If any of these elements are missing, change initiatives have an increased likelihood of sputtering out or leading to suboptimal outcomes. For example, without leadership and a shared vision, employees may not even fully know or understand the changes they need to make, which can result in confusion. A KM change initiative without any incentives can make change more difficult by driving increased employee resistance. These elements are all necessary and mutually reinforcing.
Grappling with the complexity of change not only means accounting for all of these key elements, but also understanding which areas are naturally more challenging for your organization or in need of added investments. If you have skills gaps that you need to close to help drive adoption of a new tool, you might need to focus more time and resources on skills than on other elements of change. More broadly, thinking through how you would approach each of these areas will help you make the best use of your time and resources as you design, plan, implement, and evolve your change.
Craft change management with your culture in mind
The science of change management tells us that KM should focus on specific practices to effectively manage change. For example, we found that training employees on the change and how to make the transition is the top method of employee engagement. However, what it means to train employees—and the importance of training relative to other engagement methods, such as gathering employee feedback—will vary from one organization to another.
Practicing the art of change management means accounting for organizational culture, which refers to the ingrained social norms and beliefs of an organization. It is comprised of values, belief systems, leadership styles, collective unspoken assumptions, stories, and rituals, as well as an organization’s character and orientation.
There are different types of organizational culture, and each type has different implications for how KM teams can most effectively carry out change management. For example, if you’re working within a highly formalized work environment that is held together by top-down leadership structures, you are likely part of what we call a hierarchy culture.
However, your organization might be more of an environment where leaders are perceived as mentors, coworkers think of each other as family, and the organization is held together by values such as loyalty and tradition. The emphasis in these clan cultures is on teamwork, open communications, participation, and consensus.
Resistance to change is common when KM teams work to drive change in ways that go against an established organizational culture. For example, employees in a clan culture, long used to collaboration and consensus-based decision making, may chafe at a new regime of rules, policies, and governance aimed at improving content management. Meanwhile, employees in a hierarchy culture could be resistant to change that requires deeper collaboration if they are used to using formal, structured approaches handed from the top down.
Top Eight Change Management Measurements