Tag: change management

Forming a Change Management Team

Posted on by AJ Reardon
A diverse group of people talking in a white-walled office environment.

Large organizational changes can often have ripples throughout all areas of operations, impacting employees, customers, and the community. To avoid pitfalls and ensure success, it’s vital to form a Change Management (CM) team. This team can serve as ambassadors to impacted stakeholder groups, identifying potential pain points from the change, and facilitating communication across all levels.

To form a CM team, you’ll need to determine the purpose and objectives of the team, develop your criteria for selecting team members, assess the time commitment and then recruit people to fill the necessary CM roles. This article covers important considerations for each of these steps.

Defining Team Purpose and Objectives

Start out with a clear idea of the purpose and objectives of your CM team before you invite anyone to join. It may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this step gets overlooked! Setting your purpose and objectives at the start will help you choose the best people for the CM roles, and allow potential team members to know what is needed of them. Leaving objectives hazy can lead to problems down the line, as the team is confused by what they’re meant to accomplish, or resentful when the project turns out to be a bigger commitment than they expected.

Consider what you see as the role of this team. Is it primarily to facilitate communication and raise concerns? Or will the team have a certain amount of authority to influence the direction of the change and how it is implemented?

Developing Criteria for Change Management Team Members

Just like with any position your organization would hire for, you want to think about the ideal candidate for the roles on your CM team. What skills, traits, and lived experiences will be most beneficial to ensure that you understand the potential impact of the change and can work towards a smooth implementation?

The members of your team should be representative of your organization and external stakeholders. While it may not be practical to include external stakeholders in all of the team’s activities, inviting them to participate in discussions and provide feedback may help the team have a broader view of the impact of the change.

You’ll want to fill your change management roles with creative thinkers with strong emotional intelligence and communication skills. Considering how best to implement a change and what impact it will have requires a lot of envisioning, planning, imagination, and empathy. Members of the CM team must be able to work together collaboratively. They must be willing to set aside their own personal goals for the project in order to focus on the overall success of the change.

Members of the team will need to be comfortable not only expressing their own ideas, but speaking to others in the company (and possibly community members). Change management requires a lot of two-way communication, and the CM team will be a primary conduit for this. Often, they will have to communicate other peoples’ ideas clearly, serving as a spokesperson for teams or communities that are impacted by the change. They will need to be confident in their ability to share concerns, speak difficult truths, and both give and receive feedback.

Estimating Time Commitment

It’s important to give potential team members an accurate idea of the time commitment needed to participate. Ideally, your organization will work with the team members and their managers in order to shift their work load and/or deadlines in order to allow them to participate without working overtime.

When estimating the time commitment for the CM team, consider the following elements:

  • The timeline for the project.
  • How often the team will need to meet, and how long those meetings will be.
  • Time spent researching, gathering information, meeting with external stakeholders or consultants, analyzing data, and other “homework”.
  • Time spent preparing presentations and giving them at meetings.
  • Additional time that may be needed for issues that arise unexpectedly.
  • Whether group membership will change at different stages of the project.

Inviting and Selecting Members

It’s up to you whether to invite specific employees to participate in your CM team or to treat it more like a job opening and allow anyone in your organization to volunteer. Each of these approaches has its benefits and drawbacks. Making it a more open process may feel more inclusive to employees, however it is more time consuming to manage. Sometimes a combination approach can be effective where you have a call for applications and talk to specific people that you feel are ideal candidates about applying.

Your invitation should provide clear information on how to join the team.  At a minimum include:

  • The purpose and objectives of the team
  • Criteria for membership
  • Expected time commitment, including expected hours on a monthly basis and planned duration of project

If you opt to invite specific team members who you already identified as ideal candidates, you can ask them to simply respond with a yes or no. Don’t forget to coordinate with their managers too!

If you opt to open it up for anyone within the company (or within certain roles) to apply, consider setting up a website or survey-style form for applications. When reviewing applications, keep in mind the requirements that you set earlier. Ensure that you recruit a team with the diversity, creativity, and emotional intelligence necessary for a successful change management team. Including a section for manager sign-off may also allow you to streamline the process.

Whether using an application or direct invitation process, be sure to provide a clear timeline on next steps. This will allow everyone to know whether they need to change their schedule in order to participate.

