CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN 2024

Introduction:

As the technology is improving day by day, businesses are forced to face rapid changes to stay relevant. Among many other factors that drives changes, scholars have identified few major drivers of change. According to Church and Burke (2017), three major drivers of change include changing nature of work, changing nature of data and the changing dynamics of the workforce. In the post pandemic era, organizations are facing almost all three of them. Nature of work is changing as organizations are moving towards customer centric approaches from traditional organizational structures. Moreover, data is also swiftly changing from mechanical to digital and companies are using big data to provide better services. Thirdly, the dynamics of workforce is also completely changing as remote work is thriving due to demographic complications. In such circumstances, leadership as well employees are facing challenges to adopt such changes in an effective way. In this paper we will explore various aspects of change management and the role of leaders as well as employees in creating a sustainable process of change. In the end, we will recommend some key aspects for an effective change management process with the help of change management studies.

What is change management?

First of all, we must understand what is change management. For a layman, change management can be explained as the process which involves moving the organization from its current situation or position to a desired position in a specific timeframe. Change management is defined as a “structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams and organizations from a current state to a desired future state to fulfill vision and strategy” (Asnan, Nordin, & Othman, 2015). Change management is considered very crucial for leaders as it requires crucial planning and plenty of resources to cope up both internal and external changes in a business environment.

Why change is important?

As we’ve mentioned earlier, technology is developing at an enormous speed and business are heavily dependent of modern technologies to run their functions smoothly. Chinoperekweyi (2020) analyzed and explained five main reasons about the importance of change management.

According to Chinoperekweyi (2020), change management is important when;

· When something new is happening

· When something needs to be fixed

· When business is falling behind

· When business needs to lead the competition

· When an employee arrives of leaves

Change resistance:

Resisting change can be very toxic for modern organizations. Resistance to change can occurs at various levels within the organization. It can occur from ineffective sponsorship from higher management which lead to allocating insufficient change management resources. Some organizations face middle management resistance and operational staff resistance is a common phenomenon. Some groups try to politicize change to avoid it while others embrace it. Culture plays an important role in embracing change. For instance, startups are based on the culture of innovation and creativity. Hence startup easily adopt change. We have numerous examples where startups have revolutionized the whole industry through embracing change in a positive manner. UBER has revolutionized the transport sector, Amazon has totally changed the way people buy things, digital payment apps such as PayPal has evolved the payment system and much more. However traditional organizations such as government institutions and others are reluctant to adopt changes. Tesla is a prime example in this case. Traditional auto manufacturing companies were multiple times bigger than Tesla but innovation, thinking out the box and embracing change enabled Tesla to become one of the most valuable automakers of the world (Henderson, 2021).

The role of leaders:

Leadership plays a critical role in change management. As it is considered that leadership has the ability to sell the reality to its followers, senior management are responsible to educate and create awareness about the importance of change in an organization. Managers have to conduct trainings to enable their employees for upcoming changes as change is inevitable. Moreover, the resistors who are unable to adopt change and trying to politicize change must be removed from the organization as they become negative resistive political powers and add negativity to the whole organizational culture. Contemporary leadership styles such as transformational leadership, shared leadership and other assist in embracing change through inspiration, persuasion and excitement (Alqatawenah, 2018).

Contemporary leadership styles (i.e., Transformational leadership) communicates the perceptions of meaning of work in an effective way which positively impacts change management in an organization. On the other hand, effective leadership significantly impacts organizational learning and employees are motivated to acquire new skills and knowledge and improve organizational actions. Even in traditional organizations where the estimated power distance is higher compared to modern organizations, senior management posses the power the bring change as they have formal authority and most of the strategic decisions are made by them. Furthermore, studies also shows that job security has a significant impact on employees’ willingness to change and overall change management process (Oyier, 2016).

The role of employees:

An important discussion in every change management process is the willingness of employees in the whole process. Despite every good effort of a leader and spending millions of change management programs and trainings, if employee or follower is not willing to change, it all goes in vain. Therefore, it is of great concern how to motivate and educate employees for change so they can embrace it in an effective way. Scholars are of the view that role of employees in change management process is the key to success (Valackiene, Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, & Činčikaitė, 2021). Various studies shows that employee engagement in change management process brings positive results. Konrad (2006) revealed three main aspects of employee participation in change management process. These are mentioned below:

· The cognitive aspect:

Cognitive aspect is related to the opinion of an employee towards its organization, working conditions and managers.

· The emotional aspect:

Emotional aspects are about how the employees generate the above-mentioned opinion and whether he has positive or negative influence over the opinions of other employees about the organization.

· The behavioral aspect:

Behavioral aspect is an added value component, for instance self-contained efforts to involves employees in various tasks.

Challenges of change management:

In current times, organizations are facing multiple challenges to implement change. Various authors have identified such challenges and mentioned them in their studies. Rudnev (2020) combined these challenges in his study comprehensively and grouped them in five categories:

· Differences in leaders:

Leaders are also human beings and each human being posses’ different behaviors than others. Furthermore, each leader has to ensure various behaviors according to the need of the business. For instance, a bureaucratic leader may be able to run a government organization and in some exceptional cases better than other decentralized leadership styles but he will not be able to run a startup in modern times. Similarly, some organizations such as military and others require strict command and control and cannot be operated on the structure of Google or other contemporary organizations. Hence understanding the nature of organization and having right leader for it may help in change management processes.

