In this article, I will deal with the question of how to deal with change at work and how to handle this situation. You will find some advice on these aspects. It is a situation, common to many, that often generates anxiety, the anxiety of change.
It can also be an opportunity of considerable interest if one can see it as a tool for personal growth, psychologically as well as at work. These are, in any case, topics that are extremely topical today. In this respect, for guidance on job change, please consult the Digital Coach® training proposal on Digital Marketing Certification Course.
The world has always been subject to change, but looking back over the last few decades, we can see that transformations, especially in the workplace, have taken on an exponential pace, particularly as a result of the globalization of markets and developments in technological innovation.
Change is so present in the life of every individual, as it is in the life of every company, that it imposes a sort of compulsory and permanent adaptation in order not to give way. At the employment level, many of the difficulties faced by the individual arise from the increased competitive level of companies.
The competitive intensity, due to the changes that have taken place in the markets in recent years, has destabilized not only companies but also entire sectors: the labor market has turned into a real battleground.
How to deal with change at work: 6 tips
In this paragraph, you will explore 6 valuable tips on how to deal with change at work. They will help you to navigate and adapt to workplace changes.
Overcoming anxiety
The economic and social environment in which individuals and companies currently find themselves operating shows several peculiar features, namely:
- the ever-increasing complexity;
- increasing the competitive level of companies;
- ever-increasing global competition;
- the continuous acceleration of technological change;
- overcapacity in capital-intensive sectors;
- demographic fluctuations in the labor force.
The consequence, for the individual, is the difficulty of dealing with change in an environment that is constantly changing, dynamic, and complex, less and less stable and predictable. Questioning oneself, finding oneself acting in an unfamiliar environment, and seeing established modes of behavior and habits change may not be easy.
This increases the feeling of anxiety, anxiety caused by change, the reflection on the individual of turbulent markets, labor markets, and economic logic.
Anxiety can be defined as an emotion in which cognitive symptoms, such as apprehension and fear, are combined with physical symptoms of sympathetic nervous system activation, such as sweating and tachycardia.
It may be a response to a real environmental stress situation, enhancing alertness and responsiveness; or an abnormal response to an imagined or perceived threat. Anxiety disorders are chronic and/or recurrent manifestations of stress and worry that serve no useful function for the individual’s health.
Anxiety about change can have a paralyzing effect. It can block us completely. To get out of the impasse, we need to put a face to anxiety and harness its adaptive value, which helps us prepare for and seek solutions to the possible threat we fear.
It becomes clear that the basis of our anxiety is the fear of change or the fear of losing one’s job. Fear always has an object to which it refers. Once we have identified the object of our fear, we can act to try to counteract it.
One can also try, in order to overcome fear, to grasp the positive aspects of change, seeing it as a stimulus and a means for growth. For many it can be traumatic, for example, to move from employee to self-employed status. If this is the case for you, check out this free course.
To overcome anxiety, one must strategically manage change, and aim to establish a constant adjustment of one’s potential to the constantly changing conditions of the environment, market, and work. This is possible in four successive steps.
First, one must develop flexibility, change one’s mental attitude and develop one’s own vision of the future. Then it will be possible to seize the opportunities that the current economic and employment situation offers.
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Flexibility
In the context of dealing with change at work, both individuals and organizations are required to be flexible. In an environment characterized by change, by disorder, flexibility becomes the pregnant and winning element for the individual and for companies.
Being flexible means that economic effectiveness will be measured by the appropriateness of the response to the market. One must be able to adapt to the variability of demand and the consequent product variety that this entails, adopting a strategy centered not on production but on the market.
One must produce the appropriate products or services in the time, place, and manner in which they are demanded by the market.
Mental attitude
From a personal point of view, to manage change, one must first change one’s mental attitude, be proactive, and be aware of one’s limits at the same time. One must therefore:
- not simply predict the future, but influence it;
- identify objectives to be achieved within a set time;
- focus on critical issues and identify the best strategy to overcome them, relying on one’s own resources;
- be strongly action-oriented;
- analyzing the results obtained.
Furthermore, to be a winner in one’s workplace and in the current economic environment, one must:
- be aware, at all levels, of the support that each person is called upon to give, in his or her own functional area, to the competitive advantage thanks to which the organization can compete with the markets;
- take upon themselves, in relation to their field of competence, the ever-increasing cognitive weight that increased competitive intensity demands in every area of the company;
- to be continuously involved, together with other company resources, in the process of creating and controlling competitive advantages for the company.
A vision of the future
To deal with change at work, creating a favorable situation is crucial. This involves having confidence, setting expectations, spreading a vision of the future, renewing oneself, communicating, and being motivated. One must also be endowed with one’s own original vision.
