Introduction
Individuals tend to naturally resist change even while there could be important reasons prompting the change. Often, workers are worried about the effects of the change, with some of them feeling vulnerable to the transformations. For such reasons, change management at the workplace should be done in a careful and thoughtful manner. The goal of such management should be to develop well-crafted programs that offer support for employees concerning the new conditions of the workplace. The process should also aid the workers in resuming their work duties as soon as it may be possible to avoid loss in productivity. Therefore, managers have to ensure that they adopt the correct strategies of change management to ensure that their workforce remains loyal and adopts the strategy of change. The objective of this paper is to argue the importance of workplace change management on employee loyalty. The work develops this argument along the lines of change management being useful in motivating the employees to remain engaged, monitoring them through control function of management, and communicating the process of change both at the tactical and strategic levels of management.
What Workplace Change Management Entails
Change management is useful to leaders since it aids them in the preparation of their followers for new workplace challenges, engagement of their employees through the process of change, and in the driving of positive outcomes. It should be noted that individuals always have flight or fight mechanisms of responding to change, which is why change management is necessary. The process of change management helps such individuals to avoid such a mechanism of responding to change and leads them into accepting the changes being instituted. This process has five fundamental steps that managers must follow if they want to manage their employees effectively during the change process. First, managers are required to develop the business case requiring change before proceeding to develop a common vision among the employees. The third step is the need to communicate for buy-in while the fourth is management of the change. Lastly, the process requires the employees to adopt and change their activities to suit the changes. As noted, therefore, workplace change management has an effect on the loyalty of employees when instituted properly.
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Workplace Change Management Process Helps Employees Stay Engaged
The five steps of workplace change management are effective in ensuring that employees stay engaged in the change process. Employees can only remain engaged if they are aware of the process of change and are involved in the formulation of change strategies (Lorenzi and Riley, 2000). These two issues relate to the loyalty factor’s seven-step process of change. According to this process, managers are required to hold executive workshops that will help them articulate clearly issues related to change. Specifically, the managers are required to communicate to their employees what types of changes are required to be instituted (Loyalty Factor, 2014). This initial step is useful in helping the managers begin on the process of building a common vision for change. The workshops should also communicate to the employees why the change should be effected and the manner in which such changes will affect the organization positively. Next, during the briefing, the managers need to communicate to their workers concerning the processes and methodologies that will be used in transiting from the present to the envisioned changed state. Once the employees shall have been briefed on the need for and manner of change, the management should embark on the development of a culture for change at the workplace.
Change managers are required to communicate to the rest of the organization concerning the process of change, which is aimed to reduce the levels of resistance they would have met with if they had not done so. This issue borrows credence from the fact that communication is one of the most powerful elements in change management (Loyalty Factor, 2014). This later argument posits that managers need to communicate effectively with all stakeholders, especially the employees for them to rally support for their ideas of change. The managers are then required to engage employee representatives in the development of recommendations that would help them in dealing with the obstacles to change. This ensures that the views of the employees are incorporated into the strategies of change, which avoids the feeling that managers imposed the strategies on them (Kotter, 2012). It is then useful to develop a plan of implementation of change, including the milestones to be achieved within specific timeframes and communicate the same implementation plan to the whole organization. The change management managers are then required to undertake training of frontline personnel to ensure they have the required skills for the implementation of the visionary changes. Lastly, there is a need to measure the outcomes of the change process to determine the need for additional tools or more ideas from the employees that would ensure successful implementation.
As described in this section, therefore, it is clear that change management at the workplace is helpful in ensuring that workers remain engaged throughout the process. This factor has a positive effect on their loyalty to the managers since it allows an incorporation of strategies communicated by the workforce. Such steps help in avoiding feelings that proposed changes have only been enforced onto workers as opposed to being researched and executed according to the needs of the workplace.
