Managing change

Today I had one of the most popular problem that we the HR people deal with: change and how we are managing the change in the company.

When you work in a company, were the average age is 47  years it is difficult to make the employees to embrace the new changes. But we have to find the means to do that.

Recently I read an article that was inspiring for me (sadly I don't remember the name or who wrote it).

In this article the most important thing was a chart with the variables of the change process that helped me to understand what strategies I have to use to make my employees to be able to embrace the changes.

Managing complex change involves 5 variables:

1. Vision

2. Skills

3. Incentives

4. Resources

5. Action plan

Let's analyze each of them:

Vision - when you want to make a change you always start from a vision. Where you are and where/ what you want to become. This vision is necessary to be visible, to be known by every one that is implicated in the process of change.

Skills - you must have the skills in your "change team". When you want to make a big change in your company you have to use the key people, the people that have the skills to complete this project. Otherwise the project is doomed before you start it.

Incentives - don't forget that every one of us is motivated by something. You have to take time and analyse what motivates your change team, and use rewards to complete the change.

Resources - one of the most important thing when you start a project that involves changes is to analyse what resources you need from the start of the project until the end of it and what is the most efficient way of using them.

Action plan - we usually start a project without making a plan. The action plan gives your change team all the information about the project and all the steps that are necessary in order to do it. Yes, in a project you have the project manager but I think that an important thing is to let all the team members have an input in this plan.

But what happens when you lack one of this variables? well...

When you lack the vision you will have confusion in your team, when you don't have the skills you will have an anxious team, when you don't have the resources you will find frustration and when you don't use incentives you will deal with resistance. And when you don't have an action plan you will have a false start

   The conclusion is that we need to have all this five variables in order to succeed in implementing the change in our company. After you have all this variables you can find the proper strategy to use in order to make the changes in your company easy to implement. But don't forget to work with your team in all you do.