Business Process Management: Overcoming Roadblocks to Organizational Change

Change management is one of the most talked about topics in today’s business world. With the increase in technology and streamlining of processes, it is becoming ever more recognized that change needs to happen exponentially faster to ensure companies can keep up with their competitors. Change needs to happen to reduce costs, improve quality, grow, and improve productivity.

Conflicting with change management is the mindset of the current labor force. Companies are finding today’s employees to be especially susceptible to burn-out, fears, and frustrations. This makes change hard, since change requires effort.

In many cases, the current mindset of today’s workforce is satisfied with the status quo and exerting the minimal required efforts. They feel that if they can complete their job in a somewhat timely manner, then there is no improvement required. They don’t understand the competitive requirements to constantly improve quality and cost to stay or grow in the current marketplace.

With all these factors in mind, how then do you create change? How do you make change stick? How do you retain your employees through change? These are all questions that we at Open Source Integrators ask daily.

At Open Source Integrators, our job is to create change. With the creation of change, how do we best advise our clients to make change happen? In our profession, we see resistance to change every day in many organizations. Believe it or not, it is not uncommon for an ERP solution rollout to occur, and individuals are so resistant to change, they secretly use the legacy system. Resistance to change happens when organizations do not understand how difficult it is to produce change and the steps required to undertake this change.

The secret to creating change starts by identifying an urgent matter and making an executive in the organization aware. This urgent matter often arises due to:

• Environmental changes: One example is when COVID came to arise, organizations needed to learn how to continue operations and communications in a changing environment.
• New legislation: An example of this was when sales tax laws were implemented to coincide with the new trend of eCommerce.
• New obstacles: An example of this was when international shipping became timelier and more expensive, and companies were forced to operate with these barriers.
• New competitors: This happens when a new competitor enters one’s market space or an existing competitor finds a competitive advantage that the firm is forced to compete with.

In my history of ERP implementations, I’ve never received a call from someone who wants to implement a new ERP solution because it sounds like fun or a good idea. Every call and every implementation is driven from an urgent matter. Organizational change follows the same formula in that organizational change always is driven from an urgent matter.

Most business executives will likely identify with one of the matters and understand the urgency of the situation. However, to implement change, change needs to be made throughout the organization. Often one or a few executives might see a situation as an urgent matter, but this is often not the case of the entire organization.

For example, an urgent matter might be we need to create better controls in an ERP system to pass a financial audit. This urgent matter might come from a CFO. Better controls might be extremely urgent to a CFO; however, the head of R&D might not see it this way. The head of R&D most likely realizes that controls will interfere with the timeliness of their R&D efforts. Another example might be a requirement for additional quality checks. The CFO might see this as a hindrance due to the expenses of hiring these employees and loss of profitability; however, the head of Manufacturing might realize that missing these quality checks could cause a possible closure of their facility due to the risks around a product failure.

As you can see, even the leadership of an organization might disagree on criticality, so passing this down stream to the employees performing the work is an obstacle at best.

First, there needs to be agreement across the executives on the criticality of the manner. This is done through a lot of communication.

In his book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” Patrick Lencioni discusses that if a team is not aligned, an organization is not functional. A lot of communication is required across the leaders of an organization to understand each other’s point of views and each other’s pain points. This often comes with many meetings, offsite retreats, and lots of communication. If the leaders are not aligned, change initiatives will always fail. This is the first and most important step to change.

After urgent matters are agreed upon by the leadership, then the next step for change can happen. However, the criticality of the first step of alignment upon leadership to make change happen should not be overlooked.

After alignment of leadership has been confirmed, the second step for change is to communicate both the urgency of the situation and the vision across the organization.

As John P. Kotter describes in his book, “Leading Change,” the first step in leading change is communication of the urgent situation.

Often leaders make the mistake of communicating what the change is. They do not understand the value of filling in the employees on why there is urgency and what their change vision is.

For example, an executive stating, “we need to double check all of our work and record it in the computer system” is not near as impacting to change as saying, “Our competitor just had to let go of their employees due to a quality error. This scares me. I don’t want to lose anyone in this room. Because of this, I have a vision. Let’s confirm that everything that we have leaving this facility has gone through three quality checks. This will eliminate any negligence in this situation and will confirm that we will be able to keep our doors open”.

In the second example, you can see that there are two elements to this communication, first there is communication on the urgency of the matter and second there is communication on the vision. This communication needs to be strong enough to drive people out of their comfort zone and create change.

One disclosure, when creating a sense of urgency there might be some distrust. Often when making urgent statements, employees will rebuke and say something like the following:

• Other companies in our industry are also having problems.
• It’s not my problem; it’s someone else’s, so why should I change.
• We are slowly making progress so why make a huge change.

In addition, employees might not trust that it is an urgent situation because:

• Everything seems fine
• The organization seems to be extremely profitable already

These rebukes are normal. That is the reason that your change statement needs to come with not only an urgent matter but a vision as well.

Change visions play a key role in producing useful change by helping to direct, align, and inspire actions. Without this vision, change can be transformed into a list of time-consuming projects that go in the wrong direction or nowhere at all.

Furthermore, change needs to be shown as easier than not changing. This can be accomplished in many ways. For example, performance reviews can be structured around the goals for the new change initiative. However, not complying with the change initiative needs to be managed as well. Employees need to see that it is easier to change than to not change.

In summary, in today’s world, organizations need to change and adapt quickly. Change requires the following ingredients: agreement of the urgency of a situation and a change vision shared amongst leaders, constant communication of urgency and change vision across the organization, and tools to make change easier for employees than not changing. Without this knowledge of how to make change happen, it is impossible for organizations to survive this quickly changing world.