7 Change Management Strategies for a Dynamic and Adaptable Workplace

Healthy company evolution brings new possibilities and profits—but that doesn’t mean you should charge ahead without a plan. To reap the rewards of change, you must scale strategically while respecting your employees.

Explore the best change management strategies to handle adjustments effectively while keeping your team engaged, motivated, and happy.

The importance of having a change management strategy

Organizational changes impact your customers, employees, and suppliers—all of whom are at risk of disengagement and resistance.

Whether you’re facing short-term staffing issues or long-term brand damage, you need to know how to manage change based on your company’s circumstances. The organizational change management strategy you implement must be appropriate for the particular adaptations at hand. 

Consider these potential organizational transformations:

• Merging with a larger company
• Restructuring senior leadership
• Switching your target audience
• Adopting new cultural values
• Rapidly scaling your organization

There’s no one standardized process that gets you through all these scenarios comfortably. It’s critical to learn change management best practices so you can adapt to your situation.

Change management basics

While every company’s needs are different, all good change management strategies take these requirements into account:

• Prepare employees: Before diving into plans and technical details, address the human side of change by communicating with your people. Using Fellow lets you create a structured meeting agenda so employees know what to expect, increasing their understanding and opening the door for productive questions.
• Set goals and create a plan: Defining your course of action involves nailing down details like overarching objectives, measurable goals, and key players. This plan should directly involve C, D, and V-level executives. Try Fellow’s decision-making meeting template to organize vital change topics.
• Execute the plan: Implement your organizational changes, paying careful attention to your employees. Encourage them, recognize their wins, and check in on their experiences throughout implementation.
• Assess improvements: Review your changes to understand if the initiative was a success, failure, or lateral move. Measuring your plan’s efficacy reveals helpful insights for future change management efforts.

7 organizational change management strategies

To make change both smooth and exciting, use these seven effective change management strategies.

1Be transparent

For employees, the worst part of change is the unknown. Be as transparent as possible throughout the process to decrease resistance and boost positivity. You can’t share every detail, but you can explain your primary goals and how they’ll impact staff.

As more details unfold, keep your team updated with Fellow’s weekly sync agenda template. This outline encourages open communication about contention points regarding decisions to show your team you care about their opinions.

Get this template

2Offer training

Change often involves new technologies, practices, and processes, so it’s vital to provide employee training. For example, you might be migrating Excel data to a customer relationship management system. While beneficial to the sales team (as customer information will be more organized), sales professionals won’t know how to use the new system without your help.

For extensive initiatives, you could provide comprehensive training courses, and for smaller changes, more specific coaching.

3Prioritize clear communication

Employees want to be looped in during uncertain times. Promote consistent, clear communication throughout the entire change process by hosting regular meetings and sending out frequent updates.

To further encourage clarity, define ideal communication methods and cadences. You might ask employees to ping their direct manager when they want to make certain changes (like those that affect client deliverables) but they can adjust personal workflows without formal notification. And you could set out a check-in schedule for project teams and client-facing groups where each person defines current tasks, roadblocks, and worries.

4Invite feedback

Invite and embrace employee perspectives to reduce resistance to change and increase individual autonomy. Asking for feedback shows that you care about your staff’s experience and input, so encourage open dialogue during meetings. You could also send surveys to give your people a voice and gain useful insights.

To garner instant feedback between teammates, use Fellow’s feedback system, which organizes and centralizes this information.

5Change meeting habits

Effective meetings are critical to team productivity and communication, and introducing the right tools makes all the difference.

Fellow’s Meeting Guidelines help you build and automate meeting best practices for your team. Promote healthy, productive discussions by optimizing when you schedule meetings and offering agendas beforehand so everyone is prepared.

6Be a strong leader

Change initiatives succeed because leaders support their people and demonstrate flexibility and confidence. Employees need to see leaders face challenges, whether it’s explaining a difficult concept or adapting to unforeseen economic struggles. And your executive presence (expressing your self-assurance and competence) sets an example for the rest of your team.

7Connect employees to your purpose

Helping people understand your goals and rationale ignites engagement and supports positive morale. Say you’re adding an extra step to a standard company protocol to increase product quality and, ultimately, client satisfaction. When you communicate the reason for the change and explain how its intended outcome helps your organization, people are likelier to rally behind it.

Support change with Fellow

The right change management strategies make organizational transformation positive and productive, and great tools make it all possible. Enhance your change management process with Fellow’s AI-powered meeting transcription and management software. 

Have more effective change management meetings and enjoy a speedier journey toward your new future. Try Fellow today.

FAQs

What’s change management?

Change management involves developing ways to adjust company-wide processes. This includes changes to internal and external procedures, company culture, and the organizational structure.

Organizational change is either adaptive or transformational:

• Adaptive: This involves making small changes to gradually adapt a company’s processes to new circumstances.
• Transformational: To evolve as a whole, companies implement large-scale overhauls that transform entire operations.

What are the 5 Rs of change management?

The five Rs of change management relate to how change impacts employees. For successful company transformation, consider:

1. Resistance
2. Redundancy
3. Redeployment
4. Reengagement
5. Retention

What are the 7 Cs of change management?

Remembering the seven Cs of change management encourages a fair and transparent process: 

1. Clarity
2. Continuity
3. Certainty
4. Consistency
5. Cooperation
6. Confidence
7. Communication

What are the 7 Rs of change management?

These seven Rs cover everything you’d outline to your team when implementing a larger organizational change:

1. The reason behind the change
2. The risks involved
3. The resources required
4. Who raised the change request
5. The return required from the change
6. Who’s responsible for implementing the change
7. The relationship between this change and others