When your organisation is considering starting an initiative, undertaking a project, or taking advantage of an opportunity, the initiative will involve change — changes to the organisational structure, changes to job roles, changes to the use of technology, and changes to processes.
However, the biggest effect will be the change to the way that employees do their jobs. If your employees are not willing to transition to a new work model and are resistant to change, your project will likely fail. However, if they are resilient and adopt the necessary change required by the initiative, they can expect the desired outcome. Or your employees may actually be looking forward to change, and will actively promote and accept it
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What is Change Management?
Change management is defined as the methods and processes that prepare, support, and equip individuals within an organisation to successfully transition from their current state to a desired future one. This includes looking at the difference between pre-change and post-change states, identifying the necessary steps to bridge the gap and ensure project success.
Making significant changes in the organisation can be quite challenging. It requires cooperation at all levels and involves different independent entities within an organisation. Creating a structured and organised approach to change is crucial to ensuring a successful transition while reducing the risk of disruption to business as usual.
Why Change Management Matters
Effective change management is critical for an organisation if it hopes to increase its productivity and service delivery at all levels across the organisation. There are several reasons it is important to employ change management on both large- and small-scale initiatives.
Organisational Change Happens on the People Side
When we talk about change, most of us view it from an organisational perspective. For example, when considering a merger or acquisition, you might focus on physical location changes, system integration, and financial restructuring. However, organisational change only happens one person at a time. That is because to make an organisation-wide change, your employees will need to do their jobs differently.
This means that leaders need to understand the need to support their people as they transition through the change process. If individual employees are unwilling to make changes to their day-to-day tasks, an organisation may not be able to transform and deliver the expected results.
Consequences of Ignoring or Poorly Managing Change
Change is poorly managed when it ignores the human side of the organisation. This can lead to many adverse consequences for the organisation.
For one, productivity declines on a large scale for a longer time when managers are reluctant to work on new initiatives and use resources and time to support organisational change.
Poorly managed change initiatives may suffer from budget overruns, missed deadlines, and abandonment. This can have tangible negative impacts on the organisation.
Suppliers may also start to feel the negative impact and disruption that is caused by poorly managed change. This impact may also be felt by customers, who, in an ideal situation should not be able to feel the change happening in the organisation at all.
Because of these factors, employees may lose sight of their goals and will feel discouraged and disinterested. An environment of doubt and suspicion may breed in the organisation and divisiveness may emerge in departments, teams, and employees. This will result in increased stress, fatigue, and confusion, which can lead to heightened employee dissatisfaction and a high turnover rate.
All these issues can be mitigated if you prioritise a structured and organised approach to the people side of change.
Change Management Can Improve Chances of Success
Effective change management has positive effects on a project or initiative and allows it to meet its objectives. According to a growing body of data, effective change management resulted in over 90% of employees meeting or exceeding their objectives. In fact, projects that have excellent change management are several times more likely to meet objectives than projects with poor change management.
Interestingly, surveys have also found out that even poor change management resulted in better success for an organisation than not implementing change management at all.
Steps to Effective Change Management
Most organisations today operate in a highly dynamic environment and must be quick to respond to fast-moving industry changes and technological advancements. This means that organisational activities and projects need to keep changing for a business to stay competitive.
Change has the biggest impact on your most invaluable assets, your employees. If you lose your employees, it can lead to the high costs related to recruitment, the time involved in hiring new talent, and the cost of resources diverted to training them.
Every time an employee leaves an organisation, they take vital and intimate information about your business with them. However, if you deploy an effective change management process, it can allow your employees to transition smoothly and ensure they get the right guidance throughout the journey. The major reason for many change initiatives failing is uncooperative and negative employee behaviour as well as unproductive management style.
There are several steps to effective organisational change management.
Defining Change and Aligning It to Business Goals
Although this may seem obvious, many organisations miss this particularly important step. An organisation may communicate that change will be required for them to grow; however, that is quite different from conducting a critical assessment against organisational objectives and performance to ensure that the change will pivot the organisation in the right direction.
By defining change and its value, businesses can more accurately calculate the effort and resources they need to invest in the initiative.
Determining Impact of Change
Once you have aligned your change initiative to your business goals and have figured out what you want to achieve through the initiative and why, you need to determine the impact it will have on the various levels of your organisation.
Leaders will need to clarify the impact of the change on every business unit and how it will impact every employee through processes and workflows, decision making, systems, procedures and policies and suppliers and customers. With this information, managers can then determine the areas that need support and training to manage the impact of the proposed change.
Creating a Communication Strategy
Although it is important that all employees in the organisation are guided on the change journey, the very first steps should be to prioritise support for key staff.
Managers need to find the most effective way to communicate with the employee or team that will help them get on board with the proposed change. The communication strategy should include a timeline of how the change will be communicated to employees, what core messages employees need to understand and what communication mediums the organisation plans to use to start discussions and manage feedback.
