The old saying is true: change is the only constant. From financial to political factors, it’s virtually guaranteed that the context shaping your operations will shift at some point. While you can’t always anticipate when a change will impact your organization, you can always be prepared. Effective organizational change management helps ensure your success and readiness.
Knowing that it’s a question of when not if circumstances will change, leaders across sectors must guide their teams through both planned and unexpected transitions. Issues such as change fatigue, employee resistance, and poor leadership communication can create barriers to effective organizational change.
Whether you’re facing budget cuts or preparing to implement a new performance management system, it’s important to establish and maintain a workplace culture and state of readiness that minimize the turbulence organizational change can create.
Change Management is a Practice, Not a Process
You want to cultivate a work environment that makes transformational shifts feel less turbulent. By weaving change management principles into the fabric of your organization, navigating change becomes a familiar practice. Consistently building capabilities and strengthening capacity prepares your team to deploy their skills, tools, resources, and relationships to navigate changes that arise. In turn, leaders conserve resources, morale, and the bottom line while leading organizational change.
Messaging Matters
Managing organizational change is about managing workplace culture, and culture comes down to shared purpose and trust. How you talk about organizational change, the timing of your communication, and what you choose to focus on all affect whether your team will adopt or resist the new organizational reality. Be transparent about organizational impacts and respond to questions and concerns about how the change will affect the employee experience. Your staff makes your organization go, and people need to feel like their needs are being considered. Also, be strategic about which messengers communicate which information throughout the change management process. Key decisions and updates may be better received when shared by staff with strong workplace relationships.
Cultivate a Sense of Ownership
Organizational change is people-driven. Your team needs to feel a sense of meaning, ownership, agency, and accountability. While 74% of leaders say they involve employees in workplace change strategies, only 42% of employees feel truly included. The key to helping staff through organizational change is to involve them in every phase. Meaningfully engaging your team and integrating their diverse perspectives strengthens the change management process. Instead of feeling that the change is happening to them, your team will see that the transition can only be successful with their full participation.
Uplift the Opportunity Within the Challenge
Change always comes with challenges, but it also creates opportunities to evolve processes, programs, and practices in ways that support organizational and individual growth. You can build staff buy-in by emphasizing how impending or in-progress change could contribute to both collective goals and personal aspirations.
Whether change is internally or externally driven, leaders need to be ready. Don’t be caught unprepared; connect with our team to learn how we help you prepare for the inevitability of change.