· Differences in management and changes mechanisms:

As we know companies are classified on the size and operations as small, medium and large. But a clear classification of some organizations is not possible. Similarly, the difference in size also effects change mechanisms. For instance, large organizations provide training to its employees which helps them in adopting change in an effective way. However, the impact of trainings on small businesses has not been studied widely. Moreover, when does medium organizations become large also remains a debate. Similarly other mechanisms of change management differ for large organizations compared to small. Scholars considered it a challenge which needs to be addressed.

· Markers of changes:

One of the key aspects of change management is freezing. Freezing includes rewriting the job descriptions and creating or fixing new rules otherwise change doesn’t occur. In practical world a challenge occurs in identifying list of actions or certain behaviors through which we can define the change has occurred. For instance, organization A is having difficulty in its sales department. The organization plans to resign its processes and involve technology in the practice. However, a problem that cannot be measured is the motivation and intent of employees. In this regard it is challenging to identify the markers of change so the change management process can be implemented effectively.

· Effectiveness of strategic actions:

Another critical challenge faced by organizations is the measurement of changes or the result of strategic actions that has been taken in order to implement change. For instance, Rudnev (2020) explained it through an example. McDonalds was the first food company to bring rapid changes in its operations. They separated the functions of placing and issuing the order. They further divided into cash desk and order issuance. McDonalds furthermore revolutionized the traditional method of taking order from halls by installing screens. Although these processes were remarkable but still the effectiveness of such steps cannot be measured. McDonalds was the first food company to bring this change with lots of efforts and challenges but still it doesn’t make it the only leader in his domain.

· Career of employees:

The main obstacle in change management is organizational culture and organizational memory. If the organizational culture of any business doesn’t support change, it is quite hard for the leadership to implement change. The same is the case with organizational memory. We’ve seen it happen in this pandemic. Employees were not ready to change from traditional office work to remote and home-based jobs which led to enormous turnovers and financial losses of businesses. Organization size also impacts organizational memory as the hierarchy of big organizations makes the change difficult.

Sustainable Change process:

Organizations can effectively implement sustainable change process though these three steps:

Analysis and unfreezing:

The first step is the most critical as leaders have to analyze the need of change and educate the followers about change. It also the responsibility of the leaders to motivate his followers to embrace change in an effective manner. If the management is successful in educating the employees about the importance of change in a proper way, its implementation becomes way easier.

Implementation:

The second stage is implementation. In implementation stage the changes are carried out and managers support its staff in change processes. Leaders also play a critical role in this stage as they must empower employees to embrace change.

Maintenance:

In the last phase organizations must track the changes that are implemented and keep the record of employees so that they don’t fall back to the old processes. In some cases, organizations have to take strict actions against the employees who try to sabotage this effort.

Conclusion and recommendations:

To conclude, change management processes is not possible without involving all the stakeholders. Organizations has to understand and educate employees that change is not an easy process but it is inevitable. Through contemporary leadership styles, empowering employees and motivating them, we can achieve sustainable change management.

In the end, we will conclude this paper on the recommendations for a sustainable change management process in the organization.

Shared leadership styles and empowerment:

For an effective change management process, organizations must adopt decentralized approaches. Rather than vertical hierarchical positions, organizations have to develop horizontal positions in which each employee is empowered.

Motivate employees:

Leaders have to motivate its employees to embrace change and support them in hard times through being a role model.

Employee engagement and feedback:

Employees should be engaged in various process and their feedback should be taken seriously. In this way they own the organization and uplift their limits in the favor of organization.

Employee training and development:

Organizations must spend on training of employees to cater current needs of the job and allocate development budget for future needs.

References:

Alqatawenah, A. S. (2018). Transformational leadership style and its relationship with change management. Verslas: Teorija Ir Praktika/Business: Theory and Practice, 19, 17-24.

Asnan, R., Nordin, N., & Othman, S. N. (2015). Managing change on lean implementation in service sector. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 211, 313-319.

Chinoperekweyi, J. (2020). Exploring philosophical proclivity of change management articles: Technical-rational perspective versus other change philosophies. Organization Development Journal, 38(2), 15-26.

Church, A. H., & Burke, W. W. (2017). Four trends shaping the future of organizations and organization development. OD Practitioner, 49(3), 14-22.

Henderson, R. (2021). Should capitalism be reimagined?: If so, how? In Social Scientists Confronting Global Crises (pp. 53-58): Routledge.

Konrad, A. (2006). Engaging employees of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Ivey Bus. J.

Oyier, L. A. (2016). Effect of change management strategies on the performance of Kenya Revenue Authority. University of Nairobi,

Rudnev, E. A. (2020). Five Challenges of Change Management. International Journal of Human Resource Studies, 10(4), 333339-333339.

Valackiene, A., Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, I., & Činčikaitė, R. (2021). Ensuring employee job security when implementing changes in the company: a case study of Lithuanian industry. Sustainability, 13(15), 8383.

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