE WERE MUCH MORE READY THAN ANTICIPATED CULTURALLY FOR THIS – YOU CANNOT IMAGINE HOW PEOPLE WILL THRIVE UNTIL YOU GIVE THEM THE SPACE.“
BERNA ÖZTINAZ, CHRO, GENEL ENERGY PLC
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really localise the communication requirements to the country that you’re working in and coming back to this idea of direct and indirect communication. In some countries you can have straightforward dialogue with people at all different levels. In others you need to be much more deferential to the hierarchy and your entry point is at a significantly more senior level in the organisation to be able to build that trust. So you’ve really got to be quite deft in understanding what is it, what is the dialogue you are hoping to achieve and what is the best way to do it, and then set
it up by person or focus groups or whatever methodology is going to work there to get the right result.”
BRINGING PEOPLE WITH YOU Giving employees voice is an issue David Bearfield, director of the Office of Human Resources, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has been focused on for the past year or so. The NGO manages $5bn of aid projects in 130 countries. He and his team have designed and are rolling out its global People 2030 strategy. The orchestration and delivery of this deliberate whole-organisation strategy is embedded in the design principle that everyone has a stake in changing the culture so teams can deliver more aid and in measurably better and more impactful ways. Making the case to senior
leadership, he explained on the panel with Angela Ryan that it was about outcomes and communicating how it benefited people and the organisation, including through metrics. The UNDP team spent nearly a year in the diagnostic phase and listening. When the strategy was presented, people responded well. “We managed to get over this hump that people were feeling change was being done to them rather than with them, which is really important,” he explained.
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