Developing a change management plan for 2023-2024… What does the future hold?

If there’s anything that we’ve learned from the past few years, it’s that change is inevitable. Whether pandemics, supply chain disruptions, or rapidly fluctuating inflation, businesses in the modern day and age need to be highly agile in the face of potential disruptions. Developing a comprehensive change management plan for a range of possibilities is absolutely key to weathering those storms. 

Keeping an eye out for environmental disruptions

It’s become obvious that it’s very difficult to accurately predict what the future might hold. As a result, it’s become more important than ever to constantly keep an eye out for changes, whether economic, political, or technological. Noting these changes early on and considering how they might affect your business can provide you with the extra time you need to adequately prepare. 

Communication

One of the keys to a successful change management plan is communication. Early on, you need to draft a clear, effective communication plan, one that ensures transparency throughout the process while keeping all necessary stakeholders in the loop. Change can be an unsettling process for a lot of people connected to your organisation; the clearer you are at communicating what’s going on, the fewer opportunities there will be for anxiety to arise.

Work with a professional provider

One of the problems when it comes to dealing with change internally is that you lack perspective. In many cases, it can be highly beneficial to have an external change management provider such as Move Plan Group come in and help you create a plan. These kinds of service providers have extensive experience when it comes to helping businesses through similar predicaments, and will be able to see issues that you’d struggle to predict internally.

Widespread engagement

As mentioned above, communication is one of the keys to creating a successful change management plan. That doesn’t just mean telling people what decisions you’ve made after they’ve been made – it means engaging with as many people as possible, at all levels of the organisation. 

For a process of change to be effective, it needs to consider as many internal perspectives as possible. While it will obviously be upper management that makes those final decisions, in 2023 with the highly volatile labour market, most organisations simply can’t afford to alienate their employees. 

Training

A change management plan will often consist of changing the roles and responsibilities of multiple employees in an organisation. While they’ll obviously need to rise to the challenge, they can’t be expected to do so without any assistance. You’ll likely need to provide extensive training, to ensure that everyone is fully capable of operating in their new capacities. As the adage goes – failure to prepare is preparing to fail. 

Developing a change management plan will typically include a wide range of other details besides those mentioned above. By working with a change management professional, you can ensure that you take into consideration as many variables as possible. Remember, change isn’t something that you ‘achieve’ or ‘finish’ – it’s an ongoing process that will allow your business to adapt to the times.