Change Management and Employee Monitoring through the Control Function of Management
Monitoring is one of the control functions of management. As opposed to a notion that control means asserting power over the workers, change management ensures that the managers understand the perceptions of their workforce towards the processes of change. It means, therefore, that change management requires managers to study their workforce to determine what factors should be changed so that the process can be smoothened (Kotter, 2012). The process starts with the management evaluating the overall performance of their change strategies according to the set timeframes of the implementation plan. Such an evaluation provides a useful way in which the managers obtain vital implementation concerning the effects of changes being instituted on the morale of the workers. As such, the managers are supposed to note the detrimental factors to staff morale and adopt policies meant to reverse such outcomes. Normally, there is a need that the managers ask for the views of their employees concerning the change processes, which is also a component of the steps of change management identified previously.
A need exists for management teams to select and empower committees that will be critical in the advocacy of agenda of change within their specific departments (Carleton, 2011). The committees then act as a link between the management and the rest of the employees, which then becomes useful in dispelling the fears connected to the purposed change and commitment of the process of change. Feedback obtained from this engagement with the change management committees is useful in helping the management adopt to changes within their workforce that might affect the process of change. The entire monitoring process, therefore, enables the change management teams to note factors that would affect employee morale and commitment to change and ensure the process succeeds.
Change Management and Communication at both Strategic and Tactical Levels
Communication is one of the most fundamental pillars of strategy formulation and implementation. For instance, effective communication ensures that every stakeholder within an organizational framework of operation understands the purpose of and the manner in which given strategies should be conducted (Kotter, 2012). Lack of effective communication always hampers the commitment of such stakeholders as the ones mentioned towards the adopted strategies. The fact that people will always respond to change in a fight or flight manner indicates that proper communication is critical in addressing such an attitude. According to the objective of this work, the effectiveness of communication in change management enables the managers to improve the levels of loyalty among employees. First, effective communication enables the workers to understand why changes being proposed by the organization are required (Carleton, 2011). This fact is founded on the idea that resistance to change results more often when the change is instituted spontaneously within an organization than when such change is planned. In the event of sudden a institution of change, the employees will most likely feel ambushed, which makes them feel that the proposed changes will disrupt their normal working. It is only normal, therefore, that the workers will react in a manner that will defend their interests.
Secondly, effective communications enable the managers to understand obstacles to effective execution of their projects. This factor is enabled through platforms of communication that allow an exchange of ideas between the leadership and workforce of an organization (Carleton, 2011). Normally, in change management, the managers use feedback from their workforce to adjust their change strategies to accommodate the needs for change that could be occasioned by the effect of such strategies on employee morale. In this way, the workforce feels the connection between them and their management, which is why communication yields positive results in the effectiveness of change management. In fact, the loyalty factor’s seven-step process of change is all centered on the importance of communication.
Conclusion
Change management could be a challenging process for managers because people will always tend to respond negatively to proposals of change regardless of their potential positive effects on organizations. The challenge comes in the fact that if the strategies of change are not coordinated effectively, they are likely to be received negatively by the workforce. In the event of such a scenario, it is likely that employee loyalty will be at stake. This factor is of fundamental importance to managers since employee need to be loyal to them if they have to realize success in the institution of change. Therefore, the process of change management should focus on ensuring that the employees stay committed to the objectives of change. According to the arguments posited in this paper, employee commitment relies on the effort of managers to demonstrate their commitment towards taking care of their interests. As such, it turns out that change managers are supposed to incorporate the views of their followers at each stage of the process. This means, therefore, that effective communication skills are the most fundamental aspects of effective change management. The communication serves to help the employees understand the need for change and how such change should be instituted. In addition, it enables change managers to learn of the hindrances to their effective change implementation through feedback generated from monitoring employee engagements with the strategies of change. This way, the process of change management results in improved employee loyalty since it generates a feeling of concern from the change managers about the well-being of their employees.
References
Carleton, K. (2011). How to motivate and retain knowledge workers in organizations: A review of the literature. International Journal of Management, 28 (2), 459.
Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change . Boston : Harvard Business Review Press.
Lorenzi, N. M., & Riley, R. T. (2000). Managing change: an overview. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , 7 (2), 116-124.
Loyalty Factor (2014). Change Management . Retrieved 19 September 2017, from http://loyaltyfactor.com/Consulting/change-management.html
