Benefits & Principles of Change Management

Change management is the process of conducting organizational change from beginning to end that covers planning, implementing, and solidifying changes within an organization. This refers to how businesses carry out modifications, like new technology implementation, adjustments to on-going processes, and shifting organizational hierarchy. 



Importance of Change Management 

Building an effective change management plan helps companies do hassle free transitions during the times of change. Being the head of the organization you can mandate changes; however, you cannot succeed unless you have a right plan for how to implement and evaluate. Irrespective of the type of change an organization wants to adopt, change management helps you take more control over the whole process. 

The different levels of change management are described below. Let's have a look. 

1. Individual Change Management: The change management projects help one (an individual) to manage change to enable them to grow in their position and/or accomplish specific goals. Learning a new skill is part of the process. 

2. Adaptive or Gradual Change: When it comes to scope, such change projects are smaller. Here small changes happen to products, processes, strategies, and workflows. From implementing fresh software tools to recruiting a new team member to address a challenge to updating a work-from-home rule all come under the adaptive change projects. 

3. Organizational or Transformational Change: These change management projects are large in terms of both scale and scope. Such change transformations are dramatic, such as changing the organizational hierarchy, rolling out a new product, or undertaking digital transformation. 

NB - Not every change initiative can fit neatly into one of the above levels of change management. In fact, it's completely possible for the levels to overlap. 

Benefits of Change Management

All changes, irrespective of size, benefit from the planned change management. Change cannot happen naturally to individuals or organizations. It needs proper management otherwise you are only left with hitting barriers and waste time and money. Thus change management is vital to successfully implementing changes that stick.

Let's discuss some of the benefits of addressing change management at an organizational-level. 

1. Proactively taking on internal resistance to change.

2. Setting up clear goals for change initiatives, letting firms to evaluate results.

3. Developing strategies for implementing change successfully that can be standardized and applied to different change projects across the company. 

4. Fixing as well as maintaining many aspects of change, including people, processes, technology, etc. 

5. Strengthening individuals and employees to steer the change faster, enabling them to be more productive and faster. 

6. Allowing organizations to find ROI on their transformation projects.

Types of Change Management 

One can come across a plethora of types of change management best practices and theories, based on the certain change you are working on. Now think about how you could approach each of these four types of changes mentioned below. 

1. Exceptional change: Segregated occasions that change a singular's encounter however don't significantly influence various parts of their life. For instance, a name change would require a few HR desk work and another email address yet wouldn't modify the individual's job working.

2. Incremental change: Regular changes that do not need major or sudden shifts, such as improving existing technology. Make sure shift change helps in effective handover.

3. Pendulum change: Immediate transitions from one state to another, often switching from one extreme to the opposing view or state. Let's say, moving from a full time in-office work environment to a remote team.

4. Paradigm change: Changes that result in fresh beliefs or values and become internalized as the new norm. For example, successfully shifting to a hybrid model from synchronous communication that covers up both synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Tips to Manage Change Effectively 

Considering the views of change management experts, six key change management best practices are discussed below. Get started. 

1. Create a sense of urgency

According to a popular change model, it concentrates on presenting the change as an imperative and exciting opportunity. It is suggested that you need to showcase this especially to the employees who are impacted by the change that it will help them become more productive and carry out their job more effectively.

2. Implement in phases

It's better to break the initiative into some phases that will help everyone in the team adjust to the change slowly and smoothly. Often small, gradual change is better to accept than significant changes all at once. 

You can try a beta test to a small group or department. Once you successfully fix the bugs in the beta phase, you can then think of implementing the same to a large group, and finally to the entire company. 

3. Address resistance

Explain the impact of change on individuals and specific departments. You can overlook resistance and convince your employees to adapt to change since resistances are noticed in the beginning of change.

4. Use a variety of training methods

Learning methods differ from person to person. Thus it's necessary to offer guidance through a variety of training techniques and types of employee training formats. Make proper arrangements to support end-users and employees with a mix of various learning styles that include 

·         Instructor-led training

·         Online learning with an LMS

·         Videos

·         In-app guidance and on-demand support

5. Setup change leaders

Your initiative ends before it begins if it lacks internal buy in. Change leaders encourage the whole team to move ahead with the transformation. They should include a mix of employees from several departments impacted by the change.

6. Ask for feedback

Paying attention to your group is an extraordinary method to augment the change management process and resolve any concerns or resistance. It will furnish you with procedures to improve upcoming change rollouts, and get your individual employees associated with the process.

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