Change Management Advice
This week’s blog is going to look at another new contributor on GuruOnline.
Harley Young are a small niche company of ‘Change Management Specialists’
They achieve affective solutions by using sustained & absorbed change, rather than ‘moving the furniture around’. This requires external objectivity. It also requires building strong relationships with clients to help them withstand the knocks and scraps of change.
Harley Young co-founder, Philip Cox-Hynd, covers five different topics on change management and has over 140 videos currently live. He covers, how to approach organizational change, what the different parameters are for delivering successful change, change through effective management & powerful teamwork, what can stop change being successful and directing and sponsoring change.
So how do you know when your organisation needs to change? There will often be an obvious reason which would have alerted you to the notion you need to do something different, it may be a merger, an acquisition, an expansion into a different market place, a restructuring or something that is of a specific nature. To gain the buy in of your workforce it’s important to find out what for them needs to stay the same and what needs to change, you need to hear their opinions as it will give you a better indication as to where you are. This will give you an unflustered and unbiased set of opinions that can be critical and often dovetail with strategic change objective that you’ve already got in mind.
The best way to implement change is thoughtfully. Its important that the objective for change is thought through, there’s a difference between what can be called organic change, which is something that’s happening all the time to all businesses non stop, and prescriptive change or planned change. If it’s the latter than careful thought needs to be given to the objective, the time scale and what’s realistic against what’s wanted. Once it’s planned people need to be engaged with, not just talked at.
The best way to measure change is subjectively and objectively. Subjective, because opinion is critical, there are three areas they you need to collect opinions from, they are employee opinion, what do your employees feel has been successful in the change? Secondly, clients, suppliers and partners, collect antidotal evidence form them. Thirdly, senior managers should have been tasked with behaving more inline with the new company. So you need to measure the opinions of people within the organisation to how well their role modeling those new behaviours.
On the objective side, churn rate should have gone down and retention should have gone up, retained business should have been increased and new business won should have also been increased.
For more change management advice check out the rest of the sets on GuruOnline