Your guide to change management (and why it matters)
Posted on: 28 October, 2024
If the last few years have taught us anything about business, it’s that change is a fact of life.
From the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote working to the emergence of ChatGPT and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the shifting state of the world has brought home the importance of being able to adapt to the unexpected. As a result, searches for the terms ‘future-ready’ and ‘resilience’ have been steadily rising since 2020, as organisations turn their focus to long-term stability over short-term wins.
The built environment is no strange to these shifts – as sustainability continues to climb the corporate agenda, the sector is having to juggle news business imperatives with the fact that 41% of its workforce will have retired in the next seven years.
Change, then, is inevitable. Yet while failing to act in response simply isn’t an option, getting people to accept and embrace change is another challenge altogether. That’s where change management comes in.
What is change management?
Change management is the practice of managing change and how it affects people within an organisation. This coordinated approach is usually adopted when a business is attempting to achieve a more desirable state or implement an initiative, such as digital transformation, or adopt sustainable practices.
Why is managing change important?
Change is scary. The first thing anyone who hears about a large-scale transition in an organisation will think about is how it affects them. It also often requires people to change the way they think and work, which is bound to lead to resistance and objections. If it’s not communicated effectively, people are likely to take it personally.
However, without the engagement of everyone affected by change, from the key stakeholders to the management team all the way to the end users, an organisation won’t achieve its desired end state. This means getting them involved and adding their input by managing how change is communicated is vital.
Large scale changes also need to be controlled. Without effective project management and oversight, change initiatives can suffer from scope creep – when the requirements and ambitions increase without control.
What’s more, change is hard. According to research by Gartner, half of change initiatives fail and only 34% are a clear success. Many of these initiatives are make or break – they may be necessary for a business to survive and adapt to changing markets. If change is allowed to spiral out of control, it could cost, and put the organisation – and its workforce – in jeopardy.
How does change management work?
Organisational change management can take different forms depending on the context, scope, and industry a company serves. The type of change a business is involved in is usually defined by its pace and the scope of its influence:
7 types of organisational change
- Exceptional change: This refers to isolated events that have an impact at an individual level, but with a limited influence in a wider context.
- Incremental change: This type of change denotes gradual shifts that may not even be noticed at first, and usually happens over an extended period of time. One example of this could be the rolling out of new technology.
- Pendulum change: As the name suggests, a pendulum change is a sudden, significant switch between two extremes. For many during the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition to remote working was an example of a pendulum change.
- Paradigm change: A paradigm change is as significant as a pendulum change, but constitutes a deeper transition where new values become the norm.
- Evolutionary change: This is a natural process and is the result of small adjustments and continuous improvements that are often too small to notice, yet add up to make a significant difference over time.
- Revolutionary change: Revolutionary change is driven by external factors and influences that may not always be welcome but in fact forced.
- Directed change: Direct change refers to change with a specific purpose and end destination, and it has three different types – developmental, transformational and transitional.
- Developmental change: This is when a business wants to develop and improve what it’s currently doing, e.g. increasing client acquisition.
- Transformational change: Transformational change is difficult to map with absolute certainty, and often requires significant changes in mindset among stakeholders.
- Transitional change: This denotes a direct transition from one state to another, where one thing is replaced by something else that is perceived as entirely new.
7 benefits of change management
1. Achieve strategic goals
Perhaps the most significant benefit of adopting a structured approach to change is how it can help an organisation achieve its goals. Implementing effective change management processes will minimise the risks of poor engagement, lack of buy-in, project creep and spiralling costs, all of which have the potential to threaten the success of a change project.
2. Foster internal engagement
Internal resistance to change is a key reason so many transformation initiatives fail. Effective communication plans can help reduce the chance that employees, teams and departments won’t buy into the initiative, whilst simultaneously creating advocates who believe in and recognise the need for change.
3. Save money, time and resources
A considered approach to change can help organisations put a cap on unnecessary spending and resource expenditure in several ways. By engaging staff throughout the change, it reduces the likelihood of turnover and the subsequent cost of recruiting new employees. What’s more, controlling the scope of change can prevent projects from becoming complex over time and leading to further expense and greater time being spent on them unnecessarily.
4. Align teams and increase efficiency
By engaging key stakeholders, management teams and employees around a single initiative, the change management process gives organisations the chance to align all their staff and departments towards a set of shared goals and objectives. With change often being a necessity to survive in changing markets, this can help businesses focus on their output on their biggest priorities.
