How do you help people to deal with big changes?

Many organisations are having to deal with this situation at the moment. It's not easy, but there are things you can do to make it easier.

To help people deal with the shock and worry of thinking they might lose their job, go through some of the research on how your brain responds in these situations and what you need to do about it.

When we did this in a short workshop for one client they had people spontaneously thanking the HR department for running the workshop.

We got people to talk about how they felt (research shows that just doing this helps people to feel better immediately). We explained to them how they are likely to start behaving, how that isn’t going to help them in the long term.

Then we gave them some tools to help them in dealing with the situation including:

• A way to keep focussed on the long term
• Key actions to take to avoid getting depressed
• Ways of supporting each other

When you look at why some people survive major disasters and others don’t, you often see that those who survive knew what to do beforehand. They had been trained. It’s exactly the same here.

If you know and recognise the signals, you can take action to minimise the problems. You can be prepared for change, particularly unwelcome change, and put your plan into action as soon as it happens.

Often our clients have many employees that really don’t like change at all. Unfortunately many of these companies will be going through massive changes over the next year or so.

But some of their best people are the ones who don’t like change. So it’s really worth making an effort to help them.

For more on this People who don't like change - why they are so valuable