Driving transformation with effective change management

With the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic driving innovation in process excellence, many organizations are striving to understand how best to manage organizational change. As effective change management becomes critical for organizations to ensure survival and business continuity, PEX Network catches up with Katherine Dillon, automation process analyst and developer at Nokia, who offered her definition of change management.

“Change management is the people side of change,” Dillon notes. “It is a set of tools and processes that help manage employee engagement and adoption of new ideas and ways of working.”

How change management drives business transformation

One of the primary advantages of effectively managing organizational change is that it allows you to ensure that this change is productive and advances business transformation objectives. According to Dillon, one of the best methods for ensuring that change management and business transformation are intrinsically linked is to tie change management in with internal business goals.

“Many of us are hesitant or dislike change, especially if that change is a new idea that is not our own,” Dillon remarks. “With a solid change management tool kit, individuals and teams throughout the business can link change with operational business targets, giving employees a touch point to engage with.”

Dillon explains that a change management framework provides adaptable tools to translate the behaviors that support change into tangible actions that build new habits and shift mind-sets throughout the organization. These new behaviors should be aligned with management practices so that the change sticks.

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Bring all business roles on board with change management

When asked which business roles are important for change management, Dillon makes the declaration that in order to ensure success, all business roles need to be brought in on the process. Dillon says there is no one viewpoint or approach that is conducive to optimal change management and explains that any management requirements can shift from situation to situation.

“This allows for multiple perspectives to be used to help create approaches that can be leveraged in all business levels,” Dillon states. “The elements of change management need to be customized depending on who you are working with as dealing with senior leaders response to change is different compared to end user adaption to change.”

Dillon wraps up her advice by providing an overview of the ways that change management has helped Nokia to continue driving business transformation during the pandemic.

“Our foundations in change management allowed us to implement the necessary changes quickly, by concentrating our focus and prioritizing goals that kept us safe, by moving most of us to work from home,” she says. “We established protocols and processes for critical employees that needed to work in labs which allowed us to respond to the rapidly changing customer network needs.”

For more information and expert insights into change management challenges and best practices, sign up for PEX Live: Change Management and Culture Change for Business Transformation 2021.