Introduction
While investing in future-oriented changes is a no-brainer, the winning approach can feel elusive.
A recent study found that high-performing brands measure success with growth, while average performers typically measure efficiency. This survey proves that brands prioritizing evolution through change retain happier employees and are far more likely to succeed.
Change is inevitable in an increasingly unpredictable world, but successfully managing this change doesn’t have to be a daunting or unrealistic goal. Change management theory gives you a structured approach to implementing changes smoothly and effectively with the help of the right set of tools and processes.
Proper change management helps your brand reach the set goals, minimize risks, and support your employees with their roles as part of the team. Today, only 34 percent of changes are considered an apparent success, and brands that can achieve this understand the applications of change management theory.
Let’s discuss the four most important aspects of change management:
- Why it matters.
- The process of implementing it.
- Quick tips to successfully manage change.
- Common challenges when implementing it.
- The change management roadmap.
Why does change management matter?
Every brand and its leaders have big dreams of growth, expansion, and success. But bringing about positive changes to a company is a complex process, making utilizing your best resources a top priority.
Diluting your efforts with too many initiatives or too many metrics is a strategy that backfires almost 70 percent of the time. Instead, the focus here should be on the few milestones that signify growth for you and then relying on performance-based adaptations to the process.
If, say, you want to recreate your omnichannel marketing strategy, that is where the backbone of your efforts should lie. Without unnecessary pressures, everyone can take steps that bring about change as efficiently as possible, leading to productive meetings, measurable progress and successful reports.
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Change management begins with the understanding that there is a need for evolution. The root of this need allows you to bring your team along because they understand why it matters. Productive management prioritizes preparedness on an individual level, with both planning and monitoring progress regularly.
For example, large groups can find regular updates taxing to keep up with, especially during long project durations. Naturally, they will recognize the need to invest in changing how they communicate. They are willing to let go of traditional communication channels to help support their goal and ensure everyone involved in the project is informed.
Observing the practices of companies like Lego also shines a light on what we can learn from the past and expect from the future of change. With six decades of experience and despite several economic, demographic, and societal trend changes, the brand has managed to retain its positive image, increase revenue and profits, and innovate to become a mega-successful business.
So, now that we’ve covered the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of change management, let’s discuss the process of implementing it.
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Implementing change management
Anyone in business will tell you the distinction between theoretical understanding and practical implementation, and change management is no different.
There are several tried-and-tested change management models you can choose from. Each helps you outline the roadmap with a clear vision, including the timeline, deliverables, and milestones you define.
Whichever model you choose, it can and should be molded to fit your brand and spotlight your goals. Your organization is a unique blend of its culture, workforce, mission, resources, and leaders. They all shape how you approach change to maximize improvements in the right direction.
5 stages of change implementation
Stage 1: Preparation
To best help your team adjust to the new changes, the first step is to prepare a foundation document that defines both the need and the goal of the change. Even if you don’t plan on going into the nitty gritty details of the plan just yet, it's a good idea to discuss the notion within your organization and determine the end purpose.
Through meetings, questionnaires, and research, you can get a ton of pointers from your team members that will help you navigate the second stage—planning.
📌 Related resource: How a Change Agent Helps Businesses Facilitate Change Management
Stage 2: Planning
With more clarity on your pain points, the second stage is where you flesh out the details and curate a thorough strategy. This lets you define all expectations from the first day onward, including all KPIs, communication with all stakeholders, and any potential risks while everyone adjusts to the executed changes.
A well-rounded plan details the responsibilities of everyone involved, making sure that there is both accountability and transparency. With this plan, you have the framework for the third stage—implementation.
⚡ Scribe tip: Discover the 5 key components of a change management toolkit plus free templates to get started.
Stage 3: Implementation
Here, you not only put the plan into action but also keep an eye on your progress. Implementing a plan relies heavily on meticulously communicating the results you achieve in real-time within the team so you never lose sight of the end goal and why you are pursuing it.
This is also the stage where you can expect unforeseen problems, and your preparation won’t matter as much as teamwork and cooperation. You do this with the help of stage four—monitoring.
Stage 4: Monitoring
This stage of the process allows you to monitor all the KPIs you defined in stage two and make any necessary last-minute changes to stay on track. Monitoring which milestones you’ve crossed and which are proving to be a challenge allows you to start taking countermeasures without losing too much time or resources.
Stages three and four run simultaneously as you execute and monitor your changes. Managing deviations and reporting between milestones is critical as you step into stage five — closure.
