How Do You Prepare Your People For Change?

Technological transformation is both a boon and bane - done well, it helps an organisation succeed, but done poorly, it is detrimental to people. MIT's Professor Thomas Kochan talks about how to integrate technology with the way we work for a better organisational transformation

- Mint Kang

Digital transformation is an exciting thing, and all the more so when it happens at the breakneck pace of the last two years. But not everyone in an organisation will have the capability to share in that excitement. Today's workforce labours under intense social and economic pressures worsened by political tension and inequality, and people are responding by demanding more say in their working life.

“A majority of workers want more involvement, more say in their jobs on a whole range of issues than they're experiencing today, around new technologies,” says Thomas Kochan, the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The expert on industrial relations, work, and employment points out that if employers plan to bring new technologies into the organisation, the full commitment of the workforce – including skills and mindset – is needed.

But to engage workers in such a way, the entire conversation around technology needs to change first.

“The debate around how to use technology in the past has had way too much hype about how many jobs are going to be destroyed or created. That debate must now shift to be about how we can use these technologies effectively, to engage in more productive work and build more equitable and inclusive organisations. And to do that, we have to integrate these advancing technologies with the way we work and the work systems that people are engaged in on a daily basis,” Professor Kochan says.

Start with a process that's both top-down and bottom-up