Video Blog: Change Management Best Practices

Foreign. My name is Gail Wright and I am a consultant with Sales Globe. And I have with me today my friend and former colleague Allison Tigner, who is a change management consultant. We both actually used to work for the same retailer for gosh, years. Years. Perfect. And so Allison, you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure, absolutely. So as Gail mentioned, I worked for a specialty retailer for about 18 years. I worked in human resources and sales, but more importantly worked in change management as well as process improvement, strategic planning. So that's been my background for the last 12 plus years or so. And I just transitioned to a full time change management consultant about four and a half years ago.

Well, Alison, as I mentioned, we are here to talk to everybody today about change management. So I'm going to go ahead and start with my first question. What is change management and why is it so important to everybody?

Fantastic question. So everyone's familiar with change. Change is inevitable, it's constant. But change management really focuses on the people side of change. So anytime that you do something large or small, you want to think about who it's going to impact. And that's really what change management is, is that people side of change. And more formally, it's going to be anything related to training, communication, readiness, adoption, those things where you really are focused on the people and how they're going to be impacted by the change. How you're going to make sure they know that it's coming and you're going to get them ready for change so that they actually adopt the new process or system or whatever it is that's going to be different.

And if it's so important, why do companies shy away from it?

That is a great question. So people tend to think of it as some of the soft skills or it's kind of a last thought or maybe it's more expensive. But oftentimes resources become really limited because you're so focused on everything that's needed for the change. Time, money, any of those things can be a challenge as you're going through. And since change management often kicks off early on but isn't the primary focus until the end, it's really easy for it to get left behind. Okay.

One of the things that you did talk about is training and communications as being part of change management. You also mentioned a bunch of other stuff. I kind of missed it all. So do you want to share with us some of the other stuff that goes into change management?

Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think the most critical part of change management is first understanding who's going to be impacted by the change. And you do that through a stakeholder analysis. So you really start to think about, okay, what is this change going to be, what's going to happen and who's going to be impacted. Because if you don't understand who's going to be impacted by that change, it's really hard to focus your activities in and prioritize. So first you want to understand who's going to be impacted. You also want to get leadership on board. That's really critical. Because if someone's being asked to do something but their leaders don't support it, that's going to be really hard. And the other really critical thing is something that I call a change impact analysis. So you really want to understand not just who's going to be impacted, but what's changing, what do you do today and what are you going to do tomorrow with this new process or this new technology? And when you understand those things, you will better be able to plan your communication and training. Also any sort of readiness activities or if you want to survey anything that you want to focus on for adoption, any measurement that you want to do to see if your activities are working or if your new process is actually working. So those are all things that are part of change management. But stakeholder analysis and the change impact process to me are the most critical parts of any change management engagement.

Perfect. So when we talk about timing and we talk about change management, and you mentioned making sure that change management is happening throughout the process. But if I am not going to implement a new product, a new project or whatever until six months from now, should I start my change management at day one or should I wait and maybe it's 30 days into it?

Yeah, that's a great question. So remember how I said that change management often gets left or forgotten because if you're not thinking about it from the get go and you all get super busy doing your project or implementing a new process or a new compensation strategy, right. You get to the end, think, oh my gosh, we didn't even tell anyone about this. So the sooner that you can start thinking about change management and make sure that there's folks assigned to to do those activities, the better. So I always recommend having those conversations early on and at least know who's going to be responsible and involve them in the conversation. Because if you're trying to catch up someone responsible for communication or training at the very end, when you're one month from go live, that's going to be really challenging and you may be competing with other initiatives or technologies as well. So the sooner that you can start those conversations, the better. However, when you talk about the actual activities that are key.

So.

So stakeholder analysis and change impact should come relatively early and throughout the process. But communication and training should be more just in time. So communication wise, you can start introducing some communication ahead of time, but not so far that they'll forget. And training should be more just in time, so more aligned with close to when you're going to implement. So it's not forgotten. But again, you're always competing with different things. Like in retail, we always used to compete with the Christmas holidays or summer selling season. So those are things that you always want to be mindful of what else you're competing with and plan accordingly.

