10 Change management best practices

The business landscape endlessly evolves due to trends, innovations, and market factors. These changes require your organization to implement new services, products, processes, and infrastructure. Focusing on these strategies can help your business stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

However, many challenges await during organizational transformations. Let us help you manage and even eliminate these difficulties with our change management best practices.

What is change management?

Change management is the process of guiding teams during significant organizational transitions. It’s a comprehensive plan that equips employees to navigate and understand major changes within the company.

The main goal of change management is to make sure everyone adapts to new parts of the business, whether they’re practices, policies, or expansions. This approach uses relevant engagement and timely support to help companies achieve their desired outcomes from organizational shifts.

The 10 best practices for change management

The key to successful company changes is carefully managing both the technical factors and human elements of transitions. Change management best practices consider potential bottlenecks and resistance to shifts.

Let’s explore these practices one by one.

1. Apply a structured approach to change management

Implementing structured frameworks in your change initiatives breaks your plan into clear, concrete guidelines. This system gives your team defined courses of action, targets, and support, paving a consistent path throughout the business transition.

Structuring your change management plan requires the following: 

• Practical and measurable objectives
• Change awareness techniques
• Supporting systems and infrastructure
• Desired technical and behavioral outcomes
• Change management tools and strategies
• Resiliency plans for various challenges
• Responsibilities of each team member

A structured approach to change addresses individual and organizational needs for successful transitions. As a result, target groups achieve high adoption rates and improved operations.

2. Deliver training

The value of training is often underestimated in companies, much more so in organizational transformations. However, it’s crucial for any successful initiative, as it bridges the gap between employees’ missing skills and the required abilities for change.

Change training equips middle managers and their team members with the skills and knowledge to thrive in the company’s new landscape. It facilitates organizational learning through the following:

• For team leaders and immediate supervisors: Change management courses allow them to guide their teams through significant shifts. This way, they can cultivate agile workers who are responsive to new systems.
• For team staff: Change-related training teaches them the technical abilities and soft skills to adapt to transforming processes. It helps them become resilient, versatile, and reliable, enhancing the outcomes of shifts.

Training delivery can be challenging, but learning management systems like SC Training (formerly EdApp) can make the process easier. 

SC Training is the platform that saves you countless hours in developing effective teams. Its intuitive course creator tool features a powerful AI generator that can transform documents into engaging lessons in seconds. This is perfect for managing changes, as you can effortlessly convert procedures and PowerPoints.

Change management best practices made easier. Sign up for SC Training!

3. Engage your frontline employees

Your frontline teams are the most crucial groups during organizational shifts. They represent your business’s desired changes to existing clients and potential customers. Without their adoption of these changes, no one can effectively symbolize upgrades to the public.

Change management strategies involving employee engagement help teams apply and understand new processes, methods, or structures. To minimize resistance and motivate frontlines to buy into transformations, it’s best to:

• Create multiple communication channels to raise awareness, deliver updates, receive feedback, and address concerns
• Conduct regular performance reviews using fair metrics
• Offer appropriate incentives and recognize great work
• Address technical skill gaps

With SC Training’s gamification feature, you can transform change management into an unforgettable experience. Teams can interact with new information using in-lesson games rather than reading texts passively. This way, they can remember more knowledge and adopt new practices.

4. Continuously monitor and adjust

Once you implement change initiatives, various parts can become unpredictable or may not go as planned. You need to monitor progress regularly to identify points of improvement and areas that require corrections. This way, your business shifts maintain effectiveness, and stay aligned with targets.

Change management practices for continuous evaluation include clear metrics, feedback channels, and organizational learning. To find and eliminate disruptions, delays, and slacks, you should:

• Define key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Track technical and behavioral progress
• Compare assessment results against organizational goals
• Make strategic changes based on documented data
• Realign original goals when necessary 
• Modify methods based on initial outcomes

5. Communicate plans clearly

Resistance to change normally comes from a lack of awareness about the transition’s purpose and benefits. A proven method to ease this tension is to communicate openly with affected groups and address all their concerns.

Communicating with your employees allows you to promote your changeover’s purpose, goals, and necessity. These change management best practices create a clear flow of information, minimizing misunderstood details and false claims.

Transparency builds trust among your teams, leading to better adoption of new business aspects. But communicating alone isn’t enough. Make sure to implement these change management examples:

• Proactively clarify misinformation
• Remain consistent in your messaging
• Use various formal and informal channels 
• Personalize messages based on the benefits relevant to each team
• Release information promptly
• Address expectations early on

6. Celebrate progress and short-term wins

Experiencing change is a long and tiring process for team members. Sooner or later they’ll need recognition and a sense of progress. The lack of these can result in a loss of motivation, disrupting the transition.

Acknowledging and rewarding achievements is excellent for boosting morale, resiliency, and engagement during organizational changes. It gives your team members tangible evidence that their hard work is paying off. In return, you can easily inspire continuous productivity toward complete transformation.

Using SC Training for change management allows you to celebrate progress with Achievements. The feature lets you customize badges and banners, motivating your teams to reach their goals. This way, you can diversify rewards for high-performing employees and drive results.

7. Build a network of change ambassadors

Change ambassadors are handpicked employees who champion intended transformations on the ground. They act as a bridge between upper management and frontline employees, clarifying information at an operational level.

You can select ambassadors based on their influence, either as site leaders or team members. They can help you translate, connect, and coordinate change requirements to target groups. Champions can understand their colleagues’  resistance and concerns, leading to relevant solutions.

For your benefit, change ambassadors make sure that communication stays consistent and messages are understood correctly. They also diversify your skill development channels by facilitating knowledge transfer and adaptation.

8. Use a progressive implementation strategy

A progressive implementation strategy makes changes through gradual phases that build upon each other. Instead of executing transformations in one drop, this approach rolls out shifts in smaller, controlled sequential steps.

The management practice allows you to test, evaluate, and refine changes at every step. You’ll have the power to adjust strategies before all transitions are made. This way, you can apply improvements and control risks at a manageable pace.

This approach increases the likelihood of accepting the organization’s new processes and infrastructure. Just make sure to:

• Phase your resource allocation as well
• Minimize strains over support systems
• Identify gaps in the application
• Document successes to sustain change

9. Support your team managers

Team managers can significantly influence the achievement of change objectives. After all, they motivate, advise, and guide their frontline teams during daily operations. Without the proper support, crew leaders can mismanage transitions and lose employee interest.

Managerial support can be done in different ways. These include:

• Allocating enough tools and resources to improve hard skills and management styles
• Delivering timely mentorship and feedback to address leadership shortcomings
• Communicating transparently to maintain alignment and engagement

Another way to support team managers is by offering them change leadership courses that equip them for their responsibilities.

SC Training’s Change Management course explores best practices and leadership models that allow managers to navigate changes effectively. What makes this training great is that it uses the learning and development trend of microlearning. This divides lessons into quick chunks that let leaders learn on the job without disrupting schedules. 

10. Conduct a post-implementation review

Post-implementation reviews (PIRs) analyze the outcomes and impact of your organizational change. They aim to understand the overall strengths and weaknesses of the transformational plan, measuring effectiveness through: 

• Adoption rates
• Success criteria 
• Cost-benefit ratio 
• Achievement of milestones

Besides assessing measurable objectives, PIRs allow you to evaluate the efficiency of each implementation phase. You can check for: 

• Time management 
• Quality assurance
• Resource use
• Cycle disruptions

This change management method helps prevent similar issues and improve practices for future change initiatives. Promoting continuous improvement and knowledge transfer drives organizational growth across all levels.