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 organizational 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 successful organizational change that can achieve your goals, you need to use the right strategies.
Here are some of the best strategies for organizational change and development to help you achieve success.
Is Your Organization Ready for Change?
Before implementing organizational change, it’s critical to understand how prepared your team and organization truly are. Too many change efforts fail not because the vision is flawed – but because organizations skip the step of assessing readiness.
To get ahead of potential barriers:
- Align on the case for change. Ensure everyone – especially senior leaders – shares a common understanding of the “why” behind the change.
- Gather reliable input. Use structured assessments, stakeholder conversations or surveys to evaluate how leaders and employees perceive the impact and necessity of the change.
- Build a robust plan with the right people. Include key influencers, skeptics and stakeholders early. Their perspectives help surface potential resistance and build stronger alignment.
The more clarity you have upfront, the more effectively you can build a change strategy that’s realistic, inclusive and actionable.
Effective Organizational Change Management Approaches
Two key components to an organizational change process are leadership and communication.
Many change failures can be traced back to one or both of these culprits.
Follow these strategies for managing organizational change, 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 successes 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.
This is one of the most practical organizational development strategies for change that ensures accountability and representation across departments.
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. Key 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 strategy 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
These are fundamental strategies for implementing organizational change that reduce ambiguity and boost execution.
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 detailed 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 employees to participate in the change implementation process by creating tangible opportunities for feedback and contribution. Provide managers with conversation outlines, build feedback channels and create moments where people can stretch their experience base.
Inclusive strategies for effective organizational change help foster ownership and trust, both critical to long-term success.
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 tools and 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 strike a balance between offering guidance and avoiding a top-down, overbearing approach. Most importantly, ensure your direction is clear and consistent. Frequent pivots or mixed signals from leadership can quickly lead to change fatigue. While it’s okay to adjust based on new information, staying the course builds trust and stability. Communicate regularly – and remember, effective communication isn’t just about sharing information. It’s about listening. People metabolize change by talking through it, not by reading an email or watching a video from 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.
Engage 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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