The communication strategy must also make provision for seeking feedback from those who will be impacted by the proposed change.
Providing the Right Training
Training is at the heart of any change initiative. Changes to policies and procedures can impact systems and processes that employees have been used to. If it impacts suppliers and customers, then that needs to be considered too. Training can be delivered in many ways, such as blended learning approaches, eLearning, face-to-face training sessions, and on-the-job mentoring and coaching. All this needs to be planned and communicated in a staged manner.
Providing Support Structure
Managers need to provide a sound support structure to help their employees adjust practically and emotionally to the change. This support structure needs to be effective in building proficient behaviour and technical skills that are needed to get the desired outcomes.
In some cases, change can result in redundancies and dismissals so you need to provide appropriate support like counselling to ensure your employees are able to cope with the changing situation. To help your employees adjust to the impact of changes, particularly when it comes to how a job role is performed, it is important that organisations provide mentorship or an open-door policy with management to get answers to pressing questions. This will include actively seeking feedback and suggestions for ways to fine-tune the change to the actual business as usual environment.
Measuring the Impact of Change
When implementing change, it is necessary that organisations put in place a structure that measures the impact of change on the business. Some examples of key metrics that can be used are:
- User adoption numbers
- Speed of adoption
- User competency and behaviours
- Employee readiness assessment results
- Employee engagement, buy-in, and participation measures.
- Communication effectiveness
- Employee feedback
- Employee satisfaction survey results
- Training participation, tests, and effectiveness measures
This way, organisations will be able to see if the change is helping to achieve business goals, whether the change was successful in getting the desired outcome, and what needs to be done differently in the future.
From time to time, it is also important to assess the change management plan to determine how effective it is and record any lessons for future reference.
Clarity is Essential to Change Management
Change management is a crucial discipline, no matter which industry your business operates in. Unfortunately, though, not many organisations are prepared to accept and act upon change because they want to avoid disruption to their operations at all costs. Sometimes delays, budget overruns and the pressure to deliver on time force managers to cut change process and activities in the haste to get a project or initiative over the line. While the success may be short term, the longer-term impact of short-circuited change management processes can be felt months and sometimes years down the road leading to questions about the real success or benefit derived from the investment.
Change Management Leadership
To become an effective leader that brings forth successful change, you need to apply change management to your organisational projects and aim to build change management competencies in the organisation. They are the crucial steps to ensure that your initiatives deliver the desired results.
Many employees look to their leaders to find out how prepared they are for the change. This is the reason why leadership at all levels needs to have complete clarity of why change management is being implemented and what its focus is. In addition, there must also be an alignment between your business goals, strategic direction and benefits to be derived.
Change management can become a challenge when organisational leaders are reluctant to share complete information with their employees, teams, and departments for the betterment of the organisation. Unfortunately, some managers find it hard to let go of information that has been a marker for their success and fail to share their insights with others to strengthen the organisation from its very foundations, so that it can grow successfully and compete in the industry.
For change management to be successful, it is crucial that leaders are open and transparent with stakeholders or they can breed a climate of mistrust, discouragement, and confusion.
Employee engagement is the Key to Successful Change Management
Effective change management will always first address the people side of change. Creating new work processes, forming partnerships, and implementing new technologies may be doomed to failure if change leaders do not ensure all their key people are on board. That is because the financial, strategic, and societal success of an organisation depends on how strongly individuals accept the change and are willing to act upon it.
Change management, in essence, is the implementation of structured processes and strategies to inspire the people side of change to achieve the desired outcome. The ultimate goal of change management is to help employees engage, adapt and implement changes in their day-to-day activities, while seeking their feedback on the proposed changes and seeking ways to get even better results from the change.
Investing time, energy, and resources to support the people in your organisation so that they receive change well is worth it in the end in terms of the success of the project and avoiding the innumerable costs that are part of a poorly managed change initiative.
The Wrap
The main difference between successful and failed change initiatives is understanding what type of change is needed and when and how to implement it. Businesses that employ effective change management approaches have a greater likelihood of reaching their objectives and getting that return on investment or the realisation of the benefit that was envisioned in the first place.
Change management is the process, tools, and techniques used to manage the employee side of change. It is the effective management of employee engagement, embracing how the organisation will change, and how work will be administered. It should not be viewed as a “nice thing to do” if I have the budget and the time. It should be actively championed be management top down to ensure the benefit of the change is realised.
Change management does not just require communication and training. It does not just mean mitigating resistance. Successful change management is one that follows a structured method and uses a balanced set of tools and techniques to support key employees and drive structural improvements.
Are you experiencing a change in your organisation? At EZY Skills, we can help you understand how to manage the change process to effectively meet your organisational goals and mitigate adverse impacts. With our online courses, you can ensure that you have trained and certified staff who can help you implement change successfully within your organisation or help you implement techniques on how to overcome employee resistance, help them embrace new initiatives, and sustain change so that the organisation keeps moving in the right direction. Contact us today at info@ezyskills.com.au
