The ability to change is a necessary skill for any organization, large or small. To meet customers’ evolving expectations and keep up with your competitors, successfully implementing change within your organization is a superpower.

At the project level, you might be considering a change to enhance your systems, processes, or anything else that impacts how team members do their jobs, i.e., contribute to the completion of projects.

Consequently, you want to know how to do this effectively so the change sticks. After all, 70% of company changes don’t stay long-term. The solution to this problem is change management.

What is change management?

Change management is the practice of facilitating change or transformation within an organization, implementing strategies and frameworks to ensure the workforce’s successful adoption of the change.

Change management is important because there is a human tendency to resist change. This makes change adoption – and sustaining – difficult to accomplish, especially if the change is perceived as difficult and requiring a significant effort. It’s, therefore, essential to use change strategy principles to pull off a project-level change.

7 Change Management Principles for Success

As we’ve established, change is difficult to accomplish, especially at the project level, when adopting a new way of governing or completing work within projects.

Here are some principles to embody when implementing change to maximize your chances of success.

1. Clarity
   People are far less motivated to make a change if they’re confused about what something is and what they’re meant to be doing. A lack of clarity boosts the perception of difficulty and complexity associated with a change, making workers less enthusiastic about adopting it. Lack of clarity also suggests that those proposing the change don’t fully understand it. If workers don’t have confidence in your ability to pull a change off, they won’t strain themselves to make it happen. This makes clarity and transparency crucial to encourage change adoption.
2. Support employees
   Your workforce will be more likely to adopt a change if they feel like they can. If they don’t understand how to carry out a new process or adopt a new system, then they won’t be able to make the change. So, take the time to provide instruction, learning tools, and support to help all relevant team members to get to grips with a change. The easier they find the process, the more likely they will adopt and stick with the change.
3. Expect resistance and have a plan
   Almost always, change is met with resistance. This is because the status quo feels comfortable, while change requires inertia. In other words, effort. This means that team members are likely to challenge the change. For every question about why the change is necessary, why they should make the change, and how, you should have a clear, confident answer to meet their challenge, and so should all relevant managers. If team members don’t think you’re resolved – and that you have a clear vision for the change – they’ll be less likely to put the effort in to adopt it. If adoption is slow, consider other means of solving resistance. Perhaps give a deadline by when all employees should adopt a change and/or give them the support and tools to make it easier.
4. Communicate effectively
   Effective communication is instrumental in successfully implementing a change. Communication is crucial if you want all the relevant individuals to know what the change is, why it’s needed, how they should adopt it, and where to go to get support. Ensure all managers in the affected department understand the change from the macro level to the finer details. This means that, when approached by workforce members, they can confidently answer any questions and nullify any doubts about the change.It’s good practice to contact all affected employees directly through their preferred communication channels, such as team meetings, collaborative work platforms, emails, and/or social networking channels. Connecting with employees about the change will make them more likely to come on board.
5. Highlight the benefits
   Most people are averse to putting in more effort at work – which is crucial to change – unless they can see what’s in it for them. So, it’s your job to show them why they should make the effort. Otherwise, highlight what the change can do for them. This could be making their workflows easier, improving performance (and, by extension, earning potential), or any other benefit the change provides.
6. Prioritize achieving stakeholder buy-in
   The best way to implement a change that sticks is to get all the changemakers – a.k.a. the managers and workers that the change affects – on board. There are a couple of ways you can encourage this. A good one is to make workers feel like catalysts of change rather than people to whom change occurs. Consider inviting them to discussions about the change and asking for their input/feedback about how they feel the change is going. Of course, make sure that you’re highlighting the benefits of the change aka the “what’s in it for them” for everyone from the top-level management to entry-level colleagues to achieve this buy-in.
7. Don’t overwhelm your workforce
   When making a big change – or several changes – be careful not to overwhelm your workforce into unnecessary burnout. By breaking a desired change down into stages, workers can focus on taking small, manageable steps towards a greater change rather than being overwhelmed by the intimidating task of making a huge change (or multiple changes) at once. These “small wins” can help workers build positive associations with the change, rather than it being a source of stress and overwhelm.

