How to achieve successful change management

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Understanding how to be agile to achieve successful change management has become a key skill to run a successful company, is not only for a big one-time project only.

Changes are more common now than ever, companies are going through changes all the time. It’s a new product, a new leadership team, a new safety program in place, new clients or new suppliers. The only constant is change. Understanding how to be agile to achieve successful change management has become a key skill to run a successful company, is not only for a big one-time project only.

Agile companies embrace constant change by disaggregating every project into small batches performed by small autonomous teams, developing leaders that are more facilitators of success than almighty heroes and providing support to the employees in the way of training, monitoring tools, verification, and communication.

The big problem with change is usually that people try to avoid it. People fear what they don’t know. So the greater challenge for companies is to work on how to make them feel safe about the change. And what is exactly that? You need to build a culture that provides them support. You need to care about the employees, how they feel and how they think. I call it the CARES culture. That helps employees getting ownership on the job, autonomy and therefore, more engagement to change.

What are the main ingredients to build a culture that embraces change management?

1) Hazard analysis

Before you start any project, form a multidisciplinary team, brainstorm and write down what could go wrong and what type of tools and knowledge is needed. Prevention and preparedness help people feel more secure and better ready to act when something goes wrong. It reduces fear for sure.

2) Train leaders to facilitate change.

I have seen how major implementations in big companies start with a lot of energy but loose inspiration through time. Therefore the change end up not being successful, or not being complete, where some groups actually change and some others never get to grasp the new way. Instead, working in small autonomous teams, bottom-up leaders don’t make all the decisions but foster people involvement which makes the workforce feel more engaged with the new procedures.

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3) Build a network

Every employee needs to be trained to embrace change together as part of their daily tasks in order to get involved. That means to train employees to be focus, knowledgeable, disciplined and humble to work in teams. That is simply said, engaged with the team. They need to follow the rules of the workplace, even if they are new and they don’t like it; and to speak up and propose new ideas if they think something is not working well. Provide them with tools, procedures, pictures or whatever direction they may need to perform the work as expected. People need to be trained to work in teams, to rely on their mates and procedures, and not only on their supervisors. Again, supervisors should be not be seen as the heroes anymore. Teamwork helps to reduce personal fear, it’s better to fail together that to fail alone.

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4) Monitor

Monitor performance to provide feedback on how the change is working and what needs to be done to go to the right direction. After the task is well done we need to provide some kind of reward to reinforce it positively. Monitoring results onsite in the format of statistics or KPI’s is a way to show improvement to the employees, clearly showing when an objective is met and a reward is coming. As long as scorecards don’t show guilty people, but enable instead root cause analysis, monitoring tools will be more than welcome.

5) Verify

Audits are very useful tools to verify compliance and strengthen change management in the right direction. Scores noted by an external observer can help identify where he change is slower than expected or where some best practices are showing up. What’s more, when verifications on the job are done by managers, employees feel more committed to change because they can see the involvement and therefore importance of the matter.

6) Communicate

Last but not least, communication is key. Provide online training, face to face training, newsletters and banners. Stand-up daily meetings are very useful to communicate the latest news, ask for suggestions, identifying what went wrong and how to do better in the future. Specially communicate good results. Rewards don’t necessarily have to do with money, but could be praise from a manager, a celebration lunch, more free time or a happier customer, whatever has to do with the change. But remember to reward teams, not individuals, in order to foster team building.

RECOMMENDED COURSE FOR CHANGE MANAGEMENT: Cultural Agile Re-Engineering with Safety focus

Lu Paulise

luciana@biztorming.com

@lupaulise

Biztorming Training & Consulting