The term vision suggests seeing, or perceiving something extraordinary; vision in itself implies something highly suggestive and rich in values; it suggests an orientation. It is linked to a deep and total conviction that can be turned into reality.
Since all visions are projected into the future need a daily orientation to focus on. One must have a clear picture of the goal one wants to pursue and know what to do at every moment of development. The vision must also be characterized by uniqueness. It must be differentiated from any other.
Seizing opportunities
In the world of work, this is a time of significant transition.
Opportunities and prospects for growth are arising and multiplying in the current environment, where barriers to innovation and obstacles to the free flow of imagination and imagination are disappearing one by one, where physical locations are no longer obstacles to business, where the speed of information transmission has expanded the scope of economic activity to all places.
As part of the general process of market change underway, business organization is under new pressures:
companies that want to survive and succeed are – and have been – forced to undertake a profound organizational restructuring, questioning traditional operating strategies and methodologies that have proved ineffective, and making profound evolutions in structure, systems, mechanisms, and personnel policies.
For you, these can be opportunities. To be able to seize them, training is essential. Inform yourself, first of all, about new trends in today’s economy and markets.
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Personal and psychological growth
Turning a highly critical situation, a job change, into a moment of personal growth is a particularly difficult task, but also an exciting challenge.
Even when we are faced with uncontrollable and uncomfortable events, we must not think that this is totally dependent on external factors that are independent of our actions. We must learn to think of our future by imagining it positively and using emotional intelligence.
We must set ourselves goals and achieve them with the tools we have at our disposal. There are four psychological factors we have to turn change in our favor, namely:
- the motivation
- hope
- self-confidence
- energy
These four fundamental factors should then be further developed as follows:
- develop positive operational thinking.
We need to focus on the resources we have, rather than our shortcomings, to identify what we are capable of doing.
- have hope.
We have to think that situations will arise in the uncontrollable external environment that will facilitate the achievement of the goal we have set for ourselves.
- be confident in your abilities.
Use the best skills we have when confronted with an obstacle or a complex situation, without being assailed by the doubt of not being able to do it.
- focus on internal factors.
We must identify the internal factors that determine what might happen to us, valuing these factors in the belief that they will enable us to achieve our goal regardless of external determinants such as environment and luck.
Motivation for change at work
In order to approach job change in a positive manner, considering and using it as a means of personal, psychological, and professional growth, one must be endowed with a high level of motivation to change. This is a fundamental concept and state of mind that everyone must have and make their own in order to achieve the desired professional growth.
On the one hand, change-motivated individuals may be those who initiate, nurture and maintain a behavior from the internal activation of a need that is directed towards a satisfaction-seeking goal: the need for change. On the other hand, the origin of the motivational response to change may also arise from a situation of lack, characterized by the emergence of a need.
Motivation to change jobs must be thought of as the energy that fuels the dynamics of individual behavior and actions and directs and orients it toward the achievement of general or specific goals. In this sense, it has first and foremost a force and tension value that feeds the dynamics of individual behavior and actions. At the same time, it directs and orients it toward the attainment of expected goals.
Training as a tool
Training and learning throughout the entire career cycle – and throughout the individual’s entire existence – are peculiar features of today’s society.
Training is the main tool for dealing with change at work. What is needed nowadays is an intelligent and well-prepared workforce, capable of understanding the strategies of the sector in which they operate and translating them into appropriate decisions. Business success rests on the know-how developed and possessed by people and companies.
To be able to work, one must have many skills. The only way to be competent is through training. Acquiring skills, in an ever-changing world, involves a commitment to constant learning, involves continuous training. If you have to face a job change, you have to do it by being trained. Today, digital in its various forms, from marketing to the use of social media, from affiliations to personal branding, offers many possibilities.
Many, having to change jobs, choose to become entrepreneurs or self-employed.
Conclusions: coping with change at work
Any change at work creates opportunities for growth and improvement: the key to success, therefore, lies in being able to identify such opportunities on the one hand and exploit them economically on the other.
We all know by now that the Internet and technologies have a major impact on people’s lives as they communicate with each other and act in completely new ways.
These changes are affecting companies, forcing them to change their production methods and products to remain competitive, as well as to review their forms of organization, moving to new, more flexible structures. Improved communications have made those changes, which were previously only local, within everyone’s reach.
Today’s labor market requires a focus on subjectivity and people. Individuals are the main source of long-term competitive advantage. And training plays a key role in this.
To understand how to deal with change at work, one needs to change one’s attitude, and mindset, and know how to train. Combine psychological and character qualities with the knowledge and skills that the market demands of us.
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