The business world has become global and extremely competitive and it is essential that an organisation is able to adapt to changes. As a result, change management is a constant process that should keep running in every organisation in order for it to succeed in the marketplace such as through important strategic changes for organizational effectiveness.
To keep their organisations’ competitive leaders need to adopt thoughtful planning, strategically set goals, effectively communicate with their employees so that they all in ‘the same page’. The role of HR and its functions is also changing with the marketplace – HR has to become a strategic partner, an employee advocate as well as a change mentor in order for an organisation and its employees to successfully implement changes.
Traditionally, HR has mainly focused on making staffing plans, organising training programmes and organising performance appraisal programmes. However, this role is changing and HR is focusing more on the long term needs of their organisations and people. However, this change does not come easily.
HR professionals need to enhance their abilities and extend their daily tasks. They need to align both managers’ expectations of employees and employee’s expectations of managers, which in times of change are crucially different and can cause large gaps (in terms of goals) that can damage both parties. HR needs to provide the employees with necessary information on the benefits of the changes and how employees will be affected. They need to inform the management about the employee’s views as well. In this way resistance to change and conflicts will be significantly reduced and change could be implemented more easily.
HR need to focus on Lewin’s three step model of change implementation in unfreezing the status quo, changing to a desired end state and refreezing the new change to make it permanent. Nestrom and Davis mention in their book Organizational Behavior: Human Behavior at Work that only in this way HR can develop a roadmap of the implementation and communication phase of change. HR should act as transformational leaders in order to make bold strategic changes and position the organisation for the future.
They should establish a vision and promote it among employees in order to understand the bigger picture of the change itself. Moreover, they should treat change as continuous and promote this concept as well. However, these professionals need to understand the importance of time factor as it is needed in order for the real change to be adopted and enhanced. They should create a creative representative change committee among employees.In this way it will be the employees themselves to promote change.
John Lewison, director of HR for MDRC and SHRM Organizational Development Special Expertise Panel member, says that both recruitment and talent retention are key issues for a company’s success. As a result, HR is crucial to a company’s success in terms of employee management, engagement, motivation and commitment. HR has the strategic ability to promote change and incorporate it in the whole organisation.
By Alba Bregasi