Welcome to a step-by-step guide to successfully implement change in your company and to support employees and stakeholders. The best specialist to help managers and teams accept new procedures, techniques, tools, process or an initiative is a Change Management Facilitator. Facilitation is essential for ensuring that stakeholders understand the need for change and effectively build the future to achieve organizational goals.
Changes are a big part of every company's life. To be competitive and achieve the objectives in today’s business environment, organizations must adapt, transition, or transform regularly.
Some companies fail, and some emerge from change stronger than ever.
So why do some succeed, and some don’t?
Is there a roadmap to follow through this major shift that has the potential to get very messy really quickly?
The answer is dependent if the organization has adopted effective change management process. Consider that change management is a deliberate approach to a transition period in the organization. It necessitates a well-planned, structured method to engage people in owning the change they want to see. After all, no one likes changes that are forced upon them if they don’t see benefits to themselves.
Suppose you’re striving for a detailed plan to lead you to project success and new opportunities. Your goal is to reconfigure your organization’s to new possibilities, restructure efforts, aligning and energizing everyone on the team to reinvent your business and make it more profitable.
It is a significant mission ahead of you that demands specific training, skills, and capacities. It’s not a job for one person. You will need the help of a professional to improve your chances of success – a person to facilitate this challenge with experience in organizational change management. Your goal is to maximize the potential of your change efforts with quality results to increase organizational effectiveness.
If you want to take your company to exciting new places, you need a good guide. That's where a Change Management Facilitator comes in. They're like the tour guide who knows all the best paths to start the process well.
What's a Change Management Facilitator?
This person is like your change alignment buddy. They're there to make sure everyone understands why change is happening and helps everyone work together to make the process successful. They're all about keeping energy high and making sure the change makes your company even better.
But wait, there's more!
Change Management Practitioners vs. Change Management Facilitators: Working Together
Think of a Change Management Practitioner as the person who draws the treasure map, and a Change Management Facilitator as the one who helps the crew work together to find the treasure. The Practitioner plans out the change process, and the Facilitator makes sure everyone is on board and ready to go. When they work together, finding the treasure (or making successful changes) is much more likely. Sometimes this can be a one person and sometimes more.
Change is inevitable, and if you want to keep your organisation expanding while retaining your best people, don’t worry!
I understand what you’re going through, and in this article, I will provide you with a solution that works best for your business.
This article will walk you through a comprehensive step-by-step process to examine the importance of organisational change management, its advantages, and how to implement it in your workplace. We’ll also discuss the key change management principles that underpin the change management facilitator’s crucial function, as well as the top trends that will rule 2024.
Let’s dig in.
What is Organizational Change Management?
Change Management (also known as organizational change management) is a structured approach to alter major components of an organization to obtain better quantitative and qualitative results, from the initial stages to resolution, ensuring a smooth transition.
Change management methodology works as a roadmap to the tools and techniques to help organizations transform quickly, defining the concrete steps the organization will take to execute the change.
According to their strategic goals, organizations experience different types of change management, each one requiring different kinds of tactics, but fundamentally it comes down to two layers, adaptive or transformational.
Adaptive Change
Adaptive change refers to small, incremental changes the organization makes overtime to improve products, processes, workflows, and strategies to enhance or optimize existing processes or tactics.
This type of change is not massively disruptive, but it is a change. While this adjustment may cause employee discomfort or briefly impair workflow, it usually resolves swiftly and improves organizational efficiency in the long run.
Transformational Change
Transformational changes are more prominent in scale and scope, and they frequently imply a drastic and, at times, unexpected departure from the status quo. They affect the organization’s core elements, such as culture, values, and operations. They can be triggered by significant internal intentions or catalyzed by external pressures from competitors or unanticipated changes in the market conditions.
Dealing with change is one of the most difficult challenges for organisations. Attempts to change frequently fail due to inadequate planning and, most importantly, bad change management process.
Why do you need a Change Management Process?
