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Managing Through Change: The Key Features of an Effective Change Management Strategy
High-profile layoffs dominated news headlines in Q1 2023, including big names in tech such as Twitter, Amazon, Meta, and more. While most layoffs affected companies and employees in the tech sector (including crypto), rising inflation and an impending recession mean that all employers should start thinking about how they’ll manage their organizations through big change—because it is certainly coming.
Organizational change comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, it looks like layoffs. Other times, it might look like a merger, a reorganization, or onboarding a new company-wide technology.
Virtually every organization will, at some point, undergo a transition or change in order to remain viable and scale. And, if the last five years have taught us anything—between a pandemic, ensuing labor shortage, and uncertain financial future—it’s that having a good change management plan could be the difference between surviving and thriving.
When to Roll Out a Change Management Plan
Organizational change refers to the actions in which a company or business alters a major component of its organization. That means, not every single change demands the rollout of the full change management process; change management is only essential when the potential pushback is going to be large or company-wide.
For most companies, those “bigger” changes that require a change management process include (to name a few):
- Roll-out of a new company-wide tool or technology
- Change in leadership
- Launching a new department or changing organizational structure
- Work culture or values update
- New HR policies or benefits
- Imposed changes (i.e. new industry regulations that affect compliance)
- Rebranding
- Merger or acquisition
- Launching a new product
- Unexpected financial crisis due to economic/socio-political problems
Generally speaking, change management processes should be reserved for significant or complex changes that significantly affect job roles and require a more strategic approach to implementation, but what’s deemed “significant” varies from company to company—and it’s directly tied to culture.
Determining when the change management process is necessary is all about what kind of organization you want to be and what kind of culture you’re trying to build.
Start by logging changes, no matter how small, to collect data around the range of changes your business goes through in a certain amount of time. This will help you gauge–based on the culture you’re trying to build–when it’s time to intervene and when it’s time to let things flow.
Keep in mind that allowing an “it’s just a small insignificant change, what could possibly go wrong?” mentality to thrive at your organization can be a slippery slope, resulting in negative consequences like declined employee morale and productivity (and increased turnover).
On the other hand, employees like consistency and are generally resistant to change, meaning that employers that are too trigger-happy with their change management processes can sometimes do more harm than good (see: change saturation) when trying to control a situation.
Building a Successful Change Management Strategy
Once you’ve determined your threshold for change that activates change management, it’s time to build your strategy.
Change management will look different in every organization because the size of the company and the scope of transition greatly affect how long a change management project lasts. On the whole, change management processes will be more complex and take more time at larger companies.
The process of change management is a cycle of planning, implementation, feedback, and reevaluation. C
Prepare the Company for Change
To ensure the success of a change management process, you’re going to need buy-in from every level of the organization. To encourage adoption and reduce resistance, it’s critical to get clear on your “why” so that employees are also clear on why the change is necessary.
Defining your “why” is all about articulating how current processes are no longer helping the company achieve desired results. It might be helpful to gather data around those inefficiencies to help tell the story of why the old model no longer works. Data can come in the form of customer surveys, employee surveys, financial numbers, and more.
During the preparation phase, managers and other company leaders should take that data and help employees recognize the need for change. At this stage, they’re tasked with raising awareness around the various challenges or problems facing the business that are causing dissatisfaction and forcing the coming change.
Define Goals and Create a Plan
Once you’ve identified your “why” and you can clearly articulate what pain points the change will solve, it’s time to build a rollout plan. According to Harvard Business School experts, that plan should detail the following:
- Strategic goals: what goals does this change help the organization work toward?
- Key performance indicators: how will success be measured? What metrics need to be moved? What’s the baseline for how things currently stand?
- Project stakeholders and team: who will oversee the task of implementing change? Who needs to sign off at each critical stage? Who will be responsible for implementation?
- Project scope: what discrete steps and actions will the project include? What falls outside of the project scope? How will we communicate at each stage of the plan to ensure effective implementation?
While it’s critical to have a structured plan as a single source of truth, your change management strategy should also have built-in flexibility that accounts for any potential obstacles or unknowns that could arise during the implementation process. Agility is the key to any good change management plan.
Implement Change
Once the strategy is built, it’s time to activate each step of the change management plan as it’s outlined. Most quality change management programs start out by testing a new change, workflow, or process on a selected subgroup before rolling it out to the entire company. The testing stage can help you identify questions you haven’t thought of before and allows you to rectify issues before rolling it out company-wide.
During the implementation process, project stakeholders (tasked with ensuring successful implementation) should focus on helping employees take the necessary steps to achieve the goals of the initiative, celebrating any wins along the way. Managers, HR leaders, and other project stakeholders should repeatedly communicate the organization’s vision for change to keep the team motivated and on track.
Review Progress, Analyze, Adapt
The best change management plans have built-in goals and metrics for a reason: so the company can get better at managing through change in the future. Conducting analysis and review, or a “project post mortem,” can help business leaders understand whether a change initiative was a success, failure, or mixed result. These findings will provide insights and lessons that can inform and improve future change management exercises.
For more insights into how you can successfully manage through change and to get access to practical ideas for building a quality change management strategy, tune in for another episode of America Back to Work: Expert Interview Series. We sit down with Massella Dukuly, head of workplace strategy and innovation at Charter, a media services company that aims to transform the workplace, to get her take.