Leading Change with a Limited Budget

Can organisational change be achieved without financial investment?

Let’s look at how it might be possible for your organisation to achieve change without additional investment.

In this scenario, there are 2 assumptions:

1. No additional investment is made, but leaders and individual contributors are still remunerated in line with their normal package. 
2. When return on investment (ROI) is referred to, it is in reference to the aforementioned investment of money and time (but is not indicative of additional investment being made).

Change can happen organically over time, but the reason businesses invest in change management (and management in general) is to realise the return and benefits of the business changes by a certain point in time. 

Typically, there is a business case where ROI is expected by a point in time, and a project team works to that timeframe to get results. The management of change leads to the intended result at the intended time, and it is therefore a valuable service. Generally speaking, a project may invest between 5-15% of the overall budget into managing change (with best practice considered to be at the higher end of that percentage). However, this article dives into options for leading change that gets the intended result without additional budget.

The Approach

These four considerations can help any professional lead and achieve change with a limited financial investment.

1. Take a relationship-centric approach. 

With this step, you would want to consider who has power in the business. Given there is no budget, you will be relying on your relationship(s) with people of influence to create and achieve change. An important influencer is an executive sponsor or perhaps someone identified as a change champion for the business. 

My suggestion is to focus on the sponsor: the person who takes on the role of owning the result of the change program. An Executive Sponsor is an active and visible leader, who champions the proposed changes through support, action and communication. The reason for this is because research points to the sponsor’s role as critical to the success of the change. In fact, it’s considered one of the biggest contributors to success. 

Through your relationship with the sponsor, you can both drive the behaviours, campaigns and overall support.

2. Identify behaviours first. 

Generally, projects revolve around a new technology, product, system or service (for example) in terms of defining the change. With this step, the idea is to define the change in terms of the behaviours you seek, and then find the right solution to enable and support the new ways of working. 

Essentially, this comes down to a good understanding of the problem and selecting a solution that responds to it. It’s less about defining the change in terms of the solution itself. The reason this saves money (and human resources) is that the program is carving out a path of least resistance. That’s not to say that behavioural change is easy, but rather it is easier when the solution is aligned to the strategy and desired behaviour. Consequently, there is congruence. There is fit. There is less investment in ‘convincing’ with campaigns. 

3. Anticipate resistance during the solution design phase. 

Early in any change effort, it’s important to incorporate a Change and/or Design Specialist, who understands the user (also known as the customer or recipient of change or impacted group). 

With this step, there is the opportunity to design the solution with the user in mind. By knowing the user, the project team can design a user-friendly solution. The reason this saves money is that the program is reducing resistance, reducing the need for lengthy guides, training, hyper care and customer support. By making the solution user-friendly, it will reduce the perception of a negative effect of the change, but more pertinent to this article, not incur extensive costs.  

4. Identify your “power lever” for adoption. 

There is a lot of investment that goes into meeting with senior leaders, communicating across multiple levels, training and testing, tracking and measuring, as well as general promotions for change. These are legitimate efforts by all means, but when a budget is limited and you need to get results, you might go for a more reliable lever with reasonably less effort and cost. 

An example of a power lever is rewarding the desired behaviour and creating negative consequences for the wrong behaviours. One evidenced-based way to achieve behavioural change on a limited budget is to change the scorecard or the rewards associated with the change. This works for customers and employees alike as seen by many commercial points and rewards programs through to well-run performance management processes. 

A few more bonus ideas!

In addition to the above, there are a number of free online tools to support collaboration and change efforts that are worth considering on a limited budget.

Plus, there are other avenues to consider to reduce costs in the short-term, such as starting with manual processes instead of automated processes or delivering a minimal viable product (MVP); however, those actions may or may not be as cost-effective for the long-term.

Answering the big question.

Can organisational change be achieved without financial investment?

Yes, it is possible. But there are a lot of caveats that have no doubt run through your mind while reading this article, so I have to add that not necessarily every organisation will be able to do this. Successful change requires a holistic investment of resources: money, time, effort, thought and care. I argue that you could remove additional investment and still successfully lead and achieve change through the effort and thought that goes into the points above.

This article was sparked by a conversation with a client, and I thought my network would be interested in how it might be possible to lead change with a limited budget. In the comments, please share your ideas for leading change on a tight budget! 

References

Prosci, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Change Management.

Implementation Management Associates, Change Management on a Budget. 

Prosci, Executive Sponsor’s Importance and Role.