5 Change Management Challenges In Turbulent Times

June 10th, 2021 by dayat No comments »

Over the last few years, with the dramatic changes in the financial world and the ever speeding of worldwide communications, change management has become an art form all the more challenging.

New business environments are facing change like never before and because of this accelerated pace, change management faces some new challenges as a process in itself.

Here are five specific to the ‘new world’, where the only thing that stays steady is the rate of change of the pace of change:

1. Keeping Their Trust

With each change in the workplace following hot on the heels of the last change, it is unsurprising that employees are feeling punch drunk as each blow hits home. ‘This place isn’t like what it once was’, will be the plaintiff cry heard in workplaces across the world.

Historically change happened gradually – if at all – and even just a few short years ago, any change was greeted as an event; a novelty and the inherent values of an organisation still showed through.

Not any more. And those leading change have to work far, far harder to ensure that they are seen to be the trusted organisation they always were.

For managers implementing change, the position they are in (commonly known as between ‘a rock and a hard place’) has meant that they have had to deliver change to their people, whilst also ensuring that they personally retained good relationships with their people, often built up over many years.

The solution to this is that investment in the trusting relationships they build over time will go along way to insulate them from the bad feeling that comes when changes are implemented, however often they happen. The key action for managers to take, is to spend as much time as possible of the office and with their people, listening to them and valuing them, as early as they can, so that the strong trust is in place before you need it.

2. Being Fully Honest

When changes are being made, managers will find there is a conflict between being open and honest with their people. This can cause a challenge because as they have been able to build trusting relationships, openness and honesty have been one of the foundations.

For a manager suddenly to become much more careful about what they say, can lead to suspicion and short-term reduction in the trust their people have in them.

The way to resolve this is two-fold. By building a series of relationships with employees that, over time has been tested and shown to be robustly trustworthy, a manager will be able to use that to help when they can’t be quite as open as they might be in different times.

The second issue is to be open and honest about what they can and cannot be open about! This statement of reality will show their employees that they really are sticking with the principles already embedded in the relationship – that of honesty and openness in the communication between them.

3. Creating a ‘Constant Change’ Environment

How would it be if there were no surprises and changes came and went with excitement and fun? That takes control back and makes people feel better too. This requires a change in mindset to encourage – even proactively stimulate – change in lives and in business too.

Where change is challenging is where we simply don’t have the skill to appreciate what opportunities change creates.

By looking for change constantly, managers – and, very importantly, their teams – set the ladder against a different wall and when change still gets applied outside their control, they are far more able to see the possibilities – and less likely to dwell on any downsides.

4. Maintaining Morale

In a change ridden world, people feel battered by the effects and this can strike at the very heart of how they are feeling. In any business, it leaves a sense of uncontrolled ‘done to’ rather than being a part. By getting people engaged with change and having an integral say in the ‘how’ of the ‘what’ needs to be done, creativity and engagement flows.

The best managers see their employees as a resource in change situations – even more in this new age where past conventions of ‘;caring for our people’, are being thrown out of the door.

For many employees, this is such a shift in what they are used to that they fail to see the way forward – so letting them be a fully signed-up part of that way is a perfect tactic to maintain and even max out their morale and motivation.

The question is, as a manager, will you be prepared to get out of your own way and let that happen?

5. Bringing Good People In

Incredibly, changing workplaces generate new opportunities for managers, not least in the arena of recruitment. It’s a little sad to say so, but in many situations, managers have been left with a less than fully-formed team.

So when changes to personnel happen, it’s critical that this clear-out is used as an opportunity to bring in the right people next time. For this, many managers will have to shape up in their recruitment skills or they will simply replace like-with-like and make no progress. Indeed, because of the churn time it takes for people to settle in, there could be a significant decrease in performance over a protracted period.

Recruit effectively from the burgeoning pool out there. Review where it didn’t work out in the past and grab this opportunity for change, to build a sharper, more dynamic – more demanding of you even – team for the future.

Change provides opportunity, if you let it happen. And it’s more than that. Finding the courage and strength to be dynamic and creative in turbulent business times can shape careers – in both ways. Effective managers have the capacity to stand back and change themselves too.

And this is for the benefit of all.

