Anonymous Conversations and Confessions and Polls
Fear of Change at Work
I work for a company where the culture is nearly static. I'm in a leadership role trying to bring better ways of working to my coworkers and the most popular routes forward seem to be DOA. When I talk to my peers everyone is chasing after increased productivity, new tools to make the workday better, and ultimately finding ways to do more with less, and increase company profits.
My role is a technical one and I've discovered to my chagrin that the company culture appears to have solidified around "People, Paper, Pens, Phones, Email, and Office." and that everything else is not on the table.
About a year ago I discovered an online service which seems popular in other companies and other communities, so much so that people are shocked at how much they can accomplish with the new service and marvel that it's free to use and poses only a benefit to the company I work for. I tried to advertise it, to suggest it to people in hopes that they would adopt it and see the same value that I see. The response was dramatically weak.
I suppose this post is mostly to vent at my frustrations, but I wonder if there isn't some sort of strategy that I missed that would improve the volume of my messages reaching my coworkers? This sort of outcome is nothing new for me either, I've witnessed entire technologies wither and die because while we had a fully functional system that could have improved productivity, nobody could understand it or was willing to use it.
The more I think about it, the more I get to wondering if there is no hope at changing the culture to be interested in new ways of working or new technologies that could make life easier. Then that gets me wondering about my role as a leader all on its own. If nothing is going to change, then is it a job to pay the bills? Is it worth it to roll out the resumes and look for a different place that has more capacity or interest for new technology or is this a problem in lots of other places too?
And then after all of this, what does it mean when a company actively resists collaboration beyond the basics of People, Paper, Pens, Phones, Email and Office? What then?




Would it be possible to tell us about this new tech without compromising your anonymity?
Very popular and distinctly similar to Discord.
Slack?
I'm 99% sure it is Slack.
I feel your pain. The resistance to change is strong in my company. And it's stifling. And sad. Watching the higher-up leadership team keep churning through the same process over and over again expecting it to work, when it's barely holding things together.
Brother or sister, many have trod the path you are on. We can give you the hymnal of woes, and teach you the lyrics.
After many years of trying to be a change agent, the main advice I can give you is to be patient. Organizations have never moved at the speed I tried to pull them. But looking back, I can see that my efforts had more effect than I realized at the time.
I suspect that you're having far more impact than you realize, because the results are hidden for now. But you're planting the seeds that will eventually build to a willingness to try new things.