There’s one thing that any business can certainly rely on - change. Organizational change is essential for any company that wants to grow, adapt to evolving market demands and remain competitive in their marketplace.

Change will affect your business on a regular basis. While small businesses are able to easily change their processes, workforce and projects in a reactive way to ensure they keep up changes in their market, this simply isn’t an option for larger companies.

To keep up with new market demands, stay competitive and continue to grow, a proactive plan is needed. That’s where a change management strategy will help.

What is change management

Change management is the process of proactively managing change and development within your company, in a way that ensures they are both applied and maintained effectively to help your company grow and remain competitive.

Whether your business wants to update its technology, use new software, work on new projects, hire new employees or improve the way you use your contingent workforce, every element of change in your organization can benefit from a change management strategy.

As part of a successful change management strategy, a company will use a dedicated change management team or an outsourced managed services provider (MSP) to manage the program.

This team will work to ensure any changes that are made within your organization are understood, accepted and implemented properly by your company’s workforce. Change management will give you clear data into how change within your business is performing, and what you need to do to continue adapting to market demands.

What are the benefits of change management?

To be successful, it’s vital that your company constantly aims to improve at what it does, evolves to market demands and continues to grow. Your business can only do this by implementing a change management strategy that ensures your company doesn’t standstill.

Change management will help you review your company’s existing processes, train employees, update technology, acquire the very best non-permanent workers and much more.

The benefits of change management are vast, and include:

• Preparing your company for future market demands.
• Ensuring your company has the resources, technologies and processes in place to exceed client expectations and continue to grow.
• Ensuring all stakeholders are on board with change, and implementing the changes you make effectively.
• Empowering your company to keep moving forward, ensuring that you don’t standstill and fall behind the competition.
• Minimizing how disruptive changes in market demands can be on your business.
• Enabling your company to adapt to changes significantly faster and more seamlessly by helping you to prepare properly.
• Ensuring your company is able to make successful changes while sticking to a predetermined budget.

Creating a change management strategy

There are a variety of change management methods and models that an MSP with experience can help you implement into your company’s organization. All of these methods have well-thought-out and extensively studied steps that will guarantee your change management strategy is a success.

We aren’t going to dive into any of these methods here, but there are some important steps and best practices that tie each change management strategy together. These include:

Clearly define the change: Change management is impossible if your organization doesn’t understand clearly what change you are trying to make. It’s important that you define exactly what the change will be, what the reasons are behind the change, how it will be achieved and what measurements will be used to track its success.

Identify those impacted by the change: Who in your organization will the changes affect? When making changes within your business you need to know which people in your organization it will impact, as well as what policies, processes and job roles might be affected as a result of the change. This will help your business fully prepare for the changes once implemented.

Understand what benefits you’ll realize from the change: There’s no point making change within your organization unless you can fully understand what benefits you will (or want to) realize from implementing it. Create a hypothesis that defines the benefits you hope to achieve from making change, and then define the metrics that will allow you to track and measure whether the change is successful. Without defining the benefits of the change, it will be difficult to get company stakeholders on board or understand whether its implementation was a success.

Set a formal framework: Any changes within your organization must follow a formal framework. This will ensure that every single one of your company’s stakeholders understands, follows and implements the changes you have made. Your change could be as simple as using new software, but if some employees are still using the old software there’s no way you can track how effective the change is. By setting a framework that allows your business to deploy changes effectively, you will ensure consistency across your organization.

Are you interested in learning more about change management, and how your organization can create a flexible and constantly-evolving workforce to meet changing market demands? Contact HCMWorks today. Our team of experts would love to help.