Why isn't your change sticking?

4 Steps to Make Change Easy and Long Lasting at Your Facility

The saying that change is hard, is a very worthy one, but let’s break that stigma and make it easy!? Which aspects of change are actually hard and can we break down change into manageable pieces?? What if we focused extra efforts on the few pieces that actually cause the change to be hard (what are the vital few versus the trivial many?)?? Change management is considered hard because it involves people, strategic thinking, and taking a good look in the mirror. Let’s first be okay with being vulnerable and making mistakes along the way.???

There are four key principles of change management from a people perspective: Role modeling the expected behavior, development of the necessary talent and skills needed to change, building mechanisms to reinforce the change, and developing an understanding of why the change is needed.?

Role Modeling:??

A significant amount of change efforts fail due to management not role modeling the proper behaviors.? How often is new software rolled out across an organization and top executives are still using the old system?? At one of our prior companies, a switchover to google sheets as a replacement of excel was rolled out.? Executives and certain department heads continued to use excel, not prioritizing change and the new software.? This created excuses for all staff to stick with excel while enabling reasons why they can’t change.? If management was able to lead by example from the start, the resistance could have been reduced from the get go.?

Skills and Capabilities:??

Oftentimes what is initially seen as resistance to change can be attributed to the lack of skills and capabilities to fully implement the change.? In the prior example, although excel and sheets are similar platforms, google sheets does take some time to fully understand the different verbiage used, tweaks in formulas, and flow of the program. Online resources and training programs were made available with change agents assisting on the ground at larger sites.? Managers need to be patient in their staff's development of these new skills while the employees need to be open to providing effective feedback on the training.? Being clear with what is expected of the new skills and capabilities is a necessity.? Oftentimes a lack of clarity comes across as resistance.?

Reinforcement Mechanisms:?

Supporting the new change with reinforcing mechanisms is a principle that can be easily overlooked.? How do you know if the change is being adopted properly?? Does your organizational structure support the change?? In the google sheets example, making future software purchases be google compatible across the organization would reinforce the change. Metrics showing the number of ongoing excel users against targets and goals would provide transparency into the effectiveness of the rollout.?

During the planning stages of any change effort, the metrics that would indicate success need to be brainstormed.? The creation of targets and goals will help track the effectiveness.? Just because these metrics will be difficult to track, doesn’t mean they won’t be highly effective.? Transparency of the progress to the entire team will help build buy-in.?

Why:?

Developing a change story and a case for change ties back into having a clear mission, vision and purpose for your business.? If an employee can align why he needs to change with the purpose of the business then the chances of adoption will increase.? With the google sheets example, a story showing how effective the collaborative capabilities are for a team, including cutting down the amount of times outdated spreadsheets would be used would have helped everyone understand why they needed to change.?

This is all great, but how do you know if the change effort is being adopted at the rate that you were hoping for???

Understanding which of these four aspects needs to be prioritized before a change is rolled out will be key.? Being proactive and thinking through each area instead of reactive increases change adoption by twofold.

Change management needs to be built into all aspects of managerial positions and can help in real life relationships.? Following these four key principles will change your mindset from change is hard to yes let’s go test out that new system or technology.? Building a culture where change is easy can lead to continuous improvements and the highest performing teams.? This is when teams produce unexpected results!?