Every day, new projects and initiatives are launched in organizations to improve performance, raise profitability, or strengthen competitive advantage. Organizations change continually to achieve intended outcomes.
And any organization that doesn’t change in today’s fast-paced world is likely to be regretful and remain behind. The world is changing daily – communication, customer trends, technology, economy, and social habits are examples.
The reasons for change management are only growing as organizations face faster and more complex changes than ever before. Businesses organizations must constantly change to be competitive.
Change management prepares, equips, and supports people and organizations more than anything else. Successfully engaging, adapting, and using the change to improve what they represent as active, live organizations inhabited by employees, customers, stakeholders, suppliers, and profitability.
Change Management optimizes business value
Reasons organizations need to change:
Crisis: think, for instance, of what Covid-19 did for our turbulent, fast-moving world (and to your organization!)
New technology: identification of new technology that brings more efficient and effective working methods
Identifying new opportunities: market opportunities the organization should explore to improve its competitiveness
Customer needs: constantly evolving, creating new demand for new products and services
Mergers & Acquisitions: need to overcome human challenges and cultural and operational clashes
Pressure from external elements: competition, shareholders, financial markets, and regulations
All those changes will affect:
The mission, vision, competitive advantage and existing strategies
The acquisition of new knowledge, skills, and capabilities
How to employ technology to boost productivity and cut expenses
The organizational structure with new procedures and processes
The organizational culture, which would be extremely difficult to manage due to different values, beliefs, administration, and leadership styles.
Good Change Management reduces chaos within the organization
Today, the disruptions we’re experiencing within our businesses bring light to a crucial truth that you probably already understand. Our organizations are continuously facing multifaceted transformations from all sides in these competitive times where the rapid turnover of ideas and products in the marketplace is moving fast and will only continue to move even faster.
Organizational changes impact the whole organization as one element depends on the other. To transition from the existing to the new state, the organization will require a systematic approach to transform and execute its strategies.
Change management, business transformation or move before disruption concept – businesses must constantly grow and adapt to face several problems, ranging from technological advancements to the emergence of new competitors, changes in laws, regulations, and underlying economic trends.
Change Management Best Practices
A change management facilitator provides you with a consistent, competent, effective change management plan to reduce the impact of the change process on your organisation’s operations and staff morale.
The pragmatic approach used by the facilitator builds positive, energised support for people in the transition period, grasping what it takes to persuade each individual to accept, engage and implement the change. This strategy significantly increases the chances of success while also incrementing ROI.
Improve your chances of success
There are a number of change management methodologies that can be adopted including Kotter's 8-Step Change Model, Prosci's Change Management Process (ADKAR), Agile or Lean Change Models. In this article, we delve into Kotter’s change model.
In his widely used paradigm for successfully implementing change management, Professor John Kotter lays out the steps for systematically and effectively implementing change in your organization.
Below is a simplified version of his 8 Crucial Steps to assure the success of your Change Management Plan:
1. Create a sense of urgency
Make a bold, ambitious opportunity statement that communicates the need of acting right away to help others understand the need for change. In large organizations, we recommend inviting the key decision-makers to align upon the need for change and key value drivers.
2. Build a guiding coalition
A volunteer army requires a coalition of capable individuals from among all ranks to develop, coordinate and communicate key activities.
3. Form a strategic vision and initiatives
Describe how the future will vary from the past and how you can make that future a reality by launching projects that are directly related to the vision.
4. Enlist a volunteer army
Large-scale change can only happen when a large group of people band together to pursue a similar goal. To drive change, moving in the same direction, they must be bought-in and urgently.
5. Enable actions by removing barriers
The flexibility to operate across silos and achieve a meaningful effect is provided by removing barriers such as wasteful processes and hierarchy.
6. Generate short-term wins
The molecules of results are wins. To track progress and encourage volunteers to persevere, they must be recognized, gathered, and conveyed — early and often.
7. Sustain acceleration
After the initial results, increase your efforts. Systems, organisations, and policies can all benefit from your growing credibility. Continue to implement change after change until the goal becomes a reality.
