Almost every organisation undergoes a rapid change at some point. However, these changes invite unforeseen problems that can tremendously impact your business’s trajectory.
We’ve seen companies experience a major digital transformation over the past three years due to COVID-19. Everything happens online, from listing products and services to providing exceptional customer service. This major shift has resulted in a significant disruption to how things were before. Consider QR codes and how they were sporadically used before Covid-19. Now they are part of our lives every, single, day.
Challenges of Organisational Change
Let’s look deeper at some of the most common challenges businesses and organisations face. Solving all these challenges help to maintain a comprehensive hierarchy that defines roles for the different employees and helps them to acquaint themselves with the new changes.
Resistance Shown By Your People
The introduction of new software technology can prove to be a daunting addition for many people at an organisation. People are used to staying in their comfort lane, and forcing them out of that can result in negative outcomes rather than being productive.
Technology may keep evolving and improving, but people tend to stay in their lane and make all their efforts to resist these changes rather than embrace them.
Your team will surely resist change if you don’t offer any training sessions to help them become accustomed to the new changes. They are also likely to resist this change if you fail to communicate how the new addition can prove to be beneficial for everyone at the company.
Training Hundreds of Employees Simultaneously
Offering training sessions within a given area is one thing, but when you have to train several employees across different regions, that is where the real problems can arise. Training your people can be tiring and very expensive, slowing your change efforts.
Another challenge awaits you when you’re providing training to people across several regions. Ensuring consistent attendance and that the training is effective can be difficult. If you don’t measure this adequately the process may be a waste of time and resources for the business and your people.
Inadequate Onboarding Tactics and Failure to Retain Knowledge
Using technology-based tools can be complex. Consistent use is key to success. The number of functions included with rich features can be too much for your people. It takes more than a few training sessions for them to get onboard.
It is best to offer follow up sessions and a library of training videos your people can return to if they get stuck at any point. Providing inadequate information leads to poor understanding of the new tools and thus results in a lack of adoption and low productivity.
Finding new ways to help your people retain knowledge is key to success. Well-formed documentation will come in handy. It provides a comprehensive guide with troubleshooting details that your employees can access anytime.
Tracking User Efficiency is Difficult
After onboarding users, tracking and analysing how they perform is crucial. Analysing this helps you see how organisational change implementation works within the user circle. This also lets you know where to re-iterate particular points and where improvements are necessary.
However, keeping a record of the results is cumbersome. Most organisations only give statistics on how much time people invest. They provide no insight into how people utilise the digital product.
Often senior members of organisations have very little understanding of how their people use particular tools, which features they need help with, and what features aren’t used. Hence, all these factors pose the most significant change challenge for organisations.
How to Combat These Challenges Using the Organisation's Tools at its Disposal
Utilising the existing tools and strategies of the organisation already has is key to effectively employing these organisational changes. Adapting to these key changes is pivotal to your organisation for a seamless implementation of new strategies.
Overcoming Employee Resistance to Change
To overcome your employee’s resistance to these changes, implement a well articulated plan that helps you streamline your communication system with your people. Your plan should focus on the following elements:
- Start with a proposal that will help depict the value of the organisation change and how it can help your people.
- Assist your people to get accustomed to the change leaders and ensuring them how important it is to trust and support them throughout the implementation of the new change.
- Include a results-tracking plan to analyse the recent change’s success.
- Keep a steady flow of communications to keep your people abreast of each change and how it will affect them and the organisation to ensure everyone is on board and knows what to expect.
Training Simultaneously
Enabling self-paced learning programs that users can access through an e-learning portal is very useful. A comprehensive dashboard can help your employees customise and personalise the learning material according to their level of understanding and role at the organisation.
However, it would be best if you made sure that the training material and workflows are only available to the employees that each item is relevant to. This will help your people see what they need to learn. All these tactics help you train your people more effectively compared to focused training sessions for different types of people.
Improving Onboarding tactics and Helping Your People Retain Knowledge
Creating a contextual onboarding platform can help your people access information anywhere they want. These platforms target the right people according to their responsibilities at the organisation and provide relevant training material on their specific dashboards.
Why Outsourcing Is Becoming More Relevant Than Ever Before
- Outsourcing helps businesses to manage ever-changing technology-based skillsets.
- Outsourcing delivers consistent quality, while saving resources and delivering additional skills and speed to reach your key business priorities.
- Outsourcing helps you focus on the essential aspects of your business, while utilising an expert to keep abreast of the latest, most efficient way of doing things.
- Outsourcing is often a more affordable strategy to maintaining a path to better outcomes. You can approach outsourcing like turning on and off a “tap of skills” that would otherwise cost a significant amount of time and investment in a part or full time employee.
The Bottom Line
Adopting different business software may seem the right path. However, doing it to keep up with or surpass your competitors may incur unnecessary burdens on your people and business.
Focus on developing the skills of your people and their processes. Whether it’s a receptionist answering the phone, or a young person just starting out they are worth the effort of upskilling. Executing effective communication and providing a guide to the organisation’s metrics will help your people understand what’s important to the business and why it’s important for them to own these tasks.
At Dovetail Group, we provide simple, yet effective revenue growth services and solutions to make everything work as it should.
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