And is change management, Should I only do it for major changes? Can I do it for the minor changes? Where do you draw that line?

Yeah, so I think you should always do change management of some sort and always think about it. But how much you're going to do will depend on how large your project is. So if you have five people that are impacted, that plan is going to look very different than if you have 500 or 5,000 or 500,000. So you really want to think about that stakeholder analysis. That's why it's so critical, because you are able to really wrap your mind around how many people is this going to impact and what is the impact going to be so that you can plan accordingly. How I would introduce a change to five people is very different to how I would introduce a change to an organization of 500,000 where they're all going to be doing something very different from what they do today.

And let's now move on and let's talk about some stakeholder analysis. I've heard you mention that now a few times.

Yes.

And in that, when I think of stakeholders, I think of those people like the leadership, maybe an HR rep. But what about people like maybe the technology, maybe somebody that's at our help desk? Do we include all of those in that change management? Are those considered stakeholders?

That's an excellent question. And that would depend on whether or not they're going to see the change in some way. So, for example, if the help desk is going to get a call or a question about this change, you absolutely want to involve them. You want to make sure that they have a script and that they know what the change is and that they understand how to help the people on the other end if they're never going to See the change and it's not going to impact them day to day. They probably don't need to know. But you want to think differently about how people are going to be impacted and what they need to know. So you'll look differently at those people who are administering the change, right, who are actually going through the new process versus those that just need to have an awareness of it. So that would look different depending on your end user. So really thinking about all those different groups and that's why that stakeholder analysis is important. I encourage people to really pull the string out and don't just think about the obvious, think about the less obvious. But that doesn't mean they're all going to need a ton of change management. It may be a simple communication or a 15 minute meeting to say, hey, this is changing, we want you to be aware and here's how it's going to impact you. It's going to be minimal, but you might get calls and here's a script, right? Versus the actual administrators of it might be full on training, virtual instructor led or instructor led training that walks them through end to end, gets them in the system or teaches them a new process, gives them an opportunity to ask questions live. So it would look different depending on their level of engagement. But anyone who's going to touch this change should be in the know in some way.

Okay, and it sounds like there's a lot of paperwork involved with change management, maybe some training documents, maybe a lot of communication. What do you recommend as some of the major paperwork or training documents? Communication documents that we follow.

So I think one of the first things to understand is as you're going through that analysis process, you want to understand what tools whoever you're working with has available to them. So for example, you work with a variety of clients, so you'll want to understand what works best for them. Hey, what kind of communication do you have available? What's worked best for your team, what type of training and you want to try to plug into that. So people do tend to like shorter, more digestible communications, videos, visuals, those kinds of things. Every once in a while we run into a client who tends to be a little bit more old school. And so we try to adapt or push a little bit sometimes. But in general you want to short, digestible, easy to understand communications and also in a variety of styles. So learners learn very differently. So, so the more that you can kind of mention something, the more likely that they are to pick it up and digest it.

Well, Alison, I have learned a lot about change management today. And I'm going to start, if I'm working on a project, just making sure that, hey, you know what, change management is very important. But I want to leave this conversation today with hearing from you. What did I miss? What are some of your major takeaways? That if we forget everything else about this, we should at least remember this.

So I would just encourage you to really think about any time that you have a change. Think about who's going to be impacted, what's the change going to be, and what's the best way to make sure that those folks that are going to experience the change know that it's coming and know how to use it. If it's a new system or understand how it works, if it's a new process, those are the most critical elements of change management. But really, again, remember, people, people, people.

Well, that concludes our discussion today on change management. I am Gayle Wright with Sales Globe, and this is Allison Tigner, change management consultant.

I would love to talk with you more about change management. I'm really excited about this topic. We could go on for days, but I was thrilled to be able to connect with you today.

And if you guys would like to reach us, please reach out via our links below. In the description of this podcast.