Stage 5: Closure
Documentation is one of the most effective ways to optimize different types of organizational change. For every step, your team took during the process, take the effort to segment it, note what you did, report the outcome, and analyze what could have been done differently. This may seem like a long task, but it leaves you with two crucial lessons:
- A set of repeatable ways to succeed at implementing change for your team.
- Solutions to previously unknown issues you encountered during this phase of change management.
Closure gives your team a dependable archive to refer back to during future change rollouts and easily replicate successful efforts. So while you cannot plan for every possible outcome, documenting your wins and losses is an excellent way to improve iteratively and follow through.
📌 Related resource: Best Change Management Extensions
Tips for successful change management
Being both willing and able to adapt to new changes rapidly is about more than just crafting the perfect plan. Your strategies will hardly ever play out exactly as you’d hoped, but there are a few things you can keep in mind to help you steer through the problems you run into.
Here are four tips worth remembering:
Understand the root cause of the change
One question managers tend to forget to ask and revisit is, "Why does the brand need to undergo this change?" There can be several reasons, from a transition in leadership to economic shifts to fierce competition in the industry, that act as the driving force for change.
Performing a root-cause analysis of the difference helps you clarify why you felt the need to implement it in the first place. According to change management theory, once you know the factors, you recognize how to create momentum and defend the change professionally.
Involve the stakeholders
Clear and frequent communication sets you up for the least possible chaos during change. This applies to all your key stakeholders, including your team. Actively involve them in the change control process by inviting them to solve your problems.
Considering their input lets you pool everyone’s ideas together and lend new perspectives. You end up with valuable insights into branding and can utilize them to make better change management decisions.
Retrain the staff
Undoubtedly, your team should know how to teach the new changes you’ve introduced into their workflows. This is only possible with practical, hands-on exercises that leverage their skillset.
Experiment with how they can incorporate the changes at their individual levels without disturbing their productivity, and encourage them to gain clarity on how to use that to be more productive. This also allows them to support the value added by the change through experience.
Plan for resistance
Anticipate resistance to new changes and address them formally to prompt your team to get to the root cause of their opposition. Based on your organization’s typical workflow, you can let all employees adjust and accommodate at their own pace as well.
In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated global efforts and pushed brands to take their change management seriously. Since then, we have seen organizations committing to change and customers consistently rewarding it.
Challenges of change management
Given that projects with improved change management are six times more likely to meet objectives, finish on time, and stay within budget, it's worthwhile to anticipate and solve the challenges you encounter.
According to Forbes, once you understand where the resistance originates, you can take steps to help your team overcome it. There are a couple of reasons that traditionally lead to resistance among employees:
- A lack of education.
- Fear of the "unknown" and new change.
By having open discussions about the unavoidable need for change, you can tackle both by spreading awareness while addressing the doubts that stem from fear. From the perspective of key stakeholders, a lack of buy-in is a common barrier of change.
For example, your team citing discomfort in replacing the traditional working processes with newer and fancier systems likely hasn’t had the chance to learn the advantages of the switch. If they collectively think that the change is in the company's best interest, they would be more inclined to overcome that resistance.
Active engagement with sponsors also comes with obstacles, such as role delegation and a support deficit. A staggering 55 percent of change managers think a lack of time and resources is the biggest challenge.
A majority of these challenges, from breakdowns in communications to juggling multiple responsibilities, can be minimized with one thing—collaborative documentation. An easy-to-use, efficient system for documentation that allows you to eliminate manual labor and ramp up your training and management systems is the way to achieve that.
A change management roadmap with Scribe
Scribe is a tool that helps you make change management activities easier by:
- Building training materials.
- Creating SOPs.
- Onboarding hires.
- Assisting customers.
In minutes, you can prepare professional documents to share with your team and improve your overall change management process.
The tool automatically creates how-to guides based on your workflow — with text and annotated screenshots that you can edit, share and embed with a click.
Here's a Scribe in action.
Scribe not only helps you build process documentation, it ensures continuity of communication as you plan, implement, monitor and modify your management processes.
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Added accessibility among team members and the ease of communicating information with your customers make Scribe a highly recommended solution. It also has a free browser extension and many functionalities to capture and share visual and informative materials like screen recordings and PDFs.
The SOPs, or Standard Operating Procedures, create the foundation for more accessible communication among team members during unpredictable times.
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Change doesn’t have to be cumbersome, and bringing about the change you need to reach your goals can be quick and easy.
Getting started is free, and you can try Scribe to easily apply the concepts and practices outlined here to optimize your brand’s change management today.
