In my first Insight in this series, I explained why it’s important to be proactive and have a change management plan. In part two, I gave you three of the five change management best practices.
Here are the final two change management plan best practices:
4. Recognize Your Early Adopters—Your employees who jump onboard, that are using the new policy, that are using the new procedure—particularly if there’s a client success associated with it; you want to make sure that you’re publically praising those employees within your organization.
When you do that, folks that may be dragging their heels a little bit will see the positive recognition associated with jumping onboard, and so they’re much more likely to jump on, too.
5. Be Prepared to Take Corrective Action If Necessary—Whether it’s an internal culture change or a change that influences how you interact with your customers, it’s about dealing with increasing your profits and moving forward. That’s non-negotiable.
So if you’ve done all the other best practices and you have employees who still aren’t onboard, it could be a behavioral issue. This would require immediate corrective action because if you have one person who is getting away with not making the change, that will drag others back into doing it the old way.
People will get sucked back into their comfort zone if they see no consequences for not doing things the new way.
Another Important Thing to Remember about Change Management
You need to have regular communication with your people. You can do this once a month via a newsletter or once every two or three weeks with a phone call. It’s up to you.
You just need to do something to get your employees used to hearing tidbits of news about other changes that are happening around the company, even if the changes don’t apply to everyone. You want to get your employees used to being in the flow of change on a regular basis.
This will help you develop long-term trust.
Also, if you’re communicating with them frequently, they’ll feel more a part of the organization. Then when change does happen to them, they’ve had advance notice that it’s coming and they know everyone else has gone through it so it’s nothing strange or new.
When you talk about change management, you want to be as prepared and as visual as you can be. If you can’t make a flow chart or something like that, it’s going to be a little bit more difficult for people to understand and adopt the change.
If people feel like they’re running up against a brick wall of policies and procedures, it will be tougher for them to deal with the change, as well.
But if you provide them with the resources they need and communicate the change to them in an enthusiastic way, explain to them why the change is good, recognize people who are embracing the change and communicate frequently, you’re setting yourself up for success.
An Example
A lot of the change management I work with is helping companies to move from traditional to modern.
For example, a company may be transmitting information orally at the present time. What that means is, there’s one person who is the “hub” or the “expert” that you turn to for information. But when that person is out sick for a week, the entire place shuts down.
So the change management I would help with in that specific example is I would sit down with the company to figure out how we get the information from the “expert” to a shared source.
There’s a lot of change happening in the culture of a company during that time and people are moving from a place where there were no policies and procedures to a place where there is documentation, policies and procedures.
Now this doesn’t mean the company is sacrificing a fun culture for one full of policies and procedures. But that’s another issue I run into with companies.
And that’s where best practices come in. Communicating with passion and enthusiasm; and communicating the whys of the change. This will make the difference.