Fluid changes: How did we naturally managed the process of change
There are two important moments regarding a change: the first, when occurs and the other when becomes relevant to you, affecting your work.
The first is unique in the entire organization and takes advantage of wide resources and of an almost general mobilization to ensure its communication. The second is an individual one, for each when the current tasks make him facing the change in question. Unfortunately, that time the mobilization related to the introduction of the change passed and you have to handle the situation alone.
In order to manage the introduction of changes in a natural and effective manner, strategies are needed for both types of moments. If for the first type the things are quite clear, being accesible a wide experience and bibliografy about how and what things should be done, in respect to the second, the sources of information are not so rich.
We have worked with organizations with more than 10,000 employees and we’ve been able to implement major changes fast and with light efforts. Here are some ideas developed during these implementations that could make your life a little bit easier:
- Make a list of all the effects of that change and the contexts in which they occur. In this way you will discover the moments the change will become relevant to one or other of the employees.
- Ensure that when an employee searches for information in one of the contexts mentioned above, everything that is related to the change in question is immediately accessible.
- Optimize the interaction of the employee with his digital workspace so that he performs as few searches in as few places. This means that the working environment is functioning based on processes and tasks rather than based on information categories. In most organizations you will find one form in one place, a procedure in another one, few other things in the third and the forth, when all these information you need are for a single process or task. Show them in an integrated manner, consolidated in one single place.
- Do not consider that an email announcing the change solved something, even asking for an explicit confirmation from the recipients that they read and understood.
- Notify repeatedly the important changes, always posting them on the first page of your organization’s intranet and in the dedicated pages for the processes and tasks that use them.
When it is clear for the employee that he has a place where he can find everything he is looking for and the changes are well flagged, then, they will become much faster and easier.