Selecting the Team is Only the Beginning

Once you’ve selected and established your CM team, the work has only begun. Over the next months, we’ll continue to share our tried-and-true tips for managing change. Follow us to make sure you never miss a relevant update.

Change Management in Remote Work Environments

Posted on by Judy
Image of a sculpture consisting of mirrored sphered attached by matte silver rods - change management blog

Change management is about supporting people through major change projects, and any resulting impacts. With the current remote work environment, it has become more difficult to manage this people side of projects, but at the same time it is more important than ever. 

It is crucial for employees to feel that their needs are being listened to and taken into consideration when designing a change. This is much more challenging to do when you are not working in person. You can’t pick up on the conversation in the office, walk around to see how people are doing, or read body language in a conference room.  

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations felt that remote work would be a temporary situation, a matter of weeks or months. However, 16+ months later, it is becoming clear that fully-remote and hybrid models may become the norm. The Delta variant of COVID-19 and other new variants have cast doubt on the safety of a full return to the office in the near future.  

Remote work may be safer, and even more convenient, but it can make transitions more difficult. There are people who already feel disconnected and less supported than they were in the office, and major changes can heighten those feelings. Even those who are thriving in a remote work environment may find that major changes threaten their equilibrium. It takes a much more innovative approach to change management to make sure these implementations are effective and that employees feel empowered. 

Studies have shown that projects which practice effective change management are more successful. So how do we do that in this remote environment? We’ve prepared a few tips to help you successfully manage the people side of your projects. 

Tips for Successful Remote Change Management 

Engagement – Involving employees to help create the change is a great way to build ownership. It’s harder to find the energy and connection that typically comes through engagement when you’re not meeting in person. Consider these techniques to make your remote meetings more dynamic. 

-Encourage the use of video, while recognizing that some employees may not be comfortable showing their home, or may not have the literal bandwidth, especially if they are sharing their connection with others who are doing remote work or school. 

-Start meetings with an ice breaker or warm-up. Depending on the company culture, this could look like simply asking everyone to share their name, pronouns, title, and what they hope to get out of the meeting, or it could involve everyone sharing a fun fact about themselves or responding to a trivia question. 

-Create opportunities for active participation via the use of online polls, or working in collaborative environments such as Mural or Miro. 

Training – Traditional classroom-based training is not an option when working remotely. Nor is it possible to simply teach online in the same way you taught in person. Keep these considerations in mind when planning training sessions.   

-Break training down into smaller modules and make sure there are frequent breaks to improve training results. Sitting in online training classes that are more than 2 hours is more difficult for participants to maintain focus.  

-Use technology that allows you to view participants’ screens. This can help you identify who is struggling, or if there’s a concept that the majority of the class has not fully grasped. 

-Use breakout rooms within online meeting platforms to provide one-on-one support, or to give everyone the opportunity to discuss what they’ve learned in a small group. 

-Remember that it can be difficult for participants to get your attention if they have questions. Build time into your class for Q&A breaks, and encourage everyone to use either the hand-raising function or the chat feature within the meeting platform to share their questions. 

-Send out a follow-up email recapping the main takeaways of the training and addressing any questions that came up during the Q&A or breakout rooms. 

Support – It’s important to give people access to additional learning support post-training, in case they didn’t absorb everything during the training. There are many tools you can use to make it easy for people to ask questions, receive clarifications, and provide feedback. 

-Create a survey for employees to fill out after each training to provide feedback on the training and ask any lingering questions.  

-Utilize technology such as Teams or Zoom for employees to drop in on meetings for support or further learning. 

-Provide employees with the opportunity to ask for clarification via email, discussion groups, or one-on-one breakout sessions. 

-Record training sessions with searchable titles/topics. Make it easy for employees to refresh their memory or review difficult training topics. 

-Maintain an easy-to-find FAQ page which is regularly updated based on the questions which participants have asked in follow-ups. 

-Create a list of self-help resources that employees can review on their own time if they wish to dig deeper into a topic. 

-Ensure that all resources for further learning and clarification are well-organized and easy to use. Some people may hesitate to ask for help because they don’t want to take up your time, or they may simply prefer to find answers on their own. 

Rising to the Challenge 

Remote work is just one of the many changes that COVID-19 has wrought on industries and employers around the world. Your organization is likely facing its own unique challenges. Major implementations will need to be approached with extra care. Keep these change management principles in mind and check in regularly with your teams to ensure they feel they are being listened to and that their needs will be met by the organization.