8. Institute change
Make explicit the links between new behaviours and organisational success and ensure that they are maintained until they are strong enough to replace old habits.
“One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.” – Peter Drucker
Why Change Management is so important to your organisation?
The organisational change management plan is essential for organisations to grow and expand. But it's triumph depends mainly on proper communication of how the transformation will modify people’s roles and responsibilities.
The strategic steps of the process, when effectively done, should enable your management and employees to commit to the shift and operate effectively during it, and simultaneously raise morale and develop competent skill sets and teamwork necessary to meet the business improvement goals.
Its direct influence has a beneficial impact on the quality of work, helping your employees to remain motivated and productive while cutting costs, and allowing your organisation to improve performance, increase profits, and enhance its competitive advantage,
What influence would change management have on your organisation?
CHANGE IS UNAVOIDABLE TO OUR BUSINESSES NOWADAYS.
Want an example of why changes are necessary?
Remember the mobile phone brand Blackberry? The one-time smartphone favourite, which had over 80 million users worldwide, recorded a 0.2% market share in 2016 due to its failure to adopt touchscreen technology. Their business existence needed change, and they needed change to survive, but they missed their opportunity – they ruled the world, but the world changed.
But, if the change is the unavoidable aspect, how can you ensure that your organisation will thrive in the change process? What separates organisations that succeed from those that barely survive, or worse, fail?
Engaging employees through change
👉 Regardless of the change management methodology used and how change management is implemented, the final goal is to assist your organization and your employees to positively respond to the change management process.
👉 Remember that your staff invest themselves and their families in their role in your business. Their jobs can have a big impact on their financial security, feeling of purpose, self-confidence, and professional development. Don’t undermine the effort they’ve put into your business.
👉 Engage with your employees in a transparent and honest way, helping them participate in the change process positively and purposefully to foster their understanding, especially in changes that affect them.
The effect of Change Management on your business survival
If you want your organization to succeed and expand, it will need to undergo and withstand organizational change. Otherwise, you’ll have little choice but to react to the changes rather than prepare for them.
To be change-ready, first, set your goals. Create an effective change management plan to help you go through the change and reduce disruptions to the workflow and team’s confidence.
You don’t want to fall behind as a leader; instead, you want to upskill your learning strategies to deal with your organization’s challenges.
Setting the right change management goals ensures that the organisation remains focused and that the change is completed using the appropriate processes and tools.
“Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch
Change fatigue & change acceptance
Organizational change is a common challenge for leaders to overcome and develop a plan of action to make things transformed.
As a team member, you’ve probably been a part of a variety of change projects during the course of your career. Nevertheless, you have seen how most of them fail.
→ According to McKinsey & Company, 70% of all transformations fail. It’s a staggering percentage!
→ Most of them fail because there is a lack of engagement and buy-in, which ultimately leads to fatigue.
→ Managers’ and staff minds are plagued by prior failures and sacrifices they have made during earlier tough change processes, resulting in fatigue, anxiety, and fears.
Inherently, people get discouraged and eventually give up.
That is the reason change management needs an independent, neutral leader to keep the team away from this negative influence and the change process moving forward – a professional, effective Change Management Facilitator.
This pivotal role will produce the successful completion of the change process from the current state to the future state, creating an enjoyable experience that will support the vision for improved collaboration and engagement.
The facilitator’s smooth and successful transition process will have two sides. The soft side is concerned with improving beliefs, values, motivation, and perceptions.
In contrast, the hard side is concerned with enhancing capabilities, actions, metrics, results, growth, and expansion.
And both sides will be considered and analysed at the same time.
An insightful change management process controls all changes’ lifecycle and deals with change resistance and other barriers. A facilitator will be skilled to manage the organizational change process confidentially and independently while promoting a commitment to accept the change, rather than fighting or ignoring it.
Managers and employees will feel integrated into the organization’s evolving processes, thinking and values. And they’ll become dedicated if they believe their efforts will result in successful change implementation.
