Change management is an essential part of any organization's success. It involves clarifying roles and responsibilities, streamlining processes, centralizing services, and using automation to generate cost savings and improve employee engagement. Security leadership and experience are also necessary to identify risks, develop remediation plans, compare safety maturity, measure improvement, interpret regulatory requirements, and create compliance programs. The success of change depends on the active and visible participation of leadership at all levels of the organization.
When leaders understand their role and how they can support change, their commitment and support for the program increases. Designing a stakeholder engagement plan that is interactive, adaptable, and data-driven will provide an appropriate structure at every level, starting with leadership. This plan should also raise awareness, provide and set expectations, and promote transparency. Stakeholders include all those affected by the change.
Including end-user stakeholders in the initial planning to implementation will ensure that the right tools and business processes are designed and developed, resulting in a better employee experience and greater adoption of change. Communication forms the backbone of a unified project team by generating enthusiasm and awareness among employees and helping to eliminate organizational silos. Messages must be relevant, adapted to different groups, timely, consistent, visible, and generate enthusiasm. They must also 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. Consider different multimedia options and creative ways to connect with your organization outside of email. Leverage blogs, intranet sites, and social apps to start conversations, share knowledge, and create a community. There are a multitude of collaboration tools available such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Slack, and intranet sites. Providing these capabilities to employees promotes empowerment and participation throughout the program.
Setting the right metrics allows you to communicate, train, and direct the behaviors that will drive desired business results. Organizations should summarize all the hard work to implement change initiatives by ensuring that employees receive appropriate training, have access to self-service resources, understand what is expected of them, and have the support they need. Your change management plan should include post-implementation evaluations to assess behavioral changes, system effectiveness after 30 days (and more), identify trends and gaps. The areas of an organization most affected by transformation are mentality, behavior, culture, strategy, design, and tactics. Mindset affects behavior which creates a culture that succeeds or fails to implement a solid strategy with the tactics needed to execute it. Leadership must have authentic faith in the mission. Successful organizational change is impossible if there is no leadership alignment which means that not all senior leaders agree.
When it comes to transformation within an organization it's all or nothing. Even if initial momentum is gained there will almost always be a setback without aligned leadership participation and communication. Change management tools help achieve project objectives more quickly by mobilizing individual change necessary for an initiative to be successful and add value to the organization. John Kotter's eight-step change process presented in his book in 1995 is one way organizations can manage change effectively. Stakeholder participation includes all activities to engage support and update stakeholders in the organizational change management process. Impact Advisors integrates these six principles with unique aspects of how each client organization operates (people processes technology) to create a “people-centered” change management strategy. If you invest in a clear well-defined process that supports successful change in your organization you can better achieve your objectives and avoid disappointing results.
Successful change management programs encourage and facilitate the adoption of new ideas processes or management models. One of the easiest least expensive ways to achieve a quick profit is to modify the focus of your marketing plan which is an existing process and outcome for many organizations. The essential elements of successful change management include leadership alignment stakeholder participation communication training impact of change preparedness evaluations organizational design organizations measure change management activities based on baseline of project (cost schedule results).The model of the change process holds that if everything remains same “x” box is resolved change will occur.
