Implementing Change: Delivering New Employee Models
It’s very rare for anyone to work in a vacuum anymore. The age of looking down from the ivory tower is gone – teamwork and collaboration are the names of the game. This applies anywhere from the smallest teams to on the level of corporations – you can’t expect to thrive if your workforce stagnates. Whether it’s contracting outside help or adding additional members, you need to update constantly if you want to be the cream of the crop.
That being said, any kind of improvement to your workforce is, by definition, a change. Thus, change management should be used when approaching this concept and engaging in it.
Access To Evolving Skills
In the age of technology, skills are constantly evolving and changing when new software releases come into play, or new features become available. Even jobs that you might think of as wholly divorced from higher technology, such as farming or mining, can take advantage of the internet for weather predictions, figuring out what conditions are taking place in the upcoming days and the precautions they’ll need to implement.
You can’t train somebody on a piece of software that doesn’t yet exist. Furthermore, existing skills might not be considered crucial to the field, so your employees might ignore them. It’s vital that you keep an eye on new releases, features, etc., of the technology you use to keep your team up to date. What’s initially a quirk might turn into a necessity after all, and change management is needed to decide where to draw the line.
Take, for example, mechanical checkouts vs. barcode scanning ones. Initially, they might have seemed like a fad to some – why bother going to all the trouble of implementing them if a well-trained cashier can use a mechanical one just as fast? Looking at the big picture now, we know that they’re essential for any modern store, and any organization that doesn’t implement them will fall behind.
Collaboration
As mentioned previously, working together is key in today’s day and age. However, a lot of people have trouble with this concept, preferring to work alone and on their own little section of your organization. This isn’t always feasible, especially when organizations collaborate with others.
The issue comes to light when you consider that everything is interconnected. Take the example of software development – you can write a piece of code that perfectly follows your own organization’s standards. Still, if you’re working with another organization, it needs to fit theirs too. Fail to communicate, to collaborate successfully, and you’ll probably end up with code that’s not worth the pixels it’s written with.
Change management is key to collaboration for many reasons, the foremost one being that collaboration takes different approaches each time. You might be the project lead on one occasion and take a back seat on another. You’ve successfully reduced confusion and possible misunderstandings by keeping your team up to date and knowing exactly what is going on.
Building The Talent Pool
Of course, not all of your work can be done inside your organization. No matter how big you are, there’s always something that will crop up that you don’t have an expert in or want a second opinion on. A talent pool is a list of outside talent you have previously worked with and can potentially contact to join you on a temporary or permanent basis.
Change management applies here just as much as in any other place in your organization. Adding new people into an existing workflow is disruptive, especially if your team members have to change how they do things to account for the new factor. There’s an entire industry based around employee onboarding, but very few seem to consider the existing ones too.