Most companies don’t start big. Instead, they start in a garage, a basement, a two-room office complex on a shoestring budget and a skeleton staff. In the early stages of growth, it’s not hard to handle organizational change management. You will only have a few staff, customers and procedures to worry about.
Later, when your company matures, it becomes a little harder. And if your company grows astronomically, you may find that making any major changes to your organization or how it is run has become too complex to handle by yourself.
That’s not surprising. Making changes to a business is often stressful for management and staff alike. It’s a period of insecurity and uncertainty.
The best way to manage organizational change is by breaking it down into bits and arranging for that necessary evil, a committee, to manage the changes.
Strategic planning in organizational change management
Like any large project, your first step is to write a plan. This is your strategic plan, which should address the changes you anticipate in each department and should list the anticipated new departments or systems developing from your changing infrastructure.
Your strategic plan should not come out of your head alone, but rather from a calibration between you and your management team, drawn from every department and every level in your company.
The organizational change management committee should organize a new and realistic budget (which is a large part of why you should have at least one member from every department and every management and staffing level).
The committee should also set time limits for each part of the change process. By posting deadlines, all of the planned changes should be able to be done in a set timeframe, thus making sure it does not drag on for ever without things getting done.
Above all, you and your managers must address communication. Many organizational change management plans have been destroyed by a lack of two-way communication. A problem suddenly arises, and no one knows who to go to when something is needed to be done to fix
Your strategic plan while needed to be detailed and spelling out as much details of the change and who is responsible for doing what in the plan, it also must be flexible.
The reason for this is that something in your plan may not work on closer inspection or someone may come up with a better suggestion for improving current systems or planned changes.
When communication breaks down at a low level, the rest of the company will ultimately suffer. One of your best bets is to have regular updates to tell your employees about how you are implementing changes that affect them directly and indirectly.
To keep morale up, be as honest as you can. Consider publishing an internal monthly newsletter to keep everyone informed of new and upcoming changes, and post all public documents on an internal company website.
A good consultant or two to help you manage these details and, especially, the time consumed by your committee might be a good idea.
You can find many companies specializing in organizational change management online or you can locate specialists within large human resources firms.
Your organizational change management plan
You should start your organizational change management’s team planning with your own expectations.
- What are your goals for these restructuring changes?
- What are your financial expectations?
Do you have ideas that conflict with your financial expectations (for instance, do you have a strong personal or contractual objection to downsizing employees?) And what dead weight do you want to slice out of your company?
Don’t give time extensions. Expect your organizational change management team to present you with specific time points for finishing stages of your organizational restructuring – and then expect them to meet those time points.
If you use a consultant to help with organizational change management, really use them. Include them in every meeting, and encourage them to talk (not that you’ll really have to!); call them when you have any questions. You’re paying good money for a consultant, so really take advantage of them.
Make sure you look at every aspect of your business. Organizational change is hard work, and it’s usually no fun. It can be stressful and affect your staff in many ways.
But what’s even worse is moving your organizational change plan forward, only to discover you’ve left out a minor, but crucial, bit of the puzzle, such as software upgrades or document storage plans.
Good planning, asking your consultant the right questions, and looking at each part of your company in detail will all lead to excellent organizational change management?