Change Management Will Change Your Life

June 10th, 2021 by dayat No comments »

All of us have been part of an effort that, for some reason, did not turn out as we intended. It could have been something as simple as that new omelet recipe you wanted to try. Why didn’t your omelet look the same as that pretty picture on recipes.com? Or it could have been the 2013 rollout of healthcare.gov, the beleaguered web portal of the Obamacare initiative.

Somewhere along the way, something went wrong with that omelet and with Obamacare’s website. Identifying what went wrong (and quickly) is a big part of what change management is all about.

What is Change Management?

Whether the goal is to make an omelet or to roll out healthcare.gov, it is important to realize that these products came into existence only after the completion of many individual steps. In the case of the omelet, you beat the eggs, warmed the butter, diced the fillings and so forth. Your future omelet will eventually come from this soup of ingredients.

This soup of ingredients undergoes major and minor changes as you progress through the recipe. The current state of your omelet can be called your “as-is state.” From this as-is state, you make a series of observations and form the “baseline” mental image of your omelet. As you move ahead to the next step in your recipe, you remember this baseline and monitor what the next change does to your effort. You can likely identify a problem faster if you pay attention to what things looked like before.

A lot of change management is simply empirical observation. With a good record of changes and whether the result was positive or negative, the bad outcomes can often be minimized and the good outcomes made more frequent.

Advantages of Change Management

In practice, change management has great practical value to the enterprise. Many organizations are subject to regulatory agencies or laws. For example, U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

One technical provision of HIPAA is that healthcare providers must safeguard against unauthorized changes to a health record. In this scenario, change management is not simply a benefit but a requirement. For example, if a patient has a documented history of an allergy to penicillin and his record is erroneously updated to report no allergies present, monitoring may help catch an otherwise deadly mistake.

For undertakings that involve many steps or many changes, change management can offer a clear reversion path. The record of change is the “trail of bread crumbs” that gets your product back to a functional state. Let’s say that you are working on an Excel spreadsheet with many embedded formulas, each of which references a specific location in the spreadsheet.

If you start introducing a lot of changes all at once – moving around columns and updating formulas in the spreadsheet – you may find that some of your formulas no longer work. But which change broke your spreadsheet? If you can’t identify the change(s) that did, you may have to redo all of that work.

Another advantage is that it helps preserve institutional knowledge. In large programming projects, for example, the product manager can review the state of the application over time. Each code change or revision is typically checked in to a repository as a sort of archive. The entire evolution of the application project can be observed by looking at these snapshots in time of the code. As a result one can begin to understand the way the product has changed over time – even if the original programmers have long since left the company.

Challenges of Change Management

Change management is often unpopular due to the increased overhead it brings. In fact, if done poorly, it can bog down the output of the entire organization.

There is a cost associated with change management. That cost can come from the time it takes to train staff to use the new process. There can also be capital expenditures if the company decides to purchase a CM software application.

Perhaps the most serious challenge to consider for change management is the overhead it may bring. If the process of change management is more onerous than making the change itself, the CM process may need improvement. If change management is not handled in an efficient manner, the new process may not gain acceptance and consistent use. Worse, the rank-and-file staff may quietly lower their output to the business as a way to avoid using the change management process.

Recommendations for Change Management

Before rolling out a new process or buying new software, the business should identify key stakeholders for the effort of rolling out change management. A project sponsor should be identified that will act as the owner of the project. Together, the stakeholders and project sponsor should identify what needs the project must fulfill to be considered successful. Desirable features can also be included alongside project requirements.

Once the project team is identified and the goals listed, the team should examine what resources should be involved in determining the necessary steps to accomplish those goals. Many goals in the project will likely reveal an interdependency between two groups within the business: for example, the rank-and-file’s acceptance of the change management systems, and the executives’ ability to provide an efficient and functionally relevant system.

Failure to meet such an interdependency can risk project failure. Therefore, it is important that the project team hold conversations with staff outside the project team to determine what an efficient and functionally relevant change management system might look like. This can mean lots of conversations and interactions with entities across the business.

If requirements, interdependencies, and functional concerns are addressed prior to rollout, the business will have an accurate idea of what their change management system will need to be successful.