Change management as an integral part of every change

The project is cleanly set up, the new organisation is in place, processes are defined and a system has been chosen. The timeline is ambitious but workable. And at some point, usually very late, somebody asks the question: “So how do we communicate this to employees?”

This is where one of the biggest misunderstandings about change management shows itself.

Change management is not the communication at the end of a project. Nor is it a change manager’s job to package a decision that has already been taken as attractively as possible. Change management starts much earlier.

What is change management?

Put very simply, change management deals with the question of how a change is not only decided and implemented, but genuinely accepted by an organisation and anchored in everyday work.

A new system can work perfectly on a technical level and still fail if nobody uses it properly.

A new organisational structure can look entirely logical on paper and still not work if roles remain unclear.

A new process can be more efficient and still be circumvented if employees do not understand the point of it.

Change management accompanies the change systematically, from planning through to anchoring. That includes understanding the effects on different stakeholders, preparing those affected and their managers, planning communication and enablement, and checking again and again during implementation whether the change is actually landing.

At its core it is about understanding who is affected by a change, what specifically changes for those people, and what they need in order to understand the change, support it and actually put it into practice in their working day.

How that is achieved differs from project to project. Sometimes communication is to the fore, sometimes qualification, sometimes participation. Good leadership, however, is always the foundation.

The classic line: we will involve employees later.

Considerably more often than it should be, employees are only brought in shortly before implementation, or simply informed “briefly” about what is new.

A small project team works on a new solution for months. It analyses, discusses, discards options and takes important decisions. Over time this produces a very clear picture of why the change is necessary and how it is to be implemented.

For the employees affected, however, the story only starts much later.

They do not see the six months of analysis and evaluation, do not know the options that were discarded and were not part of the discussions. They are simply presented with the result.

Resistance in such situations is really not surprising. Often it is the logical consequence of employees only becoming part of the change once the most important decisions have already been taken and there is no opportunity left to engage with what is new or to question the options.

While the project team has mentally already arrived at go-live, employees are often still trying to understand why anything is supposed to change at all.

Why are we doing this? What does it mean for my work? What will work better afterwards? What do I lose? What do I gain? Will my role change?

These are not awkward questions. They are legitimate questions that people ask when they are confronted with change.

So why is change management still so often neglected?

One obvious reason is that the other components of a project are easier to grasp: there are budgets, milestones, systems, processes, org charts and deliverables. They can be planned, implemented and measured.

The human side of a change is less tangible: people react differently. Managers vary in how well they explain change. Some employees are enthusiastic, some are sceptical. Some raise their concerns openly, others nod and then carry on working as if nothing had happened.

Another reason probably lies in the misunderstanding mentioned at the start: change management is still frequently equated with communication alone. A change manager is only brought in once the essential decisions have already been taken, in order to convey what others have decided. By that point many of the causes of later resistance can barely be influenced.

And there is a further aspect: the benefit of change management often only becomes noticeable when it is missing.

If a change goes well, employees understand the new solution, managers take up their role and new ways of working quickly become a matter of course. In hindsight that creates the impression that the change effort was not so great after all.

Where that support is missing, the consequences usually show up very quickly: workarounds appear, frequently even out of sight. Decisions are questioned more and more, managers convey different messages, and training is attended but what was learned is not applied. Old processes continue to run in parallel, productivity falls and employees’ frustration rises.

And suddenly a supposedly soft “people topic” becomes a very tangible business problem.

Involving people does not mean a vote on everything.

Involving employees does not mean putting every strategic decision to a democratic vote.

There are decisions that management has to take, and should take, without first canvassing the opinion of all employees.

Nor does good change management create the impression that everything is still up for discussion when the essential decisions have already been made. Because pseudo-participation does not create acceptance; it creates mistrust.

Involving people means understanding together with those affected, in good time, what effects a planned change will have on their working day. It means involving employees deliberately in shaping it, consciously allowing critical voices and taking them seriously, using pilot groups or representatives from each area, and preparing managers specifically for their role in the change process.

Transparency matters just as much: what has already been decided? What can still be influenced? And what specific effects follow from that?

At first glance that seems unspectacular. Yet it is precisely this deliberately planned, consistent and honest involvement that often decides whether a change is accepted.

Resistance is not automatically the problem.

Resistance is frequently seen as something to be “managed” or overcome as quickly as possible. Yet it often provides valuable clues.

Perhaps somebody does not yet understand the change. Perhaps necessary skills are missing. Perhaps there are bad experiences from earlier projects. Perhaps somebody sees an operational problem that the project team has overlooked.

But there are also situations in which employees understand the change perfectly well and still reject it, because for them it means a real loss: less autonomy, a different role, new responsibilities or the loss of familiar structures.

Of course there are also people who are sceptical about change in principle. That, too, is part of reality.

Before somebody is labelled “resistant to change”, though, it is worth looking more closely.

Change management is therefore not primarily about convincing people of a change. It is about creating the conditions in which they can understand the change, accept it and successfully align their working day with it.

Because a change is only successful once it works outside the project plan. That is, a few months later, when nobody talks about the “new” process any more, because it has simply become “the” process. In the end organisations only change when people do their work differently, for good.

That is when a project becomes a successful change.