Leading organisational change to transform a business is a major initiative, requiring careful and well thought out planning. It can be a long and terrifying journey, but if done correctly can be satisfying and beneficial to a company. The plan for change needs to reinforce not only the physical actions but also the behaviours that will create a culture capable of delivering the requirements for success as laid out within the business strategy.
Marcel Kooter has been instrumental in driving strategic change within the oil industry for many years and is an Associate of Telos Partners. Telos Partners is a management consultancy based in Windsor, England, which works on assisting companies with organisational and strategic change.
To successfully implement strategic change, businesses need to get employees engaged at the earliest possible stage. Some tips on enhancing employee engagement can be found in the PDF attachment to this post.
Planning and Strategy
The initial stage of any change within an organisation is planning and developing a coherent strategy. Engaging a project manager can help to keep things running smoothly and creates a single point of call for any questions that employees may have.
There are various aspects that need to be considered while formulating a change management strategy. These include working out who is going to be affected and how, what specific aspects of the business are being changed, and what the scope and the timeframe for the changes to be implemented are, among other things. This is just as true for small initiatives as it is for organisation-wide projects.
Organisational Assessment
To understand the impact of any organisational changes, and organisational assessment must take place. This revolves around looking at who is going to be impacted by the changes, how and to what extent this impact will occur and how the business can help ensure that the impact is lessened or made into a positive experience.
Different organisational changes will impact different groups of people in different ways. Some changes will only affect a small proportion of the total number of employees, while others will affect the majority of people associated with the business. Different groups of people will likely experience the impact of change to varying levels, so each group needs to be identified and assessed individually.
The infographic attachment looks at some surprising statistics about why corporate strategy often breaks down when not properly implemented.
Risk Assessment
Part of any organisational assessment prior to implementation of a change management strategy involves risk assessment. The level of risk often depends on the scale of the changes being implemented. The change management team needs to spend time documenting specific risk factors and the overall risk in order to be able to deliver change that can be managed effectively.
Having a structured change management team on board can help to ensure that risk is identified and managed effectively from the beginning. A clear definition of risk management for business can be seen in the short video attachment.
Employee Training
The uninformed employee is not only likely to be a liability to the company but is also less likely to be engaged with the brand and on board with making organisational changes work in the long term. Employee training is therefore an essential part of strategic change within any business.
If new software is introduced to the company, for example, employees need to be fully trained in how to use the software at the earliest possible stage. This empowers the employees to take part in the change strategy and help ensure everything continues to run smoothly as each aspect of the strategy is implemented.
