The Role of Communication in Triggering Change
Communication plays a critical role in fostering the fad of change in organizations. We hear stakeholders in and around organizations making arguments that change is inherently good and that stability is necessarily bad. The continual use of language of change in terms considered positive â improvement, continuous improvement, progressive, innovative, âpushing the envelope,â being âedgyâ â is juxtaposed against language of stability in negative terms â stagnant, stale, old fashioned, âyesterday's news,â âbehind the times.â The rhetorical force of labeling in this way pushes an agenda that contributes to the faddishness that Zorn et al. point out.
Pressure to change also derives from complex organizational environments that put many demands on organizations to adapt and innovate. For example, current shifts towards a âgig economyâ in many parts of the world may demand significant organizational changes in the ways labor is managed. The âgig economyâ involves a market of labor based on frequent, independent, shortâterm contracts and freelance work rather than longerâterm traditional jobs. Examples of those making use of this increasingly prevalent form of labor are transportation services, delivery services, video producers, couriers, household task workers, among many others. Numerous âgig platformsâ that match employers and âgiggersâ have sprouted up including Uber, Lyft, HopSkipDrive, Airbnb, Postmates, TaskRabbit, Sparehire, Freelancer, and HelloTech (https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/02/gigâwebsites.html). For the organization that makes use of these âgiggersâ there are certainly many implications for how they plan for, maintain relationships with, evaluate, and reward individuals who perform work for them. Benefits of engaging with these sorts of workers include flexibility, the ability to hire/fire at will, reduced costs for benefits, lack of the need to negotiate and honor longâterm contracts, and reducing needs for office space. However, the erratic nature of these multiple relationships, and the lack of continuity and longâterm employeeâemployer relationships surely brings new human resource challenges.
Oftentimes, the rationale that changing circumstances demand changing tactics, responses, and strategies makes it difficult for organizations to resist trying to do something new or at least appear they are doing something new. Change can be triggered by many factors even in the most calm of financial times. Triggers for change include:
- The need for organizations to stay in line with legal requirements (e.g. employment law, health and safety regulations, product regulation, environmental protection policies)
- Changing customer and/or client needs (e.g. changing demographics, fashions that spur desire for specific products and services)
- Heightened problems or needs of clients served
- Newly created and/or outdated technologies
- Changes in availability of financial resources (e.g. changes in investment capital)
- Funding agencies for nonprofits
- Administrative priorities for government agencies
- Alterations of available labor pool (e.g. aging workforce, technological capabilities of workforce, immigration)
- Trends in alternative labor arrangements
- Alteration of trade relationships or global economy
- Crisis in the industry, economy, government, or organization.
In addition, some organizations selfâinitiate change and innovation. Change initiated within organizations can stem from many sources including the personal innovation of employees (individuals developing new ideas for products, practices, relationships), serendipity (stumbling across something that works and then catches on in an organization), and through arguments espousing specific directions that stakeholders in and around organizations think should be adopted or resisted. As stakeholders assert their own preferences for what organizations do and how they operate, their interactions produce both evaluations of current practice and visions for future practice that incite change initiatives.
Communication is key in triggering all change. In fact, we can easily argue that none of the other factors that trigger change are truly the direct cause for change until stakeholders recognize them, frame them in terms that suggest change is necessary, and convince resourceâholding decisionâmakers to act on them by implementing change. That is, the necessity for change or the advantage of responding to changing circumstances is one that is created in the interaction among stakeholders. The process is subtler than we might assume at first glance. It is not as simple as noticing that the environment is demanding change or is presenting the opportunity for productive change. We actually need to piece together a construction of the environment that suggests this reality.
Karl Weick (1979) suggests âmanagers [and others] construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many objective features of their surroundingsâ (p. 164). He calls this process enactment. In this process, stakeholders âenactâ or âconstructâ their environment through a process of social interaction and sensemaking. As we encounter our world we attempt to form coherent accounts of âwhat is going on.â We do that by selecting evidence that supports one theory over the other â like a detective might in solving a murder mystery. However, the process is far from perfectly rational or a lone act of individuals. We have biases about what we want to be the truth of the matter and we are influenced heavily by the enacted realities of those around us (Weick 1995). Through communication we share our theories of âwhat is going onâ and we purposefully or incidentally influence the process of enactment of others. As Weick (1979, 1995) argues, we simply forget some facts, reconstruct some to better fit the theory of reality we prefer, and look for supportive evidence to bolster our preferred case. He suggests that sensemaking is as much about âauthoringâ as interpretation.
In this way, communication plays a central role in surfacing or suppressing triggers for change. For example, a theory that the economy is in a downturn can be supported and refuted through different ways of looking at evidence, different ways of framing evidence, and constructing evidence through managing meanings that others attach to their observations. An alternate theory can reconstitute observations, history, and the narrative around these âfactsâ in ways that suggest not a downturn but a natural lull or a period of great opportunity. Perceptions that an organization is in a crisis; needs to be responsive to a particular stakeholder; is headed for greatness; exists in a time rich with opportunity; or any number of other characterizations are created through this process. As discussed more in Chapter 8, communication among stakeholders is at the heart of change processes in organizations because of this highly social process of making sense of what is going on and âspinningâ it into narratives and theories of the world around us.
