Change Management is the most integral part of Business Transformation. Business situation rapidly changes due to mergers, acquisitions, competition, restructuring, resizing, newer technology, newer market, innovation, etc. This leads organizations to fundamentally change the way it operates its business. Billions of dollars are spent each year in this process.
The biggest impact of change management is on the employees. While an organization spends millions of dollars to implement change management, in return it obviously expects reasonable benefits from this investment. The success of this huge project primary depends on employees having the right attitudes and more importantly the right skills to adapt to the change. A positive environment can only be created when the employees are equipped with the right training. Since there are millions of dollars that are spent on each business transformation project, e-Learning obviously become key to its success.
Top companies went through (while many of them are still going through) business transformation that completely changed the way it does business. IBM changed its branding from a hardware company to a consulting company, Apple from a computer manufacturer to phone/tablets/music, Nokia moving from consumer electronics (even rubber boots) to telecommunication, Procter & Gamble hopping from soaps to healthcare. One can also see a similar impact when fortune giants get merged. Imagine the kind change management impact due to the mergers of Delta/Northwest, Xerox/ACS, Xsrate/Glencore, US Airways/AA and so on and so forth. These are just a few examples to show that successful transformation is possible if employees are re-trained effectively.
Not every organizational change is successful every time. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if there are more failure stories than success stories, though I don’t have any data right now to support it. One of the key causes of the failure is when the leadership of an organization tries to sell the idea of change management to its employees rather than being honest with them. In my opinion “Selling Change” to employees is a myopic strategy. While your employees may nod their heads in agreement but in reality they know it very well that they are being taken for a ride. The consequences of such an approach will be low morale, lack of acceptance and understanding of new processes, poor skills (since employees wouldn't know what training they need) and of courses ineffective transition. This kind of business transformation is bound to fail.
Organizational change can be unsettling for the employees and therefore the leadership should encourage the managers to communicate the change by meeting face to face with the employees. This matters a lot especially when it comes to handling the sensitive side of organizational change management. Face to face helps managers put employees at ease effectively unlike sending the same message(s) through email or written notices. Having said that, it can be challenging as well as time consuming to only rely on face to face meetings with employees. E-Learning supported by rich media technology can play an important role in this situation. Short showreels, animations, short informational interactive content, videos and may be some short engaging fun games can be used here. All or some of these approaches should solely focus on delivering positive (and honest) messages primarily about how the employees are better now than ever before with the new organizational change.
So far it was about pre-organizational change. Now let’s talk about post-organizational change where e-Learning plays a far bigger role. This is where the rubber meets the road. E-Learning will play a significant role in preparing the employees for the post change environment. The way an organization will operate its business will change means that the employees too will have to change their normal way of working. This means they need to be re-trained in an effective manner so that they adapt themselves to the change environment. This does not necessarily mean technical content only though it will have a lion’s share. Soft skill training such as “Emotional Intelligence” which is a crucial part of change management will also need utmost attention. Lot of new learning content will be developed as well as revised/updated. That holds good for even those situations where two organizations of the same industry gets merged. Take for example any recent merger of two Airlines. This merger may lead to significant amount of retraining employees as both airlines could on different LMSs and the content residing on those LMSs may have been authored using different tools on different platforms. Same course let’s say on “cargo safety”, AA might have developed it in Flash while US Airways may have used Lectora. Now with the merger, they may want a uniform experience that may even make them think about moving their content to HTML5 now to include smart devices too. For organizations of such sizes, transiting from one LMS to another and giving uniformity to the content is a huge task which obviously means lot of business opportunities for E-learning content development companies.
The bottom-line is that start planning early. Be 100% sure that the new or updated content closely aligns with the new business objectives. And finally most importantly when you “Sell” the change management to your employees, sell it honestly and sincerely so that you get a genuine “buy-in” from them and not just a “nod” for the sake of it. A genuine “buy in” from employees will help that organization understand what its employee’s needs are and how are they going to address it……..and of course how crucial learning is for the success of an organization.
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