Suppose the key decision makers in your organization all agree that change is necessary. But how will individual employees respond? Where might you find resistance to change and how can you minimize it? There are many barriers to organizational change. A McKinsey* study found that a staggering 70% of all change initiatives fail to meet organizational objectives. And of the factors contributing to change failure, a surprising 33% was due to management not supporting the change, and another 39% was due to employee resistance to change.

Don’t let your project get sabotaged by barriers to change. Assessing the impact of an upcoming organizational change provides critical insight into potential barriers. A structured, thorough impact assessment enables you to anticipate challenges to change and create strategies to eliminate, manage or avoid them altogether.

Here is a 5-point approach to assessing and managing the impact of organizational change:

1. Culture Assessment: evaluates an organization’s culture from many angles such as engagement, values, tenure on the job, language, multicultural values, organization structure, leadership, technology comfort levels and communication preferences.
2. Readiness Assessment: assesses an organization’s historical reaction to change,
   how it likes change served up, as well as its readiness for this particular change.
3. High Level Impact Assessment: explores how senior leadership sees the impacts
   of the change on the people involved.
4. Process Workshops: explore participant (usually project team members, subject matter
   experts and system vendors) thoughts around the impact of new processes, including the pain points and the wins.
5. Change Impact Workshops: walk employees directly impacted by the change through
   the new processes, systems and transactions, then capture their ideas about how the change impacts their role and what they need to be successful.

A comprehensive impact assessment is at the heart of any great change management plan. Assessing the impact of an upcoming organizational change provides critical insight into potential barriers and helps you create strategies to prevent, eliminate or manage them.

As a leader in helping organizations plan, manage and implement change, HR Transformations can take you through these 5 steps to assessing and managing the impact of organizational change. And when the change is accomplished, we can help you with the all-important Post-Change Assessment to ensure that you have achieved your expected results. Using interviews, focus groups and materials review, we can help you measure your project’s success. Most importantly, our assessment process will reveal any further actions you may still need to take in order to sustain the change.

Implementing change like a top performing company is easier than you think.

See how a travel industry leader used a customized change management plan on a technology project to transform customer service. Download the Business Case: A Customized Change Management Plan Delivers Results Beyond Expectation.

*Source: Scott Keller & Colin Price, Beyond Performance 2011, McKinsey