Change management is the organization of human resources following a major technical or corporate makeover. Financial arrangements of a deal that has gone through or a merger that is to take place between two big firms is grunt work, but the effective management of human resources is a far more complicated and challenging task. When you manage human resources well, the change becomes easier to handle, and the functioning of the newly-formed entity or deal goes smoothly. Hence, the term change management refers not to the management of change, but the management of the resources that are directly affected.
Financial changes in the company will be more dependent on how the people handle that change rather than the change itself. Change management also deals with the tools used to achieve this required business and human resource outcome. From the perspective of a project process, change management is a set of steps followed by a team member or a group of members to strategize and plan processes on how people are going to deal with the ensuing change.
Change management competency
Change management competency is the ability of a leader or a manager to lead their people through change. When the organization is going through change, the manager/leader responsible role depends on their change competency. The dedication of the organization towards this change and improving their implicit ability to deal with it also affects the competency level. It is this index that can gauge the ability of the organization to come out on top of the change on the other side, shining. Leaders and managers at every level must take special care to harvest this change management competency to build healthier employees in the corporate world.
The importance of change management
When organizations change, people within the organization change accordingly. Supervising this change is a matter of great responsibility, and the success of this venture will determine whether the organization will be able to cope with the dynamic of this change in the long run. The individual responsibilities of various people working in that field to take care of their duties during testing times gauge the organization’s change management competency. It is the progressive impact of successful individual change that results in an effective organizational transformation.
The cost of managing poorly
Poor change management can cause organizations to have a drop in their productivity while taking severe damage to their clients, firms they collaborate with, and various stakeholders in their company. Customers are also negatively impacted because this change is an organizational matter, and this should not have been a reason for their services to get disrupted in any manner. If the change does not take place smoothly, employees don’t get the chance to adapt, and their grievances remain unsolved, which means the company eventually sinks.
Negativity prevails, which further decreases productivity, general morale, and profits. Managers find themselves already loaded with the financial and structural tasks that come with the change to allocate adequate time to improving the morale of their employees and seeing to their change management competence. You can mitigate these long-term losses through a proper, well planned-out change management program.
Implementing change management
Individual change management:
Effective change management of your organization’s employees is immensely crucial. You can gauge their change management competence by their ability to cope with structural, financial, or departmental changes in the organization they work for, and how it affects their general productivity. For individual change management, we need to spread awareness for a change at the individual level. We need to discuss how this change is going to affect each individual’s life and how they can reinforce or change their habits to get sail through this change. The five building blocks, thus, are Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Behavioural Reinforcement. The goal is to lead the people on the soft side of changes and manoeuvres to help them come out on top on the other side.
Organizational change management
The organizational perspective deals with the cooperation of several individuals to make effective change management happen. They rely on the following assessments and strategies to support the creation of an effective organizational change management program: the creation of a communication plan, sponsoring roadmaps, enacting a coaching plan, and a training plan, along with a resistance management plan in case something unexpected arises. Each of these plans has a specific element that deals with the corporate psychology of employees and helps them deal with unfamiliar situations like change.
Importance of change management roles
The responsibility of senior leaders and managers heading the change management program in their organizations is not a trivial one. Reports conducted at hundreds of firms suggest that during the change, employees have preferred senders of change messages to be either the people at the top of the organization or the person/persons they report to regularly. It is the effectiveness of these senior leaders that make a difference in the change management. In short, the rule is to begin applying the change on projects and the tasks that build the organization’s competencies.
The people side of change is not the easy part of the change, and it is not the part that organizations can afford to ignore. Investing the time and energy to manage the people side of the organization pays off in the end, in terms of the success of the effort and avoidance of the numerous costs that plague poorly managed change.
