Organisational change can take place in many businesses at key times of their business growth. Change is good because it usually means it’s for the benefit of future success but it involves the alteration of a major component. These alterations could be a number of things including the culture, technologies, infrastructure or internal processes.
For many employees or team members, accepting organisational change can be tricky. Taking teams out of their comfort zone (particularly if they have not had input in the desired outcomes of the change) can be unsettling so it’s important for the change setters to recognise this and support their teams accordingly to avoid future challenges in team building.
We’ve identified 4 key types of organisational change and how your teams can be supported through the process of making those changes:
1. People-focussed organisational change
While all organisational change will affect your people in some way, a people-focussed change directly affects them, such as implementing a new work-from-home policy or inserting a new head of department role. In all cases of people-focussed change, there will be some form of emotional reaction and this can change over time. The Kubler-Ross Change Curve identifies these stages of dealing with change as follows:
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Shock
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Denial
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Frustration
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Depression
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Experiment
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Decision
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Integration
Understanding these emotional reactions can help businesses to avoid challenges in team building and support them in times of organisational change. Identifying a plan with how to support your teams through these changes is key to ensuring a smooth transition into the new way.
2. Structural change
This will usually involve shifts in management hierarchy, how teams are organised and perhaps movement of people between departments or teams plus altering roles and responsibilities. Structural change can overlap with people-focussed change and will affect all employees in different ways. For example, for some, it might involve a promotion which comes with welcomed new challenges and for others it may involve significant changes to their daily working lives that they weren’t expecting, which can be difficult to manage initially.
Clear communication and celebrating wins with explanations for the changes can help to justify the changes. Businesses should encourage feedback to tackle it head on, really listen to their teams so they can support structural change to become a success.
3. Reactionary change
For those who love to plan everything, reactionary change is far from ideal. It usually happens when a problem is identified and needs to be dealt with fairly quickly. Examples of reactionary change include dealing with the loss of an experienced member of staff – how will the rest of the team adapt and might it result in further resignations? Addressing customer behaviour, perhaps a business has identified a weakness in how a product is launched and it how it adds additional and unnecessary challenges to a team. There are ways in which Evocatus can support businesses to cope with reactionary change from risk mitigation plans to tabletop exercises, we’ve got something that will work for everyone.
4. Strategic change
Identifying the ultimate goal will help businesses to support their strategic changes. This is certainly large-scale organisational change that needs to be managed on a long-term basis. It could be something as simple as changing your company values and mission statement, therefore having a knock-on effect to several processes or something more intricate like introducing new systems and technologies. Often something which is initially thought of to make working life easier can have vast changes in a business output so they need to be carefully considered.
Evocatus has a unique approach to change management. We play games… we’ll design a bespoke change management game for our clients which are created to draw out unexpected consequences, allow for experimentation, tests plans, rehearse various outcomes and identify training solutions to support you on your organisational change missions.
There are a number of benefits to using games in change management strategies, more of which you can read about here.
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