A Change Management Facilitator plays a crucial role in assisting your organization resolve transition issues quickly and efficiently, ensuring that employees have the tools, resources, and training they require to successfully change to the new state.
Key Change Management Principles
To facilitate the intended structural transformation, efficient communication between management and employees at all levels of the organization is required. An organizational change facilitator will need to understand the delicate balance of change in the organization and recognize its impact on other parts of the business—both favorably and negatively.
Therefore, following the key principles listed below is essential to assist organizational change facilitators and managers in navigating change in a systematic manner.
Create a culture of innovation To allow all employees and management to approach the organisational change with an open and creative mindset, focusing on the opportunities presented by the change.
Engaged employees are more likely to be effective change leaders and participants, regardless of the specifics of the change at hand. An experienced organisational change facilitator will ensure a collaborative and supportive environment to guarantee that all participants are equally consulted during the visioning and executing stages of the change process.
Create moral support for organisational change
To emphasise how these changes match new corporate goals and how each employee can contribute to the change individually.
Create a sense of urgency, communicating why the change must occur and why it must occur now. Effective organisational change management facilitators have the skills and experience to create robust change management plans. This plan will outline the technical approach, capacities, skills, tools, and structures required to encourage employees of all levels to engage in successful organisational change.
Create enhanced communication strategies
To promote trust. Explain what is changing, why it is changing, and what will affect each employee individually.
Strive hard to keep expectations in check. Give employees consistent information about what matters to them and allow them to share feedback and ask questions.
Engagement is the final key to organisational change success. A change management facilitator will use multiple, redundant communication channels to reinforce fundamental ideas with timely, motivating, and actionable guidance.
And remember that change doesn’t finish when the change is anchored in the organisational culture. It’s a never-ending process of strengthening human resource capacities, incentive programmes, training, and development, and other infrastructure sectors to match them with the company’s new direction.
The art of balancing change management in an organization is a difficult and challenging time for many business owners. To be effective, navigating changing times necessitates adequate competence and management.
Why do you need a professional Change Management Facilitator in your organisation?
Change is constant, and organisations have to invest millions of dollars on change-related initiatives only to feel disappointed with the results. People become irritated, exhausted, and worn out, developing change-averse behaviours that sabotage future endeavours.
An effective change management facilitator or manager will, not only oversee the project and technical duties required to implement the organisational changes but will also boost staff morale and drive positive teamwork and improvement.
Facilitation change management is essential for ensuring that managers and employees fully understand the change and engage effectively in creating the desired future. They must realise that true change necessitates changes in their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours before becoming practical operations in the business environment.
Organisational change facilitators will provide you with the support and guidance you need to effectively manage the transition process, supporting the actions necessary to boost employee morale and meet strategic business goals.
“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” – Peter Drucker
5 Key elements to manage organisational change in your organisation
If you don’t adapt, your company’s image will suffer among customers and competitors, leading to a negative brand image in the stakeholder universe. If you fail to adapt to changing times and technologies, you could have the same destiny as Blackberry and many other companies that could not adapt to change.
What’s more, adapting is not as difficult as we might believe. The change management process can become a continuous movement inside your organisation to promote success, engagement, and even accepting failure. It will clearly outline both your goals and competitive advantage.
To stay competitive, all organisations must learn how to manage change successfully. Here are the top measures I’ve been able to identify that consistently put business leaders on the path to developing good change management and adaptability:
1. Define the change and align it to business goals
Key questions:
What has to be changed?
Why is this change necessary?
How this change impact our organizational goals
Make sure you have a solid business case for why the present condition has to be changed and what that change should entail for various stakeholders, such as consumers, employees, and shareholders, in terms of objectives and performance goals. Your aim is to create the groundwork for the change project.
Define your ultimate goal. It’s critical to have a clear objective before you begin since it will help you to create a timeframe. Everything should be scheduled, implemented, and enhanced.
2. Determine impacts and stakeholders
Key questions:
What are the changes’ repercussions?
