For businesses to keep up in an ever-changing marketplace, they need to evolve and adapt quickly to overcome challenges – especially now more than ever. Of course, implementing organizational change in a company is easier said than done but with organization design consulting professionals, it is much easier.
In fact, studies show that around 70% of organizational change programs fail – with most of this failure coming from employee resistance and lack of support from the management. To create effective organizational change that can achieve your goals, you need to use the right strategies.
Here are some of the best organizational change management strategies to help you achieve success.
Effective Organizational Change Management Approaches
Two key components to an organizational change process are leadership and communication.
Many change failures can be tracked back to one or both of these culprits.
Follow these steps to implement change in an organization, and you will raise your odds of success.
How to Implement Change in a Company
Break down the change into manageable chunks
You might have a grand vision for your company’s future, but you won’t be able to make all the changes you want simultaneously. Too much change at one time will overwhelm your team and create resistance.
Instead, define the intermediate changes over time that will lead to your desired end, and break the changes down into manageable smaller changes. Don’t start with the hardest or easiest change, but start with one that can positively set things in motion, creating momentum and a sense of confidence that change is possible. We call that initial change a “keystone” change… A keystone change is a clear, tangible goal that paves the way for bigger and better changes later on.
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For example, imagine you want to move your business infrastructure to the cloud. Migrating everything at once will strain both your systems and your personnel, likely resulting in failure. However, if you move one or two processes to the cloud (a keystone change), your team can get behind the changes slowly and at a reasonable pace -- in addition, small success will lead to bigger ones in the future. Teams are much more likely to adopt change when they believe and are committed to the initiative.
Assemble a Change Management Team
Once you’ve identified your change, it’s time to create a team that will help guide it on behalf of the organization… This group of people will be in charge of successfully implementing changes and getting the rest of the company on board – a critical component for any effective change management project.
There are six main roles in any successful change management team:
- Primary Sponsor – The person who authorizes and funds the project—typically one of the senior executives. This person needs to be the most committed to the project because, as any management expert will tell you, changes start at the top.
- Managers and Supervisors – Upper management team members who supervise employees with key roles in the change. If you were implementing a new product development process, for example, you’d need leadership from R&D, marketing, and manufacturing.
- Project Team – A group of people who are in charge of the technicalities of the changes. They design how things will be done in the future for maximum efficiency.
- Change Management Resources – To stay on track and under budget, you need someone who can manage the project’s resources.
- Project Support Functions – Experts in a particular area brought in to support the project. These can be training specialists, HR business partners, subject matter experts, etc. They can act as “subject matter experts” to the team on an as-needed basis.
- Stakeholders – Anyone who’s impacted by the changes. Stakeholders can be employees, vendors, managers, or even customers. Everyone needs to be on board for success. Mapping and prioritizing your stakeholders is critical to keeping the change effort focused and on track.
Building the right team and an effective communication plan are crucial steps in the organizational change process – the key to encouraging employee involvement and ensuring that the initiative is successful.
Create a Plan and Share It
The key to any successful change is a good plan. Be as detailed as possible with your organizational change management plan, and include these elements:
- A clear case for the change – what is the imperative that makes it compelling? What are the positive results it will deliver? What might be the consequences of not doing it?
- Detailed steps to achieve the goal
- Who is responsible for each step
- Timelines for completion of each step
- Explanation as to why each step is necessary
You’ll also want to create a list of potential challenges or risks and ways to overcome them. The more prepared you are, the smoother the changes will be.
Once you have your plan written down, share it with your team and all stakeholders. Not only will this let everyone know what’s going to happen, but it’ll also help to keep you and your change management team accountable.
Be Inclusive and Encourage Participation
Excluding people from the change, even unintentionally, alienates the very people you need to embrace change. And it risks the project’s success. Simply put, if people don’t feel included they won’t want to help.
Encourage your employees to participate in the change implementation process. Create tangible ways for them to do so. Provide managers’ conversation outlines to bring into their meetings to get people talking. Create feedback loops that allow people to weigh in on what they’re seeing. Create opportunities for people to contribute and stretch their experience base in the process. Employees will feel more engaged with the project and the business goals — plus, you might gain some valuable insight from different perspectives.
Monitor and Measure Progress
Implementing change in an organization isn’t a quick task; it’s a long-term effort. As your plan progresses and you go through the steps, monitor and measure your progress.
Be sure to define several metrics to help you measure success, and remember to touch base with stakeholders to determine how the changes are affecting the team. And when you get data suggesting something might be off-kilter, investigate and act on it.
Organizational Challenges That Prevent Success
So many businesses fail at implementing change because they don’t consider the potential challenges. Even using change management best practices, there’s still a chance you won’t succeed.
Here are three common challenges to your change management structure.
Leadership Direction
Change is a top-down initiative, but there’s a tricky balance leadership must maintain in order to foster change effectively.
Too much direction fails to make team members feel empowered in the process, increasing resistance – and a lack of direction will have your team working without intent or at cross purposes.
You’ll need to find the balance to give employees the direction they need without coming off pushy or overbearing. More importantly, you’ll need to be sure that the direction you provide is clear and consistent. Organizations that go through fits, start to get change fatigued quickly. Leaders prone to changing their minds too often must realize the downstream impact that has on the broader organization. While there are sometimes needs to pivot a change when you get new information, it’s important that you stay the course once you set out. Communicate often and consistently along the way. And remember, communicating isn’t only about giving information, it’s about listening. People are metabolizing change when they are talking about it, not when they are reading an email about it or watching a video of the CEO.
Transition Management
Transition management has to do with the rigor of your plans. You want your planning and implementation to be structured and detailed, so be aware of these 2 “ends-of-the-spectrum”:
- Too rigid adherence to the plan and its milestones can quickly cause change management fatigue and turn team members away from the objective.
- Not enough planning makes it impossible to track the success or to keep everyone on the same plan.
Engaging people in the plan Keeping people informed and engaged helps sustain energy and focus. In the day to day busyness of work, the change won’t be top of mind for people, so you need to keep them informed of progress, setbacks, and adjustments.
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Remember, selecting a simple keystone change goes a long way to prevent transition management problems - it’s straightforward enough that you won’t need to overly plan, while still allowing for some flexibility.
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Ongoing Diagnosis and Learning
A major part of how to implement change in an organization is tracking whether or not the changes are occurring on time and whether they’re effective. Choosing the wrong metrics to track or over-generalizing data can give you false information, which makes tracking progress impossible.
You also want to avoid over-analyzing or collecting too much data. Tracking too many or unrelated metrics wastes time and energy that could be better used elsewhere.
Managing Change in an Organization
Managing change in organizations will never be easy… Getting one or two people on board with change is difficult. But the opportunity for great things to occur with positive change, or the need to avoid worsening conditions by changing, makes being good at change necessary. If you’re wondering how to deal with organizational change, follow these helpful management strategies to lead your team toward success.
Still not sure how to manage change in an organization? Consult the experts at Navalent.
Using proven organizational change management strategies developed with years of real-world experience, we’ll quickly identify the issues hindering your success and give you the strategies to implement lasting company-wide change. Contact us today for a free 15-minute strategy session to discuss your organizational issues.
See how Navalent saved a $3 billion-dollar company from bankruptcy and doubled their bottom-line in 4 years.