Change! That’s a word that seems to hound almost every other business, the management, and their people at work. Change in processes, systems, structure, markets and many more…

The theory of management states that ‘Change’ is a process, and it involves ideas, thoughts, processes and systems that are understood and driven by people within a given framework. However, most businesses deploy change as projects that aim at creating, innovating processes involving dynamic steps that finally get installed wherein people need to comply with and condition themselves to work their way with changes forward.

Project managers and leaders consider the scope of the what and where factors across installing a change, and most often than not a large population of employees are affected in some way or the other. Those who implement apply their energy & attention to the system and process, however the people affected need to adapt and alter their behaviours to manage change! Research on change clearly brings extremely dissatisfying statistics on how effectively a change gets implemented!

In 2014, change survey data from 5857 people in global organizations across 40 countries indicated the following distribution of data across the commitment stages in relation to a specific change that their organization was going through…

A typical organisation faces a significant challenge created by the projects it runs, whether they are focused on cost reduction, process redesign, mergers, restructuring, or a large IT implementation. It can be difficult to capture the value of all these activities simultaneously. 

However, the biggest difficulty is usually getting employees to embrace the change each project brings. This is the realm of change management – helping people adopt new behaviours, accept and take ownership of change instead of resisting it. The way you implement change is at least as important as the strategy or solution you’re trying to implement, if not more so. Successful project implementations rarely come from purely technical project plans that do not take into account the human dynamicsof change.

Nearly 90% of UK executives surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit, in their report ‘Organizational agility: How business can survive and thrive in turbulent times’, ranked organizational agility as vital for business success.

The same report highlights that the research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested that agile firms grow revenue 37% faster and generate 30% higher profits than non-agile companies. Organizations that lack agility and can’t adapt, can suffer more than ever before from: 

• More adaptable competitors beginning to dominate 
• Business performance deteriorating rapidly 
• When deterioration occurs recovery being tougher than ever before 
• The engagement of employees becoming more difficult 
• The term ‘change fatigue’ becoming part of regular conversations inside the organization 

Organizations need to build change management competencies across the entire enterprise, ensuring that change management is sponsored and applied effectively on all change projects. This is called Enterprise Change Management. 

To build sustainable change capabilities into an organisation you need to do more than simply train people. The key challenge is to move change management from being training-led to being a consistently used business application. This does not devalue training, which of course remains a crucial activity. It means training becomes a key component of a change management implementation, rather than the driver of it. 

Building Change Management capability is a vital ingredient for business success!