8 Keys to Managing Change Effectively

Business leaders have always needed to navigate change, but never as quickly as they do now. Accenture’s  Pulse of Change: 2024 Index, which uses a variety of indicators to track how quickly the business landscape is evolving, finds the rate of change increased by 183% since 2019 and 33% in 2023 alone. The same report finds that 88% of business leaders anticipate even faster changes ahead.  

While the rate of change increases, some things remain the same. As​​ Emily Klein, a strategy executive who helps organizations achieve optimized business outcomes, put it, “When we drive change, what we’re ultimately driving is behavior change.” And no matter how quickly the world shifts, influencing behavior has some fundamental best practices.  

8 steps to roll out change efficiently and effectively

1. Identify your stakeholders.

Leadership may have given you the green light, but you still have to decide who’s driving change and where you’re heading. To Klein, successful change always involves a cross-functional team. Depending on the scale of the change, that team might include an executive sponsor, an executive steering committee, and additional stakeholders.

Once you identify your stakeholders, Klein suggests using a RACI chart to clarify everyone’s role and designate who’s Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for each task within a change project. “Use this chart throughout the life cycle of a change project to keep track of who’s responsible for what and course correcting as needed,” she said.

You’ll also want to work with stakeholders to determine your critical success factors and the end-to-end employee journeys. This will help everyone visualize how changes will impact employees and workgroups. “Ensuring that leaders understand the impact changes will have on employees’ day-to-day is essential,” added Klein.

Use this exercise to find your “change champions.” To Klein, change champions are critical links between employees and the executive team, as they engage with employees to help achieve buy-in and cascade changes throughout the organization.

2. Engage employees early on.

Think of your individual contributors as a collective stakeholder, and be sure to bring them into the process early. Right now, only 57% of managers report having enough capacity in their day-to-day work to support their teams through change. But if you engage employees early on, the brunt of the work doesn’t have to be on the managers and can instead be shared among team members.  

“Add co-creation and engage employees early on as part of your change strategy,” recommended Klein. “Instead of feeding employees information, actively solicit their thoughts, suggestions, and ideas to move change forward.” To Klein, when employees have a stake in the change, they are naturally more apt to embrace it, which helps shape successful outcomes and mitigate rumors or assumptions.  

Lisa Whited, a workplace expert and author of Work Better. Save The Planet: The Earth-First Workplace Is Good for People, Great for Business (Workplace Transformation Facilitation, 2022), agrees. Whited identifies workshops and focus groups as tried-and-true ways to engage employees. You can use the latter to better determine employees’ readiness for change and ways to get them involved in implementing it.  

You could even ask focus group members what messaging would resonate most with their peers. “When you do that, you get folks most impacted by the change involved and thinking about how to communicate it, creating greater buy-in because the message is coming from them,” said Whited.  

According to Gartner, shifting implementation planning to employees can boost the probability of change success by 24%, improving the odds of the initiative being well-received and sustainable.

Make engagement voluntary. “When you invite somebody to participate in a focus group (or any initiative), give people a choice to opt out,” said Whited, who notes that people are naturally inclined to delete a message saying they must do something. In your invitation, use language such as, “We’d love to have you join us because your views are important to this process. However, if you opt not to attend, we understand, and we will miss you.”

3. Optimize internal communications.

Transparency is key when communicating change internally, as is getting the message out early. 

“The best way to communicate is ensuring people don’t feel others knew [about the change] before they did,” said Whited. “The leadership team may be the most informed, but everybody should have a chance to hear about it as quickly as possible.” Otherwise, you risk the messaging becoming distorted as rumors spread.

Your messaging should also ensure employees understand the benefits of the change. “One of the biggest challenges with change is letting go of the ways in which work has always been done,” said Klein. “But when employees are aware of how changes will benefit them and their work going forward, they’re more likely to embrace change and get excited about it.”

Messaging should also be tailored based on the varied nature of workgroups and the direct impact on them. “Many people can forget that the ways in which people will respond to or be affected by the change may vary by role or workgroup,” said Klein, and this needs to be considered in the messaging to be effective.

If you’re stuck, Klein suggests using the Prosci ADKAR model (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement) to craft messaging that enables employees to navigate change.

4. Understand training needs.

Some changes, such as adopting a new workflow, may require substantial training. Other changes, such as using a new email signature, require formal training but could still benefit from a short how-to video.

Determine whether training is necessary by posing the question. “Your people are the best ones to ask,” said Whited, who suggests asking employees—via live polling, a pulse survey, or focus groups—if they feel they need training, and if so, where it would be most helpful.

