Change management: New tool to raise efficacy of HR rules?

Change Management is essential for every step in an organisation. If you want to meet your sales target, they key is change management. If a new strategy needs to be executed, change management will help. If there is abrasion in the market that shall directly affect your organisation, you need change management. Change management is the adoption of measures and steps as per the given situation that will help deliver the required results and outcome.

Dr Ashok Mohanty, head-human resources and talent management, Tata Housing says, “Change management is an integral process for any organisation which seeks to address key issues, capitalise on opportunities and improve performance. Every organisation goes through change and it is imperative one is prepared and equipped to embrace change. Change management is a process wherein it identifies groups or individuals who need to adopt change and build a plan to ensure smooth transition by way of workshops, training programs, sessions with the leadership, etc. HR managers in organisations need to be advocates of change management and hence is the basic skill that is expected of them. The manager needs to take care of three elements of change management i.e. people, structure and strategy. Aligning all three together will help the manager and the organisation to achieve the objective for change”.

Besides the fact that the HR manager’s major role is of hiring, training, monitoring and observing team performance; it also has a very crucial role to play in any change-management program. The manager has to ensure the team is motivated to accept the change and participate in the change management initiative. In order to make this happen, they need to recruit the right type of people- ones having the perspective that fits the organisation’s vision.

Based on the details of a recent study, ‘Where Change Management Fails” from Robert Half Management Resources, the reason organisational change usually fails is basic. It’s communication. Or more specifically, lack of communication. The study (which included 300 senior managers at US companies with 20 or more employees) notes that most organisational -change efforts struggle in the executional phase on the foundation of insufficient or disjointed communication.

The research concluded, “The survey findings further suggest clear and frequent communication can be the remedy for what ails change-management efforts.

Sukhdeep Aurora, chief people officer-ANAROCK Property Consultants adds “Change management is very important in a company of any size, be it a massive multinational or a growing start-up. Change, regardless of how positive it is, involves pulling people out of familiar circumstances and pushing them into new ones - in short, out of their ‘comfort zones’. As such, it is reasonable to expect a certain amount of resistance to change, and such resistance must be handled intelligently and compassionately. Employees must also be equipped to deal with new concepts and environments, such as new office layouts or new technologies. A firm’s HR department must make itself available to assist employees in embracing and adopting change, making the most of it and thereby helping the company to grow and evolve”

“Change management while by definition only entails the process of managing an organisation’s or an individual’s shift in its current state, it should not be one-dimensional. In today’s work environment where new technologies, ideas and innovation are reshaping the work requirements, ethics and best practices, change management becomes a key personal attribute for every professional. The ability to foresee and forecast the impact on person or processes is something that can be acquired and one can learn to anticipate and manage unexpected changes.

As organisations move to transform to the next level of service operational excellence and efficiency improvement, either via process optimisation or technology enablement, these changes will be delivering greater synergies and value for firms as traditional models give way to robotic process automation and machine learning with a higher “change the business: run the business” ratio,” concludes Shiv Agrawal, managing director, ABC Consultants

Over four decades, Dr Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School observed countless leaders and organisations as they were trying to transform or execute their strategies. He identified and extracted the success factors and combined them into a methodology, the award-winning 8-step process for leading change called the Kotter's 8-Step Change Model – Implementing Change Powerfully and Successfully.

WHY CHANGE?

• If there is abrasion in the market that shall directly affect your organisation, you need change management
   
• With technologies, innovation reshaping the work requirements, change management becomes key

The writer is manager-human resources, SILA