Do you know what happens when a colony of bees loses its queen? As word is out the queen is gone, a slow and steady commotion builds. It’s subtle at first, but minute by minute, more of the colony leaves the hive and takes flight. Before you know it, the sky is filled with a swarm of bees flying sporadically in search of something they’ve lost.

The bees aren’t aggressive, but they are agitated. Each worker bee is trying to figure out what to do without a queen to guide him. It seems as if all hope may be lost, until one bee finds its way to a nearby post and lands there. Within some minutes, most of the lost bees land on that same post. Calm energy is evidently taking over. The chaos of just minutes before has stopped, and the colony is working on what to do next.

The bees experienced change and survived. They will find another queen and build another hive. The process may have been full of emotion and a bit chaotic, but in the end, they persisted and stabilized.

Let’s consider the same scenario, but with employees instead of bees. Of course, employees are not mindless worker bees who are lost without their leader, but there are biological reactions that all creatures, including humans, experience in a state of change. Evolution has made the human brain resistant to a change in stability. Even small changes that can impact the stability of an employee’s environment, like moving desks, can initiate this type of resistance reaction.

Change is bound to happen. It’s happening all the time, and in 2020, the change to our employees’ feeling of stability has been drastic. Companies enlist the help of trained change management experts and experienced leaders to bring strategies to the workforce to manage the emotions raised by change. We applaud these companies for wanting to help their employees, but we think that most change management practices are missing something critical: the neuroscience behind the reaction. When change occurs, emotion often completely overtakes a person’s working memory, making it difficult or impossible to make rational thoughts and reactions; when we feel something, it takes over.

Instead of trying to remove and move beyond the emotion, focusing on engaging employees’ feelings and mindsets will not only help employees actively make the needed change but will make them more willing to do so.

Bees are innately able to change, just like humans — but how much more quickly could they build a new hive if they had support to help them understand their feelings and choose to change!

That’s where we challenge you as the learning and development (L&D) team to step up and take lead. You know that L&D plays a unique role in your company, which makes you a valuable part of the change management team that leaders may not have considered.

Learning Professionals Have Been Trained to Talk With People

Learning functions are innately solution-focused. One of the most critical parts of your role is to build trust quickly with your stakeholders and ask the right questions that enable you to reach the root of their request. This intentional drive to find alignment between business goals and individual needs is an asset during moments of change.

This direction is exactly what your employees and leaders need. Where others may shy away from emotion, L&D professionals embrace the feelings, reactions and challenges of our customers because of the valuable information that we can find in those exchanges. Our job is to take all that information in, allow our customers to speak and find the right solution to move everyone forward.

Because going through change is typically an emotional process, it’s important that our L&D teams are vocal and proud of what we can offer. We can help our employees feel heard and find a direction forward. Learning teams are skilled in the art of influence, which can be valuable to bring employees, no matter where they are in their own change process, on board.

The Learning and Development Team Can Be the Agile Engine for the Company

During a change, employees are looking for answers to questions, and learning teams are experts at finding the right channels to push content out at the right time. By adopting an agile approach, L&D can quickly change direction and deliver messages and resources in different ways.

While it may not be commonplace, a time of change is the perfect time for you to push your senior leaders to lean more heavily on your learning team for communication and support. Your employees won’t feel left out on their own when your L&D team is in charge of communications. You know that at the heart of learning design is knowing the audience; show your senior leaders that the L&D team should lead the way.

We know that change is going to happen. In L&D, our job is not to keep employees from feeling or reacting. Instead, successful learning teams focus on making the transition easier and help employees reengage with their work. Remember, the bees will always find their new hive. The question is how you can enable them to find their hive more quickly, more easily and with less stress.