Change Management and Organizational Change

Management

Management

After months and months of meetings upon meetings, you’re finally about to transform HR into a pivotal organizational function. That’s exactly the right move since, as you know, companies are increasingly depending on human resources to enable business strategies through the management of human capital. In other words, you’re about to shift from being a functional tool for establishing and maintaining a workforce to partnering with the company to produce and reach business objectives. Good for you.

But you do need to be able to deal with such change, and that comes through change management. Here’s what you need to know about change management and organizational change, and more.

What is Transformational Change?

There are multiple kinds of organizational change that change management can affect, including developmental change, transitional change, and transformational change. The latter is change that fundamentally and radically alters an enterprise’s operation and culture.

What is HR Transformation?

Let’s be clear, HR transformation is not simply the digitization of HR processes, although that’s a central and important part of it. Technology alone accomplishes nothing. HR transformation is also not just sitting in on meetings with business leaders. Real transformation is about making HR a partner to the extent that all employee-related efforts line up with business objectives. That means complete integration.

How Can a Transformed HR Help the Company?

Human Resources transformation can help in some important ways, including:

  • HR can tell the company whether the organization has the talent capabilities to take on new sectors or industries.
  • HR can keep the organization abreast of goings-on in the business world, such as stock price changes that may open employees to poaching by competitors, or looming layoffs in a particular field.
  • HR can offer their company insights into whether certain work should be done remotely, say, or by machines rather than people.

What is Change Management?

Essentially, change management is a systemic way of handling the transformation of a company’s processes, objectives, or technologies. The aim is to put in place strategies for making the change happen, managing the change, and helping your employees adapt to the change.

What Makes for an Effective Change Management Process? 

To work optimally, change management must factor in how, in this case, HR digital transformation, will affect the organization’s systems, processes, and employees. You’ll need a way to plan for and test the coming change, a process for slating and implementing the change, and processes for both documenting the change and measuring its impact.

Here’s a checklist you can use for change management:

  • Define what you plan to do and why you’re doing it.
  • Based on that, come up with a solid messaging strategy.
  • You also must establish a communications plan for employees.
  • Pinpoint and bring in stakeholders. You need to engage them.
  • Identify and engage the people you want to champion the transformation.
  • Establish a solid plan to first test the change.
  • Utilize training for instruction as well as for marketing the transformed HR function.

You know that you need change management to help you deal with organizational change, particularly as it applies to your HR transformation. But you’ll fare better if you have exterior help. Using an approach that is both data driven and specific to your company’s culture, a consulting firm such as Mercer can help you with your HR transformation as well as your communication strategy. The firm can help your employees understand and ultimately buy in to the change, bolstering the employee experience, and improving your bottom line.