Your Complete Change Management Tool Kit

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Introduction

How to keep your team engaged through any transitioning or restructuring process.

Change Management is hard!
Have you ever had a change management initiative backfire? Or an employee engagement strategy come up short? Chances are, it’s happened to all of us at some point. Change is both necessary and hard to manage in any organization. Employee engagement can be difficult as well, since different people respond differently.

But we’ve got you covered!
To help make your life easier, we’ve put together this handy toolkit for handling change and engaging employees. Whether you’re just starting out with managing change and encouraging employee involvement or looking for tried-and-tested methods that have been successful in the past, this guide will give you all the best practices along with practical solutions.

 

The Change Process: Understanding what’s required


Leadership and Management

In order to capitalise on windows of opportunity, leadership must be paramount – and not just from one executive. It’s about vision, action, innovation and celebration, as well as essential managerial processes.

Select Few and Diverse Many
More people need to be able to make change happen – not just carry out someone else’s directives. Done right, this uncovers leaders at all levels of an organisation; ones you never know you had.

Head and Heart
Most people aren’t inspired by logic alone, but rather by the fundamental desire to contribute to a larger case. If you can give greater meaning and purpose to your effort, extraordinary results are possible.

‘Have To’ and ‘Want To’
Those who feel included in a meaningful opportunity will help create change in addition to their normal responsibilities. Existing team members can provide the energy… if you invite them.

 

Develop a plan for implementing change

Once you understand the change process and the needs of each team member, your next step is to develop a plan for implementing the change. When creating a plan, consider the following: timeline, budget, resources needed, communication strategy, and training materials. All these factors should be carefully considered in order to create an actionable plan that will help move the organization forward.

8 Step Change Management Framework


1. Create a sense of urgency

  • Establish a timeline for the change process
  • Clearly communicate the benefits of implementing the changes
  • Articulate why it’s important to act now and not wait
  • Highlight potential risks of delaying or not making any changes

2. Build a guiding coalition
Create a group of impactful change leaders rather than relying on a single person to lead the change

  • Ensure diversity of the team in terms of level, function, geographic location (if applicable), tenure, and ideas
  • Lookout for individuals with an ability and a willingness to work across the hierarchy while also working with people across all levels and functions…with respect and energy
  • Importantly, these people must have a commitment to the change initiative at hand

3. Form a strategic vision and initiatives

  • Communicate the vision and initiatives to stakeholders, team members and other relevant parties. Make sure everyone understands how these initiatives will help the organization transition smoothly through change
  • Regularly review the vision and initiatives to make sure they are still relevant with any changes in the external environment
  • Ensure that everyone is aware of the progress being made and any challenges faced along the way

4. Enlist a volunteer army
Give people a reason and motivation to join the movement. A strong vision goes a long way

  • Don’t boil the ocean – while you reach “stickiness” once you surpass 50%, about 15% of your organisation is enough to build material momentum toward change
  • Recognise the effort of existing volunteers to keep them
    engaged and to recruit more

5. Enable action by removing barriers

  • In order to remove barriers, you must identify them. Think about why past initiatives have failed. At what stage? Did they get off the ground at all? Stall mid-way? Get completed but then abandoned?
  • Barriers can be commonly accepted statements that, while appearing helpful, can deter attempts to get past legacy obstacles. These are statements like, “It’s just not done that way,” or “We tried that before — it didn’t work.”
  • Common barriers include: silos, parochialism, pressure to hit numbers, complacency, legacy rules or procedures, and limited access to key stakeholders and leader

6. Generate short-term wins
An effective short-term win is not a gimmick. It is a significant organizational improvement that’s:

  • Relevant in light of the opportunity before you
  • Meaningful to others. People beyond the winner or winners care about the win, be it members of your team, another team, customers, stakeholders, etc.
  • Unambiguous, visible, and tangible such that people can
    replicate or adapt it. Wins have the most impact when they scale
    across organisations

7. Sustain acceleration

  • Revisit urgency after generating some significant wins. It is so easy to lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is to move the initiatives into the culture and sustain them.
  • Get more and more people involved, always looking for ways to expand the volunteer army.
  • With new volunteers and fresh eyes, you’ll find more barriers in need of knocking down. Remove them, too!

8. Institute change
Steps 1-7 are all about building new muscles, new behaviours and new ways of working. Step 8 is about sustaining it long into the future

  • Ensure practices are deeply rooted and anchored to replace the old ways
  • Ensure clear communication and synchronization between the traditional hierarchical structure and the innovative network of volunteers
  • A key challenge is grafting the new practices onto roots that may be
    old but still effective, while killing off the inconsistent pieces

Engagement is Key

Engagement is an essential component to the successful management of any organizational change. When implemented correctly, it can help ensure smooth execution and quick adaptation from everyone involved. Without engagement, there is a risk of negative reactions to new processes or direction that could lead to further delays or disruption in productivity.

Components of Engagement Framework


Mission
Start with your why and build your framework around this Narrative

  • Our why & Mission
  • Our Value & Behaviour
  • Our story communicated by CEO / COO / CPO in Video

Surveys
Ensure you build regular cadences of surveys

  • Linked to M & V
  • Weekly Pulse Sentiment
  • Monthly eNPS
  • Quarterly Engagement Survey

Awards
Ensure you promote awards given on your intranet

  • Linked to values
  • Setup awards as monthly, quarterly and/or annual for employee of the month, unsung hero, best improved etc.

Recognition
Ensure staff are trained how to give recognition to peers

  • Linked to Behaviours
  • Setup certain awards so they can be given peer-to-peer by anyone in the organisation. Ensure all recognition received and given is accessible to the manager for one2ones

Feedback
Ensure You run sessions on giving feedback with staff

  • Linked to Behaviours
  • Realtime peer to peer feedback linked to values and behaviours or strategic pillars. Ensure Feedback is surfaced to managers for discussion in onezones

Our Top Tips: How to drive consistently great employee experiences?

  1. Focus on trust, transparency, inclusion and care.
  2. A supportive culture plays a big role.
  3. Innovation & growth depend on equitable rewards & building communities.
  4. Consistent, mission-first people investment in any business climate improve performance.
  5. Employee experience excellence directly leads to business outcomes.
  6. HR capabilities and the right technologies are vital.


Ready to do change management the right way?

If you’d like to learn more about how Oriri can provide the expertise and strategic planning tools that will assist your organisation with successful strategic planning, get in touch with us today.

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