Company restructures, buyouts, or reorganization can happen to any business. If your company will encounter a drastic change in the company, it’s best to evaluate how your employees will fare with the reorganization. Thankfully, there are organizational readiness assessments you can administer that can mitigate any potential problems. Listed below are the crucial elements of every change readiness assessment.
Defining Organizational Readiness Assessment
Organizational readiness or change readiness assessment is a company-wide appraisal for employees that sets to identify whether the organization is prepared for a drastic change of direction. The assessment aims to test if the company has the resources to undertake a new project or management. The resulting data gathered from the assessment will then impact the scale of the company reorganization.
CEOs and business owners looking to change directions with the business, or if you’re interested in selling your business, need to prepare for the upcoming onslaught of employees’ commentaries. Hence, an organizational readiness assessment will train both the owner and the staff by accomplishing the following:
The assessment will help you address potential problems in the future. Analyzing any prospective failures in an upcoming project is vital for it saves your company of wasting resources and time by readying a solution in your standard operating procedure.
The assessment will help inform your staff of the upcoming change. Employees unaware of change can cause disruptions that cost the company time. Readiness assessments prevent this by allowing employees time to comprehend changes that will happen to the company. Furthermore, employees aware of upcoming project changes feel more value, increasing workplace productivity when company reorganization occurs.
A successful organizational readiness assessment will bode well for you and your employees. You’ll learn how your staff will take in the information and how they’ll perform once the restructuring occurs. A readiness assessment is a necessary precursor for a successful reorganization that also helps everyone involved.
Crucial Organizational Criteria to Evaluate
Conducting a readiness assessment will be ineffective you choose to evaluate the wrong employee attributes. Hence, we have written below the key components you need to focus on when appraising your company and staff.
Capacity of Change
Albeit quite obvious, employers often forget that everyone in their company constantly encounters a change in their workplace or personal lives. Hence, it’s your priority as the employer to prevent them from getting burnout from company restructure.
Since your employees are sensitive to change, consider implementing leadership programs, team-building exercises, or any activities that test their capacity for change while improving their receptiveness in potential project failures.
Employee Unity
Also known as group culture, employee unity aims to evaluate your staff’s values, traits, and behavior as a group. For example, some groups tend to work together and excel in teamwork, while others prefer individualism rather than collaboration. As the employer, you have to cater to your company’s restructures along with the group culture. Take note of your employee’s vision of the company, assumptions, norms, beliefs, and leadership traits. Once you have gathered the data, you can now predict how the group will react to the organization’s upcoming change and plan accordingly to mitigate opposing reactions.
Willingness to Change
Try as you might, some employees may try to renounce upcoming changes in the company. However, the main reason why most resist change is due to the lack of awareness. Enlightening your staff about the company’s driving factors restructure helps them understand the reason for the change, thus increasing their readiness to accept the change. The crucial factor you need to appraise when checking for your staff’s willingness to change is its awareness regarding the company restructure. Start by organizing meetings that discuss upcoming projects, potential problems, and planned solutions.
Leadership Style
Every manager manages their staff differently. Some prefer a hands-on approach, while others like to dictate orders and expectations. Whatever the case may be, the manager can influence your team the most. Hence, when conducting change readiness assessment, appraise every supervisor’s leadership style. After all, once a manager objects to your company reorganization, your employees might blindly follow suit. That’s why it’s best to inform managers first before disseminating the information to the rest of the staff. Furthermore, convince key vocal managers first and try to make them support the change. Once the managers are convinced, your employee’s willingness to change will go up accordingly.
Final Remarks: Data Analysis
After you have evaluated your employees, it’s time to gather all the data and start analyzing it. Remember, the data should be concluded by both qualitative and quantitative methods to get a complete representation of your company. Qualitative data can be collected by crucial stakeholder interviews, while quantitative data comes from change readiness assessment. Take note; you should gather data from all business functions.
Finally, once you have the data on hand, it’s time to analyze and outline recommendations with the company and employee in mind. An organizational readiness assessment can be the thin line between a successful reorganization and a failing one. Company change is complicated, but preparing for one isn’t.
