Having Trouble Getting Your Employees to Adopt Changes?

August 24, 2022

Reducing the Fear of Change

Organizations often spend valuable resources, both time and money, to implement changes and improvements only to find out their employees are resistant to the change, resulting in a loss of productivity and revenue. Employees fear change for many reasons, including job loss, moving to another position, a reduction in hours, pay or responsibility, or working with a new team or manager. Fear is due to your employee’s perceptions of the change. Recognizing and addressing those fears will make your employees more receptive and embrace the change. They may even become proponents of the change, encouraging other employees.

How Organizational Change Management Can Help

Organizational change management (OCM) manages the “people side” of the change. Per Prosci®  (the Global Leader in Change Management), organizations implementing OCM see tangible results such as; “6x more likely to meet objectives, 5x more likely to stay on schedule, and 2x more likely to stay on budget” – all resulting in a greater ROI.

OCM focuses on three levels to help individual employees embrace, adopt, and use a change in their day-to-day work.

• Individuals: enable people’s success by supporting them through their change journey
• Project: increase outcomes and ROI by driving adoption and usage
• Enterprise-wide: deliver strategic intent, mitigate saturation, and improve agility by embedding change management

Deploying the Prosci® Framework

The Prosci® framework includes a 3-Phase process that involves preparing the change, managing the change, and sustaining outcomes. This blog explicitly discusses preparing for change. The following two blogs will cover the additional process topics.

Preparing for change involves several steps that outline what you are trying to achieve, who has to do their jobs differently, and what it will take to achieve success from a people perspective. This phase includes the following activities: 

• Prepare a project summary – The project summary includes documenting the “4 P’s“, Project name (what is the project), Purpose (why are we changing), Particulars (what is changing), and People (who will be changing).
• Conduct readiness assessments – Required to properly scale your organization’s change management strategy, considering organizational attributes and change characteristics to provide an early indicator of the level of people-related risk associated with a particular change. 
• Assess sponsorship – Enables early detection and mitigation of “Sponsor Coalition” concerns, a key predictor of project success.
• Perform group impact analysis – Understanding how the change will uniquely impact various workgroups is key to providing the foundational information necessary to build effective, targeted change management plans and mitigate resistance that may be unique to each group.
• Anticipate areas of resistance and outline high-level special tactics – Leveraging the outputs from the risk assessment and group impact analysis activities provides a report of initial resistance areas and the ability to design mitigation tactics. 
• Recommend change management team structure – Scaling the change management team depends on the project. The higher the risk, complexity, and diversity of impact, the larger the team should be. 
• Summarize the change management strategy – Outlines critical risk areas and recommendations for where to focus change management efforts. 

Guiding Your Organization Through Change

Change acceptance does not happen overnight. Our change management consultants can help guide your organization through the change, gradually phasing out old processes. In addition, we monitor and manage the process to ensure you’re staying on track. Contact us today to see how your changes can deliver results sooner.