If you’ve been in a fairly large organisation you probably have come across a strategy for revolutionising your workplace via the brand new ‘transformation’ or ‘evolution’ programme. These projects promise big in pushing your organisation into the new technological future with faultless systems to be delivered within a few years.
If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably already seen several of these come and go, and likely your scepticism has grown with each one! These grand promises are often only partially met, and as priorities change the promises are quietly swept under the carpet, only for a new programme to take its place a little while later.
So why is it that change management projects have such a mixed rate of success?
- A lack of genuine senior support, nor this being built into the organisation’s priorities
The first question of whether a change management project will succeed is how seriously the organisation itself takes it. Is this something that your CEO has personally staked their reputation upon delivering, or rather is it something that has been farmed off to a small team in HR to implement? If it’s the latter, it’s going to be quite an uphill battle!
Even if this has been publicly stated as a priority by your head honcho, it’s critical that the wider senior management understand and agree to this as a priority. How successful this is is dependent upon how good your organisation’s senior management is, and how well they buy into the wider organisational objectives themselves. If it’s common knowledge that the Director of Finance is dead against any modernisation of the 1990’s fax machines, you’re probably not going to move to integrated cloud-based computing solutions by next year.
- Lack of everyone else’s buy-in. The wider workforce is apathetic, cynical, or has never even heard of it
This is an issue that I’ve seen lots, much to my frustration. With an understanding that senior buy-in is so crucial, leads spend nearly all their time getting agreement amongst their seniors. Through sheer hard work, they agree a great set of principles and set this out in a nice, pretty document.
One problem – no one in the organisation has ever heard of this, nor even knew this was important. Picture the scene: you walk into the office one morning and suddenly are told the business has set its ambition is to be the market leader in innovation within three years. You sneer, pointing out that it’s hard to be particularly innovative when the printer has been broken for three weeks. You have a quick flick-through the document before putting it into a drawer, never to be read again.
Any programme needs to have support from wider staff to be effective. To do that, an ongoing dialogue is needed throughout the creation process. Better yet, explain why a programme is needed, and speak to staff about what they want to see in such a strategy. If you can demonstrate you have listened to staff concern’s, the chances it’ll be taken seriously multiply ten-fold.
- Your change management programme has grand, visionary goals without real actions to get there
You’ve worked hard, got agreement from seniors and balanced these with the requests of your staff, great! Staff are excited to read the new document to build a better workplace environment over the next two years. However, once they read it they are disappointed to only see grand visionary statements, and little genuine action to make progress towards these goals. Despite wanting to support the initiative, there is no real mechanism to do so. As work picks up and excitement drops, the programme is put on the backburner, with the result of little change.
Any change is an ongoing process, so the release of a new strategy really is a beginning rather than an ending. As such, this should be the point where communication should be standardised, and ongoing conversation should be taking place with the organisation. If the ‘delivery’ of the change management now is pawned off to that HR team, it’s really doomed to fail.
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