Who will be the most affected by the change?
What if we don't do the change?
Ensure you analyse the impacts of the change at various organisational levels after you know precisely what you want to achieve and why.
3. Develop a communication plan
Key questions:
What do we need to communicate and when?
What methods will be used to communicate the change?
How will you handle feedback?
It’s vital you bring people together to plan and implement the change management plan. Develop your communication with all stakeholders involved on a regular basis. Be honest, transparent, independent, and confidential.
Not only can excellent communication guarantee that your change management strategies are carried out, but it may also become the most direct means of analysing how well you’re accomplishing your organisation’s final goals.
4. Provide training and support framework
Key questions:
What behaviours and skills are required to achieve the desired business goals?
What are the most effective training delivery methods?
What forms of assistance will be most beneficial?
It’s critical that the stakeholders of all levels understand they’ll receive organised or informal training to adjust emotionally and practically to the new responsibilities. Efficient and practical training on the skills and information they’ll need to operate effectively as the change is implemented, such as micro-learning online courses, face-to-face training sessions or on-the-job coaching and mentoring.
Because certain changes may result in layoffs or reorganisations, you can consider giving assistance services, such as counselling, to help employees deal with the new circumstances.
A mentorship program or an open-door policy with management to raise issues as they emerge could be set up to help staff adjust to changes in how their new function is conducted.
5. Measure change results
Key questions:
Was the adjustment helpful in reaching the organisation’s objectives?
How well did the change management process go?
Is there anything that could have been done differently?
At the end of the project, you should continuously assess the efficacy of your change management facilitation methods and keep track of any lessons learnt. Throughout the change management process, a structure should be in place to measure the business results of the changes and guarantee that chances for continuing reinforcement to build proficiencies exist.
Speeding Things Up with Opportunity Framing
Opportunity Framing is like looking at a scary, dark room and instead of being afraid, turning on the light to find it's actually full of cool, new toys. It's about showing everyone that change isn't just something we have to do; it's a chance to make things better and more exciting.
This way, everyone feels more excited and less scared about the changes.
By using the Ultimate Guide to Opportunity Framing , our change buddy (the Facilitator) helps everyone see the bright side of change, making the journey smoother and more fun.
Ultimately, opportunity framing workshop can help find answers to the following questions:
What are we working on and why?
Does this type of change make sense for us?
What are we hoping to accomplish and what is required?
What issues do we need to consider and address?
Which issues represent decisions, uncertainties…?
Which of these decisions is the highest priority?
What alternatives do we have to these?
How will we decide between these?
Who can help us?
What do we need to do to gain clarity?
Final message
Hopefully, this article has explained that changes and new opportunities come, sometimes when you least expect them. You should take advantage of them, set goals, and actively include your stakeholders in the process.
Change is essential, but it’s far from easy. Successful change management requires a collaborative process designed with you, which will be carried out with the help of skilled facilitation, professional communication, and innovative evaluation.
Our professional change management facilitators, experienced in working with diverse clients, will use core tools to assist your change management approach.
We begin by assessing your readiness for change and then tailor the program to your specific needs, capacities, and skills. We enable effective change while enhancing your people’s engagement and productivity.
With empathy and dynamics, we’ll enable the organisation to embrace change confidently, allowing you to see a return on investment as soon as possible.
Many companies have become masters of change, and yours can be one of them.
Are you ready for a change?
Reach out to either Iwona Wilson or Susanna Durston when you need a tailored change management facilitated workshop.
Susanna Durston I Facilita Consulting
Susanna has over 25 years of experience in the resource industry and is an internationally certified facilitator. This extensive experience involved working in over 20 different functional areas, including projects, operations, developments, new energy, corporate affairs, finance, contracts and procurement, engineering and quality.
Susanna has also mentored and coached over 100 employees in facilitation skills and delivered training to 2000 staff on project management. Susanna has a natural capacity to form relationships with people to develop an informed plan and positive interactions that will help companies achieve their goals.