What is change management? We live in a changing world where the success of companies and organizations over time is heavily dependent on continuously adapting to the new conditions that prevail.

In the video, we talk about the importance of employee engagement.

The challenge

New visions and strategies are developed and when they are to be executed, you often need to make a more radical change to your business. It's important to know what you're getting into and how best to lead everyone through the change. Unfortunately, there is no one recipe that works for all situations. But the common denominator is that most people usually want an improvement, but are not as prepared to do the work.

Employees are the key to successful change

When the management of an organization or company has identified that a major change needs to happen, the most effective way is to engage employees. But they need to get answers to their questions about why and what it can mean for them, their own individual why, to gain momentum. If you succeed in doing this, you can save a lot of time and also bring about sustainable change. It is the employees who know what needs to be done and how to overcome obstacles. Give them the confidence and conditions, give them ongoing feedback and keep an open dialog, constantly with the goal as a guiding star, and things will happen in the right direction. Management is often mentally ahead of the change because they have been involved from the start. There is not enough patience to give employees a chance to catch up. Another pitfall is that the management is not clear enough about what needs to be prioritized to make room for the change work.

The right conditions and change management

To summarize what is most important to consider when pushing through a change? There are many ways to summarize it, but here is a variation:

Manage your conditions before you start:

• Creating a clear vision and goals
• The right leadership, both in management and of the change
• Communication; resources, skills and channels
• A reasonable plan

Engage employees in the work:

• Involve employees early on to actively participate in the change. This is the only 'shortcut' to sustainable change.

Leading change with flexibility:

• Manage the change, adjust the plan according to the conditions. Flexibility and adaptability of how the change is to be made is a critical success factor, but stick to the goal and why the change is needed.
• Measure and monitor progress
• Celebrate the progress!

Establish new habits:

• Work on the change for longer than you think. It takes time to establish new habits and make a sustainable change.

Methodological support in change management

There are many established models and methods to use in this area, such as

• ADKAR
• John Kotter's model of change
• Elisabeth Kubler-Ross change curve
• Knoster model for managing complex change
• FIRO (Will Schutz, 1958)

For us at Anchor, the method must never become an end in itself - we pick what is relevant to the situation and spice it up with quite a few pinches of experience to get the best effect.

Anchor's recommendation

Implementing and making changes sustainable is difficult. And it often takes longer than you think. Many organizations are also not very skilled at making this tough journey on their own. This is not surprising, as major changes are not implemented very often. At Anchor, we all have long professional experience, we have worked in different roles and in different types of organizations. What has brought us together and made us feel comfortable at Anchor is that we have realized that we love leading our clients through their change journeys using our toolkit and the peer support we give each other. Change management in the context of digitalization is one of our specialties.

Read also our previous articles for senior managers:

• Why do you, the management team, need to understand how your business works?
• How do you manage your most important resource - information?
• Why you need a CIO in your management team
• How to move from strategy to action

Welcome to contact us to talk about your change needs and how we can work together to make them successful with the right change management.