What does the changing world mean for your business?

By Tom Marsicano, CEO of 'and Change'

Tom is a Founder and Director of and Change in South Africa. He is also the founding member of the Association of Change Management Professionals (Africa) and has served as a Director on the Board of ACMP Global.

We’ve likely reached the point where it’s okay to speak of a post-pandemic world. Many people, organisations, and even countries have accepted that COVID-19 is another disease we will have to bear and that it is fundamentally changing our ways of working. Flexible working arrangements, implementation of new technologies, and remote working are all becoming commonplace, as many recent studies have shown. All of these require significant organisational change. 

and Change recently participated in research exploring this changing world of work, and fascinating insights are already starting to emerge. Prosci, change management experts who developed the change management methodology that we follow, are currently updating their study on the contributors to “change success” and how the pandemic has altered them. 

While the full research report is scheduled for release early next year, some key findings have been released, such as a whopping 70% of the over 1000 global respondents confirming that how change is managed has changed – either moderately or significantly.

The research focuses on several contributors to change management in transformed organisations following the advent of the pandemic, such as: 

• How employees contribute and work;
• How to purposefully overcome obstacles to build a more agile environment to direct people’s energy and innovation;
• How to develop new tactics for mobilising change agents in the hybrid work environment;
• How to deploy adjusted work patterns;

Over the past 25 years, research has shown that the most potent contributor to success is active and visible sponsorship –the leaders or leadership bodies that oversee and take ownership of a given organisational change. This factor goes beyond budget approval and mandating change; it’s about executives remaining visible and actively supporting change in their everyday behaviour and actions. Recently, this has changed – to a point – but the changes vary across different industries, types of change, and organisational cultures. 

As work patterns shifted to a more hybrid approach, executives have had to create more opportunities to share and receive feedback on why the changes are happening and the need for their people to change. 

How communications happen has also had to change. In some cases, there has had to be far more focus on strengthening feedback mechanisms and increasing repetition to emphasise the message of change. More so than before, people leaders need to articulate the sense of the change and help their people connect with how the change affects them personally. The Prosci research showed that communications specialists who operate within project teams or impacted operational areas expressed an increased call on them to better structure communications so that recipients more easily fit messages into the “bigger picture”. 

Engagement emerged as the area of change for both people leaders and employees, with more change for employees than for leaders. Our own experience as a change management consultancy showed that employees expressed a greater need for balance between the attention given to them as contributors and to them in the specifics of their work. 

As their lives have become more complex, they need coaching and guidance on balancing work and life. In a sense, increased autonomy to determine work hours introduced the need for better decision-making and planning to ensure they continue to perform well at work. People leaders who responded more to these emerging needs achieved more employee engagement and could therefore ask them to change quicker and more radically when circumstances demanded.

In the context of remote working, adaptations arose from the need to give employees a sense of control and stability in the workplace. Tactics included increasing the variety of communication channels and media and increasing the frequency of feedback on performance and recognition. Virtual training boomed during the pandemic and has remained a favourite route even if there is now the option to revert to in-person learning. Personal coaching is now also more in demand which puts pressure on people managers to find more time to interact and better ways of measuring and managing output.

These adaptations are reflected in recent research that showed that 63% of South African professionals say their productivity increased while working from home, with 31% sharing that their productivity stayed the same even after transitioning into the remote work set-up. 

Ultimately, we are seeing that the pandemic has taught us all how to become more agile in the face of global change. Adaptations that promoted agility included pivoting to incremental, iterative change. This approach works better when there is more freedom to fail on the road to success for the overall change. Learning has been divided into smaller segments, allowing people to absorb new skills quickly and turn them into abilities sooner. 

While this agility can sometimes give a feeling of chaos – or even lead to change fatigue – leaders need to provide the anchor of stability, embodying a sense of calm and confidence in the team’s ability to thrive in a new way of working. 

It’s a brave, exciting time for change managers, with the prospect of a step shift in how change is led. It calls for intentional and empathetic engagement that remains output focused but casts off the shackles of old management thinking and work habits.

How are you managing change? Share your story in Top HR Leaders