Top 4 Change Management Frameworks to Implement Change

1.  Lewin’s Change Management Model
   This change model comprises of three stages: unfreeze, change, and refreeze. The ‘unfreeze’ stage involves analyzing the current method of doing things to figure out the changes that need to be made. It’s also a good practice to share with employees the results of the unfreeze so that they can understand why the change needs to be made, too. The next step is implementing the desired changes, providing the support employees need to make the change and make it stick. In the Lewin model, this is typically done over an extended period to account for overcoming employee resistance and giving them the right tools and training to help them accomplish the change. The ‘refreeze’ stage ensures that the change sticks and that the workforce doesn’t fall back into the old way of doing things. It involves obtaining regular employee feedback about the change and working to smooth out any pain points that might discourage change adoption.

2. Kotter’s Change Management Theory
   Kotter’s model has 8 steps to guide the successful implementation of organizational change.

1. 1. Create urgency – to motivate employees to make the change. Communicate why the change is important and why it’s important to act now.

1. 2. Build a change team – nominate those within your workforce to be key drivers of the change, to adopt the change themselves, and to encourage and support others to do the same, giving them the tools, they need to do so.

1. 3. Define your vision – for anyone else in the company to understand the change you intend to make, how it’ll be made, and what the company will look like after the change, you need to make sure you’re 100% clear on this yourself first.

1. 4. Communicate with stakeholders – sharing your vision with team members, and any employee whom the change affects is important to get them on board with the change.

1. 5. Identify and remove pain points – the more effort and difficulty there is to go from the status quo to make a change, the less likely the change will successfully be adopted. Identify barriers and obstacles your team might face during change adoption to remove them before they have time to discourage your workforce.

1. 6. Break the change into steps – the Kotter model focuses on achieving short-term wins/goals that, over a period, will allow your workforce to accomplish the complete change.

1. 7. Sustain momentum – never slack in your effort to bring the change about. For a change to be adopted and sustained, your workforce needs to know that you’re serious about making it for good, or they won’t bother. If leadership loses momentum toward a change, your team will, too.
   8. Maintain the change – too many companies implement a change only to backslide to the original way of doing things. Schedule regular check-ins and implement strategies to make sure this doesn’t happen.

3. McKinsey 7-S Model
   Created by McKinsey, the 7-S model doesn’t break change down into a sequence of steps to follow from beginning to end. Rather, it outlines the seven components to focus on when implementing a change.
   
   These are:
   
   
   • Strategy
   • Company structure
   • Processes and systems (used to complete projects)
   • Company culture and values
   • Working style
   • Stakeholders, a.k.a. those impacted by the change.
   • Workers’ skills
     
     

   When making a companywide change, McKinsey states that all these things need to be considered, as well as how changes in one area will impact the other components.

   Whenever a change is made, companies need to make sure that ‘hard’ elements like company strategy, structure, and processes align with their values, complement staff working styles, and benefit employees.

   Suppose there’s a gap between workers’ skills and your vision for the company and its components. In that case, the 7-S model encourages you to develop employees and support them to move towards the vision for the company.
   By keeping an eye on these key components of your company, you can identify any misaligned and rectify them to ensure your company is in harmony.

4. Nudge theory Nudge theory eschews the traditional top-down change management model, in which leadership issues employee orders to make a change.

   Instead, nudge theory involves devising a strategy with the aim of nudging workers towards making the desired change
   themselves. You might recommend a change to them and highlight its benefits to your employees and team members but never command the change.

    To do this, nudge theory says that you should: 

   • Define the changes you want – this makes creating a plan to nudge team members towards a change easier.
   • Consider employees’ perspective.
   • Present options to workers with the benefits and drawbacks of each, especially highlighting the benefits of the change you desire.
   • Present as a choice, not a command.
   • Take onboard employee feedback.
   • Limit options and make desired change easy to accomplish.
   • Make the change stick by breaking it down into small steps. This gives employees the opportunity to achieve short-term wins regularly to encourage them to keep working towards the change.

By adopting these key change management principles and using the change framework best suited to your company and its goals, you can make your desired changes at the project level to enhance your project management processes.