It’s important to tie any training a change might require to employees’ current needs so the training feels engaging and relevant. “Any training should allow employees to feel like their needs are being met and that the impact of that change on their workflows and workgroups is understood,” said Klein.

Once you understand your employees’ situations, training could take a number of forms, including customized modules, lunch-and-learn sessions, and short explanatory videos. No matter the format, it’s important that the experience is deeply ingrained in the organization. “If there is training, all the leaders should also do the training,” said Whited. She urges leaders who want to see employees change to model the desired behavior themselves.

If you opt for focus groups to understand training needs, Whited suggests micro-groups of no more than four people per group. The thinking is that everybody is more likely to participate, including introverts, and those little moments of connection will pay dividends in social capital. 

5. Plan for resistance.

Resistance to organizational change is natural. However, when a change is extreme or follows another shift, it can lead to change fatigue or create resistance among employees.

Data from McKinsey & Company shows that 39% of transformations fail because of employee resistance. Meanwhile, Gartner research indicates that employees who experience above-average change fatigue have far lower intent to stay with their organizations.

Employees often resist change because they don’t know why they should change or how they would personally benefit, Whited noted. Research from Oak Engage finds roughly 4 in 10 employees resist change because they lack awareness of the reason for change. “People need to know what you are trying to do and how doing so makes a difference,” said Whited.

Should you still see resistance emerging, try to understand the cause, said Klein, who suggested conducting assessments to help with resistance management. For example, resistance could relate to your culture. Gartner finds that when managers create a psychologically safe environment for their employees, change fatigue can decrease by as much as 46%. If you know certain workgroups or individuals might resist change, create intervention strategies to address their issues. Conversely, it’s helpful to recognize and reward people who embrace, adopt, and champion change, Klein added.

6. Measure your progress.

It’s important to track the impact of the change by regularly reviewing your key performance indicators (KPIs) and considering if you’re seeing the desired behavior change you sought, said Klein. 

Depending on your change, your quantitative metrics could include anything from a goal number of sign-ins to a new tool, to a percentage of people who’ve complied with a new procedure after a certain period, to statistical improvements in performance.

But it’s important to always add employee feedback to the data, said Whited. She uses a change model that measures progress on a chart, with the vertical axis representing a KPI and the horizontal axis tracking employee engagement. Having both rational and emotional perspectives represented gives a clearer picture of how well the change is being implemented and ensures employee voices are being considered throughout the process.

To gather that human insight, Whited suggests pulse surveys or live polls but notes that they must be quick—perhaps only two questions. Whited explained how, after implementing a change, one organization used a virtual anonymous poll to understand employees’ sentiments. It later repeated this across its geographies to compare and aggregate the data, giving further context to the change’s impact.

Don’t let negative anecdotes skew reality. A leader could hear one negative story from a direct report that feels more significant than it really is because of who conveyed it. Only reliable, objective data should prompt a course correction.

7. Report to stakeholders. 

As you monitor your progress, you’ll want to report to all of the stakeholders involved in the transformation. Whited suggested communicating progress regularly (at a predetermined cadence), consistently (with metrics), and honestly (no sugarcoating).

Create a dashboard to give stakeholders a visual of your KPIs, “like the old-fashioned thermometer when raising funds,” she said. Pair the data-backed visual aid with positive and negative anecdotes when presenting the result, and be forthright with the stories gathered from the organization.

Remember, too, that your employees are a collective stakeholder. If employees take the time to give you feedback, they deserve to see the results, said Whited. Plus, communicating results to employees could also counter change or survey fatigue, which often happens when people are asked to answer questions but never hear the results.

Share results with transparency, not rose-colored glasses, Klein suggested. If challenges are evident, identify them and then consider engaging employees across the enterprise to resolve them.

One way to do this is through a hackathon, a condensed burst of collaborative problem-solving, suggested Whited. Hackathons can crowdsource solutions while fostering small-group connections that can foster collaboration and innovation over the long term.

8. Make the most of change.

Once your change is out in the organization, reinforce your commitment, repeat your why, and reiterate your intended impact and how you plan to get there. “Change must be reinforced to be sustained,” said Klein. While the results of any organizational change will vary, the lessons you learn from each rollout can be helpful for the next one. Track any personal lessons alongside your organizational results so you can use them later. 

Don’t be afraid to learn from others’ experiences. Whited strongly recommends that leaders be willing to look outside of the organization and identify leaders in the community from whom they could learn. After all, every leader has had to navigate change at one point or another. It’s far better to learn from someone else than to repeat their missteps. Together, we can all move forward.