5. Increase adoption
The ultimate mark of success in organisational transformation is the rate at which change is embraced and adopted at the user level. Effective change management strategies incorporate end users throughout the entire process, and increase the chance that new technologies or processes will be adopted throughout the organisation.
6. Eliminate risks
Change management models can also help to identify potential risks that could hold back the success of an initiative early in the process. By establishing a stage-by-stage framework for how the change process will be managed, potential risks such as inadequate resources and poor engagement can be addressed at an early stage.
7. Preserve your company culture
Large scale change can have a significant impact on company culture. For instance, if a significant portion of a workforce wasn’t consulted about the adoption of new technology, a change initiative could risk alienating these employees and impacting the attitudes and perspectives of the entire workforce. By engaging all teams affected by change throughout the process, organisations can maintain and even evolve their company culture.
The challenges of change management
As you might expect, driving change across an entire organisation isn’t without its challenges. Some of the biggest obstacles and pitfalls with this process include:
1. Lack of buy-in from leadership
Without the backing of senior leadership figures with influence throughout different teams and departments, no organisational initiative will get off the ground.
2. Resistance to change
If a change requires employees to change the way they work, there’s a good chance they’ll be resistant to it – particularly if the benefits aren’t explained to them.
3. Poor communication
Effective communication is the cornerstone of change management. Without it, confusion and rumours can lead to resistance.
4. Inadequate resources
Failing to calculate the scope, cost and time required for change is a common and dangerous pitfall organisations occur in change management.
5. Insufficient engagement
Without the engagement of the employees most affected by change, it’s highly unlikely that a change initiative will see any long-term success.
6. Change fatigue
If multiple changes occur over a short period of time (or all at once), this can lead to change fatigue, where employees are burnt out, resistant, and have lowered morale.
5 tips for effective change management
To navigate some of the most common mistakes when implementing change and reap the benefits of organisational transformation, it’s critical to put together a cohesive strategy and map out each stage of the process carefully.
Here are some key considerations businesses should take when planning to undertake any change initiative:
1. Develop a change management plan
The most important thing for any organisation undergoing change is to be prepared. This can involve talking to the employees who will be running the project and briefing them on the need for the change, and will culminate in the creation of a detailed, comprehensive change management plan.
2. Communicate change and consult key stakeholders
Once the change management plan has been created, the next step will be to communicate the change and loop in the most important stakeholders of the project. Consider who will be most impacted by the project, as well as whose help and resources you’ll need.
Care will need be taken with how information is communicated, too. What is the message you want to communicate? What time is best for employees to receive this message? And how will you respond to feedback?
3. Support staff
While some teams, departments and members of staff will be more impacted by change than others, it’s important that you make them feel part of the process as much as possible, as their buy-in, engagement and even advocacy for change can make or break the success of your initiative.
Hold Q&A sessions that give your staff the freedom and space to ask questions and raise their concerns. Consider what some of the most common frequently asked questions may be too, and have clear documentation for how these can be answered to ensure these matters are being addressed clearly and consistently.
4. Embed the change within your company culture
Implementing a change is only one part of the process – it’s equally as important to ensure that end users don’t slide back into old processes, and that your business doesn’t revert back to the prior status quo.
Embedding a new process or technology will require engagement and understanding on the part of end users. Look for advocates who can speak of the benefits of change to other employees, and adopt new structures (along with reward systems) that encourage the adoption of new practices.
5. Monitor and evaluate change
Just as it’s crucial to embed change into an organisation, another key to success in change initiatives is to measure, monitor and evaluate their success. After all, you may be successful in rolling out a new practice or tool, but how do you know if end users and teams are actually making use of it?
Collecting data and analysis can help organisations see the benefits of change, while helping to identify challenges and bottlenecks in adoption. They can provide learnings that can be carried over into future initiatives, helping businesses avoid making the same mistakes twice.
Change and the built environment
Change is a recurring theme for the construction industry and the wider built environment. It can happen at a project level, when changes to the scope of a project require plans and processes to be revisited, and at an organisational level, when a company launches a sustainability initiative.
Change management strategies, then, are valid to the built environment and offer significant benefits to the sector. Here are just a handful of its potential applications in the context of the built environment:
- Highlight errors in the project design phase before they are carried over to construction
- Identifying potential risks that could lead to costly delays early on in a construction project, e.g. material shortages, inclement weather and unforeseen costs.
- Embracing sustainability as a priority throughout the building lifecycle by embedding it into different working practices and operations
- Preventing projects from exceeding their requirements and ensuring costs and scope are kept under control
- Ensuring a project stays on track and meets the expectations of the client, serves the needs of end users and conforms with compliance and regulation
