Change management is a process that helps organizations transition from one state to another. It involves planning, implementing, and monitoring changes to ensure that the desired outcomes are achieved. The success of change depends on the active and visible participation of leadership at all levels of the organization during the project or initiative. To ensure successful change management, organizations must adhere to five key principles: Clarifying roles and responsibilities, streamlining processes, centralizing services and using automation, security leadership and experience, stakeholder engagement, and communication.
The first step in successful change management is to clarify roles and responsibilities. This helps to structure the story from the beginning and get the team involved. Streamlining processes, centralizing services, and using automation can generate significant cost savings (10%) and improve employee engagement without adversely affecting support provided or patient care. Security leadership and experience are essential for identifying risks and developing remediation plans, comparing safety maturity and measuring improvement, interpreting regulatory requirements, and creating programs to ensure compliance. The second principle of change management is stakeholder engagement.
Designing a stakeholder engagement plan that is interactive, adaptable, and data-driven will provide an appropriate structure at every level, starting with leadership. A well-conceived plan will also raise awareness, provide and set expectations, and promote transparency. Stakeholders include all those affected by the change. The stakeholder engagement plan should also provide appropriate structures to capture the voice of the end user (employee).
From initial planning to implementation, including end-user stakeholders will ensure that the right tools and business processes are designed and developed, resulting in a better employee experience and greater adoption of change. The third principle of change management is communication. Messages must be relevant, adapted to different groups, timely, consistent, increase visibility of the project, generate enthusiasm, and have leadership support. To develop a communication strategy, you'll need to identify the audiences affected, the communication channels you can take advantage of, the communication objectives, and the governance structure for approving messages. Leverage blogs, intranet sites, and social apps to start conversations, share knowledge, and create a community. The fourth principle of change management is setting metrics.
Setting the right metrics allows you to communicate, train and direct the behaviors that will drive the desired business results. Organizations should use data collected from post-implementation evaluations to assess behavioral changes, effectiveness of the system after 30 days (and more), identify trends and gaps. The fifth principle of change management is resource allocation. Organizations must ensure that they have the necessary resources including staff, equipment and budget to implement the change effectively. Impact Advisors integrates these six principles with the unique aspects of how each client organization operates (people, processes, technology) to create a “people-centered” change management strategy. By involving stakeholders early on and frequently in the change management process organizations can generate support for change and ensure that stakeholders are actively involved in the planning process.
Create a coalition such as “Change Champion” network to help bridge the gap between project team and rest of organization. Each of these factors will have an impact on your organization and should be taken into account when developing your continuous change activities. In conclusion, successful change management requires organizations to adhere to five key principles: Clarifying roles and responsibilities; streamlining processes; centralizing services; using automation; security leadership; stakeholder engagement; communication; setting metrics; resource allocation; creating a coalition; involving stakeholders early on; and taking into account factors that will have an impact on your organization.
