Organisational Change Management

Organizational change management needs to be present in all phases of a transformation, not just part way through investing in the right capability to lead the effort and then investing in the effort itself will pay huge dividends later down the line. And the larger the organization, the more critical and the more challenging organizational change becomes. But not everyone understands this, which is why they don't see the risk of compromising the human element of transformation. My name is Rob Llewellyn and as you know, companies need people with the right capabilities to manage and lead transformation. As you know, orchestrating successful transformation isn't that easy, and I mean innovative transformation, which creates a new future without the constraints of the past. Which is why I hope that what I share in this episode will help you get better equipped to perform at your best as a manager, leader or consultant. If you want to learn more, go to studythrive.com.

Organizational change management, or OCM for short, addresses the human element of digital business transformation. It deals with the people who have to change their ways of working and involves setting up a foundation for effective OCM with respect to governance and assessing organizational change readiness. Establishing and implementing stakeholder communication and performance management strategies and continuously receiving feedback to make improvements is key. OCM needs to be present in all phases of a transformation, not partway through too many companies are often focused on technical implementation in the early stage of their initiatives and they ignore ocm. Adkar from Prosky is one approach to ocm. Adkar is a change model that uses five milestones that it says must be achieved in order to change effectively. Those milestones make up the acronym ADCAR and are awareness of the need to change, desire to support the change, knowledge of how to change, ability to demonstrate new skills and behaviors, and reinforcement to make the change stick. A huge amount of free material is available on the Prosky website, so if you're still looking for a model to consider, I recommend you taking a look@prosky.com there are multiple approaches to OCM available and everyone will be influenced by their perspective or what they know best. They all aim to achieve the same objectives and are simply a different way to put the ingredients in into the end result. From setting up effective OCM governance through to receiving feedback about the success of the implementations, OCM is fundamental throughout the transformation life cycle. Regardless of what approach you adopt, you first need to set up change management which involves establishing fundamentals such as OCM governance and the Charter. Then comes building an OCM strategy and plan followed by establishing the OCM team and their roles and responsibilities and training them for the journey ahead. Stakeholder management is another key component of any OCM approach which involves identifying and analyzing stakeholder groups and developing a stakeholder engagement plan at both group and individual levels. Remember that stakeholders can be any individual who will be impacted by the transformation. An impact analysis needs to be performed and a change agent network built and deployed. All this should be documented along with the high level impacts and and a change agent register. Next on the list is communication management which involves developing and implementing effective communication with different stakeholders. It sounds simple, but communication has for decades been one of the most common reasons for project and program chaos and confusion. It's important to stay mindful of the fact also that communication should consist of two way mechanisms, not just a one way megaphone. A communication needs and channel analysis should be undertaken and then a communication strategy and plan developed. It's important that the communication strategy and plan considers the need to tailor communications to the changing objectives throughout the transformation. This starts with creating awareness, then understanding, followed by supporting and involvement, commitment and lastly action when the change has happened. You might have noticed that what I've just described is similar to atka, although not exactly the same and that's an example of how there are variations, but they all essentially share the aim of achieving the same outcomes. The communication strategy and plan are deliverables that solidify and communicate the approach to communication. But the most important deliverables are the messages and activities that are used to engage with people. These must be delivered by various means both clearly and concisely, leaving no room for ambiguity. Engagement needs to go beyond traditional communication methods which tend to focus on transmitting one way messages from leaders and teams to end users. The effort needs to win the hearts and minds of stakeholders through interventions that truly engage them. Next is performance management of both the transformation team and the business. Transformation can't be well executed without a high performing team, so the well being and performance of that team really is vital. Team performance management involves team building, recognition, knowledge transfer and continuous improvement. This should produce the recognition awarded to the team, knowledge in the knowledge transfer process and team assessments. Business performance management involves understanding the existing HR practices that could be adopted into the transformation. This also helps if necessary to encourage lines of business to own their transformation and not feel they are only on the receiving end. Goal setting, Talent management suggestion schemes and 360 degree feedback systems are also integral to performance management of the business as is job rotation and outplacement strategies. The output of all this should be HR practices which support the objectives of the transformation. Next up is an organizational change readiness assessment, which involves understanding the readiness for change, identifying the gaps of where the organization needs to be and establishing a strategy to fill the gaps and ultimately increased change readiness. This work should produce the current state of change readiness along with a strategy and plans to sufficiently improve it. Then there's the monitoring of the organisational change management strategy to take the temperature of how well the impacted people are taking to transformation. This involves gathering regular feedback to assess the situation and adjusting or fine tuning the OCM effort. There's role mapping, which addresses the changes that transformation brings about with respect to who is going to do what in the new organization. Role to position mapping involves assigning roles to positions and specifying who will do what. Then there's business impact assessments, which involve identifying impacts that the transformation will cause in the business. It requires the OCM team to implement action plans that will ensure business readiness has reached an acceptable level with when the new systems and ways of working are introduced. Then finally, training provides qualification and enablement with respect to the competencies required for business transformation and the strategic core competencies vital for the company's future success. It calls for the preparation of training, strategy needs analysis, gap analysis, a training plan, curriculum and material preparation and of course, the actual training and evaluation of it. All of what I've just described is the simplification of very detailed activities, each of which plays a key role in organizational change management. Investing in the right capability to lead this effort and then investing in the effort itself will pay huge dividends. And the larger the organization, the more critical the OCM undertaking becomes.

If you want to take your transformation capabilities and and credentials to the next level, go to studythrive.com.