HR Directors’ Retreat: Focusing on behaviour change

Our recent HR Directors’ retreat put the spotlight on behaviour change. We often think of change in terms of strategy, systems and processes and rarely consider people’s experience of change, what it will mean to them as individuals and groups living through the change process, or how they will feel in response.

Change means many things to different people and it can provide simultaneously conflicting emotions; yet our expectations are frequently that it will be linear and plannable and that people can be brought on board. In this mindset, any hiccups are cast as failures to manage change properly.

The HR Directors’ retreat provided a rare opportunity to reflect on the emotions of change and give them detailed consideration.

The more negative emotions towards change were beautifully captured by Jenny Knight from Brighton Business School who had researched how people react to change and written a poem ‘Making Sense of Nonsense’ in response.

Another of our speakers, Jo Clarke from Petros and the University of York, focused on what psychology can teach us on the human side of change. Jo spoke about the challenge of change for people and the importance of resilience. Jo explored how each of us makes sense of the world and our behaviour within it, in terms of mental frames we create.

We heard from Hendrika Santer Bream of the hard work that was done over many years at Guys and St Thomas’s Foundation Trust (G&StT’s) to shift culture. Hendrika outlined the journey taken by G&StT’s in opening up debate and allowing values to underpin people management processes.

Ruth Owen recounted her experience of having to radically rethink how customer service could be delivered in Job Centre Plus when the demand significantly increased in the 2008 – 2013 recession. By empowering staff whilst retaining frameworks of budgets, processes and priorities, they helped managers push the boundaries that would then become the norm for everyone else.