Change Management Processes
JFK famously once said that ‘Change is the law of life,’ a statement that is as true in the world of
business as it is for the President of the United States. Businesses need to adapt to survive,
whatever their industry, but each major change comes with huge risks and the bigger the potential
for disaster, the more crucial it is to have an effective change management strategy.
Change management is about creating the structure for smooth and thorough implementation of
business changes, ensuring that these changes deliver lasting benefits. There are many suggested
methods for achieving these goals, and this guide will give you all the information you need,
allowing you to choose which method suits your business and its needs.
The dangers of getting this wrong are potentially catastrophic, as there are so many areas that can
be affected. One of these is negatively affecting staff morale by failing to keep them informed and
invested in the changes you are implementing, thus leading to the loss of key talents to other
companies and a fall in productivity in general.
Failure to effectively communicate your changing strategies to stakeholders and customers can be
equally damaging. If you don’t think about the impacts of your changes on the people who are
most important to your business, you’re risking losing more than just those people.
The 12 factors in change management
1. External Environment: The first step is understanding how direct and indirect external
factors affect your organisation at the moment and how this could change.
2. Mission and Strategy: What are your organisation’s vision and mission, and how well do
your staff understand and buy into it?
3. Leadership: Look carefully at the leadership structure of your organisation and where the
main role models can be found.
4. Organisational Culture: This defines how the people in your organisation work together,
what the organisational values are, and how they influence what you collectively achieve.
5. Structure: More than simply the hierarchical structure of your organisation, you need to look
at the deeper ways in which communication and decision making is done.
6. Systems: This refers to the policies and procedures that govern how your staff goes about
their day-to-day work.
7. Management Practices: Taking things up a level within your organisation, how do your
managers implement and affect the way your corporate vision is achieved?
8. Work Unit Climate: This requires you to get your staff involved to find out what they think
and feel about you and each other and what their hopes and expectations are.
9. Tasks and Skills: Properly look at how well matched your employees are to the tasks that
you are asking them to do, making sure you understand what each position requires.
10. Individual Values and Needs: Find out what is important to your staff and what they feel
you need to do to increase their job satisfaction.
11. Motivation Level: How motivated are your staffs? If you don’t know this, achieving any kind
of meaningful corporate change will be almost impossible.
12. Individual and Overall Performance: How is your performance when it comes to
productivity, quality, efficiency, budget and customer satisfaction?
Implementing Changes
Changes being made for the right reasons are only going to be effective if they are implemented in
the right way. Having a good change management strategy is essential, How to motivate your staff
to drive forward the change you are seeking to implement and how to ensure that the change
sticks.
8 steps process for leading change
1. Create a Sense Of Urgency: In this first step, Kotter says that you need to start out with a
bold and inspirational message that immediately gets everyone involved inspired and fired up to
make effective change happen right away.
2. Build a Guiding Coalition: To really get things done, you need a project team who have
totally bought into your plans and can coordinate the delivery of them.
3. Form a Strategic Vision & Initiatives: Hopefully, you’ve already got all of this from the
previous section, but make sure you’ve clearly defined how the results will be different from
what has gone before.
4. Enlist a Volunteer Army: You’ve already got a team leading the way, now you need the
troops who will go into battle for you and represent you and your mission to all of their
colleagues.
5. Enable Action By Removing Barriers: When you did the research into your policies and
procedures, you will have come across those that could hinder your progress. Now is the time to
remove them before they cause problems.
6. Generate Short-Term Wins: Change management is a lengthy process, and if you are
going to keep people on board, you need to show them that it’s worth it by arranging quick wins
and communicating them to everyone.
7. Sustain Acceleration: Once you’ve broadcast these wins, capitalise on them and use the
positive atmosphere they have generated to drive forwards with important changes.
8. Institute Change: Make sure the changes stick by demonstrating their effectiveness and
importance until they have become the new habits for everyone.
Continuous Improvement
1. Plan: Work out what needs to change and decide how you are going to change it.
2. Do: Make the change happen.
3. Check: Use whatever measurements you can to determine whether the change is working.
4. Act: Use these results to help embed the new procedures into your day-to-day business
operations.
Communication in Change Management
One of the biggest stumbling blocks in change management comes down to your staff. Forgetting
that change impacts on each and every one of them as individuals is a clear path to disaster, this
model demonstrates the stages of grief, and while this might seem to be overstating the effect
your corporate changes can have on your staff, it can be deeply troubling to have major changes
made to your day-to-day job.
Here’s how the stages could be seen through the course of the corporate changes:
1. Shock: If you haven’t properly built up to a major change in the way your business operates,
this will come as a huge shock to some of your staff and generally not a happy surprise. Even
with suitable information beforehand, changes can deeply affect some of your people. You need
to know how to deal with this.
2. Denial: The easiest way to deal with something upsetting is to pretend it isn’t happening. If
your employees are burying their heads in the sand rather than embracing the changes you are
trying to drive through, there will be little chance of it being successful.
3. Frustration: Once denial has failed, disaffected staff will soon start to exhibit signs of
frustration. As you can probably imagine, this can be hugely problematic for the atmosphere in
your workplace as it can be infectious. Frustrated staff will be less productive and increasingly
hard to deal with.
4. Depression: The next stage is the lowest point of the Kübler-Ross change management A
staff member at this stage will be completely unproductive and toxic for your environment. You
will need to address their feelings quickly or risk losing them to another company.
5. Experiment: This is the stage at which things can start to get better if the staff member is
still with you. At this point, they start to accept that things have changed and that they need to
engage with the changes you are implementing if they are to feel better about their jobs.
6. Decision: After experimenting with the new systems and processes, they start to feel
happier in this new world and are well on the way back to being fully productive members of
staff.
7. Integration: If you have successfully managed the situation, this is the stage where they are
fully committed to your changes and are hopefully more productive; exhibiting better morale
and greater motivation than before the change was implemented.
