On Reorganizations: A Behavioral Perspective
This is a guest article written by our partner Sabyasachi Sengupta.
Corporate reorganizations and restructures are very common in the business world due to a change in market demand, change in technology, or strategic shift. The objective of all this reorganization and restructure is to help smoothen the operations and improve efficiency.
However, it needs a fundamental shift in the behavior of the employees. To explain, just imagine a tree with 15 birds. If somebody shoots two bullets, you don’t only kill two birds but trigger a variety of other dynamics:
1. Ripple Effect Throughout the Rest of the Flock: Just as the noise and impact of the bullets upset all the birds in the tree, reorganizations upset everybody -not just the individuals directly affected by the changes or threatened with redundancy. The psychological impact may result in uncertainty, fear, and decreasing morale that go viral across the organization.
2. New Roles and Responsibilities: New roles or changed responsibilities often fall to employees following a restructure. Whichever, behaviors must change; a move from learning new skills to learning different ways of working. The value that the restructure is meant to deliver will not be realized if behaviors do not change accordingly.
3. Alignment with New Objectives: Reorganizations are typically aligned with new strategic objectives. Workers have to change their behavior in working toward this new direction of goals. This could be new performance metrics to adopt, different types of work to focus on, or engagement with new processes and technologies. Change in behavior is necessary to ensure all are driving in the same direction.
4. Overcome Resistance to Change: Such a resistance could be managed if people decided to have behavioral changes on purpose, otherwise, by nature, they resist change—especially when uncertainty and risk are involved. Successful reorganization will, therefore, have been able to overcome this level of resistance to bring about a change in behavior. This might involve programs of change management, interventions for leadership, and continuous communication to help employees embrace new ways of working.
5. Sustaining Long-Term Success: Success in reorganization is not only found in the immediate change but also in the sustainability of long-term improvements. Sustainability in this case has to boil down to changed behavior. This is the reason why employees should develop habits in their lives and ways of doing things: then, it will be possible that accrued benefits from the reorganization shall be maintained or improved upon. The goal of the organization is to facilitate these changes effectively.
In other words, if shooting at birds in a tree affects the entire flock, corporate reorganization also negatively affects the entire workforce. These behavioral changes will be helpful and not optional when there is a reorganization in the corporate world. Building that changed behavior within the working culture, the intake of new skills, and the new objectives, an organization can guarantee a restructure for sustainable growth and success.
We hope you found this short guest article by Saby Sengupta on reorganizations useful. If you’re looking for a behavioral business partner to drive change in your organization, we’d be happy to schedule a call. Want to learn more about the application of behavioral insights in management, HR, growth and innovation? Then read our blog or check out our YouTube channel!
About Neurofied
Neurofied is a behavioral science company specialized in training, consulting, and change management. We help organizations drive evidence-based and human-centric change with insights and interventions from behavioral psychology and neuroscience. Consider us your behavioral business partner who helps you build behavioral change capabilities internally.
Since 2018, we have trained thousands of professionals and worked with over 100 management, HR, growth, and innovation teams of organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Deloitte, Novo Nordisk, ABN AMRO, and the Dutch government. We are also frequent speakers at universities and conferences.
Our mission is to democratize the value of behavioral science for teams and organizations. If you see any opportunities to collaborate, please contact us here.
