In today’s ever-changing world, business change management has become a critical success factor for any company that wants to stay competitive. Companies that can adapt and embrace change are able to capitalize on growth opportunities.
What is Change Management?
Change management is the process of affecting a transition or transformation to existing business goals, processes, or technologies. It helps make employees ready for the change and provides them with appropriate communication and training to ensure employees are well informed of the details, processes, and risks involved.
Today’s work environment is agile, creative, and highly connected, so change is never occurring on an isolated basis. Whatever the case, it affects the entire company and every employee. It can be a stressful experience for the team as they adapt to new ways of doing their work. But a good change management plan will reassure your staff that their work is important and help you guide them through the transition process.
Change Management Principles
The American professor John Kotter presents four Change Management Principles which describe how to turn change recommendations into tangible improvements. The four change principles include:
- Select Few + Diverse Many: Change management is not solely the responsibility of senior leaders—it’s every employee’s role. When a select few have the power to determine how your company will transform, you may miss out on input from people in other departments and others may feel like their concerns are heard or addressed. Involving representatives from across your organization at every stage of a change process allows everyone to prove themselves and you to identify new leaders you didn’t even know your company had.
- Have To + Want To: There are many people in your company who would like to be involved in a meaningful activity, and they are willing to do so voluntarily. Ask employees their opinion, as they have the most in-depth knowledge of the process and practical experience in dealing with it. Involving your employees in a change process and listening to everyone’s ideas will help you identify challenges, plan improvements, and create buy-in that makes it easier to implement change and sustain progress over time.
- Head + Heart: The first step to getting people to embrace change is to involve them in identifying that change is needed. When their head and heart are both engaged, they’ll feel more invested in the changes you make. When change is driven by logic and feelings, it tends to spread throughout the company easily. This means that if your organization is filled with employees who see a need and commit themselves to addressing it—even when they face challenges along the way—you’re more likely to be successful in moving towards your goals.
- Management + Leadership: Managers need to have leadership and credibility if they intend to drive the company forward with a permanent lean transformation strategy. Their primary purpose should be to provide employees with an understanding of the company’s direction. They should offer a well-functioning workplace for all employees who understand the importance of change, the vision, and their role in it.
Change vs. Transformations Change and transformation are frequently used interchangeably in an enterprise setting. Both methods are about implementing changes that affect all levels of the organization. However, there are some critical differences between the two.
There is a very thin line between change and transformations. Change management is about making incremental improvements to existing business processes and functions and adjusting the way things work. On the other hand, transformation is not simply a matter of implementing enhancements, creating a new vision, or modifying processes and procedures. It involves re-engineering the entire organization’s purpose, core capabilities, operations and structure, and developing a new business model based on a vision. As such, they require much deeper integration across business functions and disciplines.
Transformation is a much more radical approach and, consequently, involves much more risk. Change management can be incorporated into transformation, but not vice versa, and even if some changes lead to significant improvements in a number of processes, it does not guarantee the success of the overall transformation.
Change Management Strategies
- Develop the Full Vision for Change: Anyone who wants to make a large-scale change in their organization successfully needs to have a picture of the future state of an organization after changes have been made. Change visions should be simple, clear, and compelling. They should be easy for everyone on the team to understand, including lower-level employees and international colleagues.
- Communicate With Your Employees: When you work with people, communication is a key strategy that serves to keep information flowing between employees, departments, and upper management. In order to successfully implement updates in your company, the reasons for change must be explained in advance to all levels of the organization. The best way for a company to communicate is to tell employees explicitly what is going on in the company and explain the vision, goals, and expectations for what needs to happen and why.
- Deliver Effective Training: To get the best results from your staff, involve them in the change process by delivering practical training for all levels of your workforce. When employees are informed and know what is expected of them, they are more likely to feel empowered and connected to the company’s day-to-day operations and overall goals. Training empowers people to adapt to change, embrace it, and be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities that arise.
- Create a Clear Road Map: Change management is not a one-step process but rather a systematic approach where the change must go through different stages. A change management plan needs a roadmap that guides both the business and the project teams to achieve their goals. Properly identify the major changes that are required to take your business to the next level, establish the stages of its implementation, set timelines, isolate the weaknesses, and address them directly without causing any disruption.
- Gather the Right Change Team: Assemble your ‘change agents’ by selecting a diverse team to manage the change. Don’t be afraid of getting help from business change consultants, as people who weren’t involved in your working process but as overseers may tell you what, in their opinion, needs to be changed and how to do it properly. Our change consultants have experience working with companies like yours and therefore can bring the knowledge to recommend particular changes that will work for your company.
Change Management Consulting
Sometimes doing changes by yourselves isn’t enough as you may not have enough experience or ‘know-how,’ especially if something goes wrong. That’s why it would be better to get the services of a change management consulting team. Managers with Black, Yellow, or Green Belts in Lean Six Sigma will help your change production team.
Change Consulting Scotland has over 20 years of experience running complex change management programs – including business change, people change, and technology change. We use our extensive experience in delivering change to adopt the right fit for your change and organization.
Our Lean Six Sigma approach to business is focused on finding the root cause of a problem, developing a solution, and implementing changes to improve process efficiency in order to improve your business incrementally. The Lean Six Sigma methodology is a holistic strategy for optimizing business efficiency. Using its techniques, you can identify the origin of the problem in your process, find the right way to correct inefficiencies, and adopt a new management culture. You can find more information by following this link