Change management is crucial for business success. Whilst it’s inevitable, navigating it can be daunting. It often comes with significant challenges and obstacles and those obstacles can sometimes derail change initiatives if they are not addressed effectively.
In this article, we will explore the most common challenges in change management and provide practical strategies to overcome them. You will walk away understanding how your business can navigate the change process successfully. Let’s dive in.
1. Resistance to Change
A lot of people can be scared of change. This is often because they’re used to their typical ways of working so one of the common barriers to change management is that feeling of resistance. There are many reasons behind employee resistance to change.
Fear of the unknown
Fear of change is a big driving force for resistance. If employees don’t know what’s going to happen during the process and as a result of the change, they will become stressed and unwilling to support. The fear will obstruct their ability to cooperate with the change process. Kurt Lewin’s Change Management Model emphasises how resistance to change can stem from altering familiar routines. It consists of three stages: Unfreeze, Change and Refreeze. The Unfreeze stage tackles the fears accompanying change, such as the fear of the unknown.
Job insecurity
It is not uncommon for employees to hear change and interlink it with fear for their job safety, especially when introducing new technology. At the beginning of this year, the International Monetary Fund said that AI would impact nearly 40% of all jobs. People may fear losing their jobs, salaries, or colleagues due to the introduction of new technology such as AI. The sudden lack of control of their destiny could cause anxiety among your employees.
Lack of understanding about the need for change
Keeping your employees informed of ‘why’ you’re implementing the change is crucial to ensuring they are on board. Employees will often resist if they don’t understand what’s happening and why. If, all of a sudden, things are landing on them and they don’t have the time to process and understand it or even feedback on it, they’re going to have a higher resistance to change.
How can you overcome resistance?
One thing you can do as a business leader is offer solutions like:
- Clear communication of the change’s benefits – Explain to your employees why the change will not only benefit the business but themselves. If they understand the reasoning behind the change, they are more likely to get on board and support the process.
- Involving employees early in the process – As soon as the process begins, keep your employees involved no matter how close to the project they are. It’s important to keep them informed so they can understand what is going on.
- Offering support and reassurance – The change process can cause some employees to feel uneasy and unsure. If this is the case, ensure that you have systems in place to offer them the necessary support and reassurance.
2. Poor Communication and Misalignment
Poor communication and misalignment can lead to confusion, misinformation, and a lack of alignment between departments or teams.
Whether the change management is for a minor thing like a change to a system or for a large transformational thing like a restructuring, if people are comfortable and like the way things are then they may question the change. They will want to understand why and what it means for them.
One of the key things around change management is:
- Being clear about the vision and purpose of the change
- Being clear about what it means for each member of the team members impacted.
A two-way communication channel, whether that’s through workshops or Q&As, gives people an opportunity to give feedback and input into the process. This will mean the team feels more involved and has their say. It can be different depending on who the person is and what their role is to know how much communication they need, however.
How can you improve communication during a change project?
RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) will help how to best tailor your communication and engagement to your people. It is a responsibility assignment matrix that describes the participation of various roles in completing deliverables for a project. It will help determine who requires what level of communication within the change process.
You can improve communication during the change process with Strategies such as:
- Regular, transparent updates
- Multi-channel communication approaches (emails, meetings, intranet)
- Encouraging open dialogues where employees can ask questions and give feedback.
These strategies bring people along on the journey, so they aren’t left feeling isolated and that things are being done to them. For change to be successful you need to make sure it’s embedded and communicated properly, and that people are adapting in the right way.
3. Insufficient Leadership Support and Planning
The role of leadership is to address concerns and build trust during times of change. Therefore a lack of leadership support or inadequate planning can undermine a change initiative. Leaders may be too detached or fail to provide the necessary resources and guidance.
If leadership decides that the change is necessary, they need to make sure they are supportive and actively engaged in the whole process going forward. If leaders aren’t actively engaged in the change and don’t understand the ‘why’ behind it, then employees will question why they’re doing it if their leaders aren’t leading by example. Leaders need to live and breathe the change.
“When people are empowered to be their best authentic selves, they can show more compassion towards themselves, others, and the planet.”- Kate Smith, leadership consultant.
On a project or a change, you’ll usually have a sponsor who tends to be a leadership member. Their role would be the accountability piece in RACI. What does this mean?
- Regularly supporting decision making
- Helping with resolving issues
- Engaging with those actively involved and trying to deliver the change will struggle to move forward at pace and deliver on time.
How can you strengthen leadership and planning?
We recommend ensuring that leaders are actively involved and visible throughout the process. Leaders also develop a robust change management plan that includes:
- Clear roles
- Timelines
- Measurable goals.
It is also important for leaders to understand the ‘change curve’. The change curve is essentially a model that explains the emotions people feel when experiencing a change. By understanding the model, leaders can prepare for how their employees might react.
4. Lack of clear objectives
Did you know that according to Walk Me, only 34% of change initiatives are successful?
Businesses may think they know what they need and what the best solution is but without conducting an analysis and discovery to figure out if it is the right solution for them and what the actual problem is, you could be looking in the wrong direction.
You need:
- To ensure you have a problem statement for what the issue is that you’re trying to solve.
- To understand what the requirements are: what is a must-have requirement and what is a could-have requirement?
That due diligence will make sure you’ve found the best solution for you. If you don’t know the problem, the solutions may not resolve it. Having clear objectives throughout will make sure that when people get into the nitty-gritty of the change process, the objectives won’t be forgotten.
However, remember that naturally objectives may change over time so ensure you have regular check-ins to establish whether objectives are being met and whether it’s still the right thing to do is important.
So what have we looked at in this article?
We’ve explored the main challenges that accompany change management such as resistance to change, communication issues, leadership gaps and lack of clear objectives. We then had a look at different useful strategies to overcome them.
Key Takeaways:
- Resistance to change is a very common challenge that you may face when implementing change in your business. Ensuring you communicate with your team and let them be involved in the journey is a great way to avoid too much resistance.
- Change can often cause miscommunication which then leads to problems such as misalignment and unhappy staff. Ensure you provide regular updates to the team and communicate over multi-channel communication systems such as Microsoft Teams.
- Leadership is a vital responsibility in change management. They provide information, engagement and support throughout the whole process. They need to be able to understand their team’s needs and be able to accommodate them.
- Only 34% of change initiatives are successful. That’s such a low number and it’s likely due to a lack of clear objectives that direct the business down the right path. You need to have clear visions and goals for what you expect from the change itself.
Are you experiencing any of these change management challenges but don’t know the next steps?
Why not try our short Change Readiness Assessment? It’ll only take two minutes and by the end of it, you’ll gain the confidence of where you are in your change journey and what your next steps are!
