Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Tips for Navigating Change in the Workplace

Remember to “stay in awe” of your colleagues and celebrate their strengths

By Angela Horton, Health & Safety Team Lead (BC)

You may have noticed that the CLAC Training Teams’ email has changed, and depending on where you are calling from, the phone number as well. Those are just a couple of small changes of the many to create a unified support system for members accessing CLAC’s training, apprenticeship, and jobs services across Canada.

These seemingly small changes come with big hurdles. One change we make in one spot can lead to a trail of other items that need to be picked up and addressed. Having so many moving pieces makes it easy to lose track of where something is at and whose responsibility it was. 

You may have experienced similar hurdles in your workplace, when you must change your work plans thanks to some unexpected delay in material arriving, or the material that was purchased for the job isn’t quite right.

On top of your scope of work changing, there are many other variables that can impact your work such as health and safety regulations, personnel, and even the weather can force a change in plans. Luckily, we can see positives coming out of these scenarios where you get to work with someone new, or your workplace is safer thanks to a change in regulation.

What I’ve learned in the process of our integration of CLAC Training Teams is how important it is to be open minded and stay curious to ensure continued growth. If you don’t understand someone’s point of view, you need to ask more questions and do it in a respectful way.

If you are having a hard time working as a team, it can be helpful to think about what do we share in common? Often, we have the same goal, and remembering that can make it easier to focus on how we get there.

Keep in mind that even if we share the same goal, it is okay to have different opinions. If we all had the same ideas, it’s likely we wouldn’t discover more efficient ways of doing things.

During this time of change within our team, one of our partner trainers, Tanya Steele, gave me a book of inspirational stories called Pursuit 365 by Shelly Lynn Hughes. One of Tanya’s stories was in it.

Tanya’s message stood out at a time of great change. Her key takeaway from the story was remembering to “stay in awe” of your colleagues. This means celebrating the strengths of others, and specifically what they have to offer that may not be a strong suit for yourself.

It can be helpful to keep this phrase in mind if you feel that you are frustrated with someone or the work they did. We all have great qualities we bring to the table, and if we dwell on the negative, we might miss something great right in front us.

Tips for Navigating Change in the Workplace

You might be interested in