10 Best Practices For Change Management In Organizations
It is no secret that the ongoing pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods. However, the widespread availability of vaccines across the globe has allowed organizations to finalize plans for reopening their offices in 2022. But with the outbreak of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, many companies have had to alter their back-to-work plans, bringing down employees' expectations. The recent survey by Gartner states that around 44% of organizations have delayed or altered their reopening plans due to the Omicron. As a result, businesses are now responsible for navigating and supporting employees' expectations. Whether you are working remotely full-time or moving into a hybrid arrangement, you will need to adapt to changes in workplace arrangements. Since technology and business are constantly evolving even in this pandemic time, you need to be ready to change your organization. This is what makes change management so critical to an organization.
To learn more about the change management process and how you can implement it in your organization, you can adopt critical practices. Before we deep dive into it, let's understand more about the organizational change management process and its relevance in 2022.
What is organizational change management?
Undoubtedly, companies need to keep up with the changing technological advancements and dynamic market trends in an age of fierce competition in every industry. They may also need to adapt to the specific needs of their clients. All of these processes require that your organization implement seamless change management.
Change management is aligning a change initiative with an organization's strategy. Changing small things can be routine for the service desk, but it can also affect the entire organization. Organizational change refers to how an organization changes a significant part of its operations, such as its culture, the technologies and infrastructure it relies on to operate, or its internal processes. Change management aims to leverage change to achieve a successful resolution, involving three key phases: preparation, implementation, and follow-up.
Factors affecting organizational change
- New leadership at the top of the company or within its departments
- New organizational structures
- Introducing new technologies
- Adapting to new business models
Why is organizational change management relevant in 2022?
Organizational change is crucial to the growth and success of any business. Effective change management facilitates the successful adoption and utilization of change. It encourages employees to comprehend and adopt the change and perform more efficiently. Companies that fail to manage organizational change may experience rocky transitions and spend a lot of time and money. In addition, they may experience lower employee morale and less professional skill development. An organization can fail due to a lack of effective change management.
Several reasons make change management so important. Some of them include:
- Less failures on projects
If your organizational structure is rigid, your projects are likely to fail. In 2022, projects need a certain level of flexibility to succeed and carry out smoothly. When managing a project, an organization must keep room for adjustments. Organizations can make their projects stronger and more adaptable with effective change management. It significantly reduces the chances of your projects failing. - Reduce confusion
Employees who encounter unforeseen circumstances and face rigid policies and standards will be unsure how to respond. In the end, they would make decisions that were not always in the best interests of your company. Effective change management provides all your employees with as much information as possible about the proposed change. By doing so, your team can outline the changes and carry out their activities efficiently, eliminating any confusion regarding the protocol. - Better Implementation of Change
With effective change management, organizations can implement change more quickly. Change management involves strategic planning and identifying goals. A successful change management campaign involves clearly defining the objectives you want to achieve from bringing about the same type of change within the organization as a sales/marketing campaign.
Implementing a solid change management plan naturally makes it faster and easier. A management plan is required regardless of whether you are changing at the project or company level. - Keeping your budget on track
The cost of bringing about a change in an organization can vary depending on the purpose. It is possible to be surprised by the project costs if you do not have a budget in place. You can create a budget for implementing the change by implementing change management. Plan out a budget you don't want to exceed when creating a blueprint and chart out your plan. The result is that you cannot allocate resources appropriately and ensure that your budget is not exceeded during implementation.
If your business is undergoing changes, these 10 practices are good to start.
- Define your goals clearly
An effective change management initiative should be clearly defined. Even though setting smart goals can be difficult for change management, organizations should aim to set them as specific as possible. In this way, employees and leaders will have a reference point for evaluating change management efforts. - Maintain honesty and transparency
As per the TLNT survey, around 30% of employees indicated that their company isn't always truthful and honest. Employers must be honest and transparent in order to execute changes successfully. The majority of employees aren't satisfied with the change, so being transparent at every change management process can help build employee confidence and engagement. - Provide training
Boost employee confidence, provide new training sessions and give them time to adjust to new practices. A sense of empathy and reassurance speeds up the process and reduces future organizational changes. - Encourage smooth and frequent communication
Though effective communications are a crucial component of successful change management, they go beyond that. Thus, managers should ensure that the right, complete, and consistent message is communicated to every employee. Establish a collaboration of teams and individuals for change plans, processes, and goals to avoid unwelcome surprises that introduce resistance at the employee level. - Listen to what your employees have to say
Managing engagement and communication shouldn't be your only concern. Allow your employee to lead the conversation so they can ask questions, offer comments, and make suggestions for improvement. They will be glad to have the opportunity to express themselves, and it's also an excellent way to learn about different perspectives and understand the impacts you might not have considered. - Take advantage of automation and AI
It is important for your tools to automate your change management processes to help minimize the burden on your employees. AI-powered service desks can help drive your management process by providing data-driven insight and intelligence. It also eliminates manual processes that are more likely to introduce human error. - Be aware of your risk.
When you do not take adequate precautions to manage risks and prepare adequately for a high-risk transition, your digital transformation program will fail. Establish a risk-management process to anticipate and prevent risks associated with radical changes to operations, systems, processes, and business models. - Choose tools familiar to your team
It is critical that your developers' tools integrate the right change management processes. When teams have to learn new tools, enter information into multiple tools, or deal with unfamiliar and uncomfortable tools, they tend to slow down adoption, which will negatively affect your ability to deliver valuable updates to customers. - Take ITIL as a guide.
As many organizations adopt ITIL, the framework comes with many implementations. This flexibility makes it easy for organizations to adopt ITSM practices that work best for their use cases. - Embrace success and stay focused on the future
The success of any change depends mainly on teamwork. Your teams should be recognized for their achievements throughout the change process, and employees should be rewarded for going the extra mile for one another, particularly during times of uncertainty and disruption.
Conclusion
It is important for all companies that wish to remain competitive to implement organizational changes. It is also possible that any change incurred by the organization can be disruptive, especially if there is no strategy for guiding the changes. Hopefully, the above change management practices will help you take a proactive, thoughtful, and strategic approach to efficiently help your employees through challenging times. Rezolve.ai, an AI-powered service desk platform integrated within Microsoft Teams, helps employees stay abreast of the new changes in various ways, such as answering their questions quickly, providing training via conversational microlearning, automating their routine tasks, and offering an extensive knowledge base.
