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When people mention change in an organisation, my thoughts automatically turn to ones of restructure, redundancies, re-grading and how we  in HR are going to support colleagues affected by it. I never think to apply the supporting change principles and models to smaller more local changes such as what information we collect or changing from a paper diary to electronic one.

In my place of work my colleagues and I were faced with a ‘smaller’ change that was leading to conflict and wasting a lot of time in the office going round and round in circles debating the change. What was this change I hear you ask? Well, I’ll tell you;

I work in an office where we advise students on welfare issues. When they arrive we ask them to complete a form collecting personal information such as date of birth, gender, whether they have a disability etc. We then use this information to identify particular groups who use our services and whether we need to aim our services at a particular group of students depending on the student demographic and trends in advice.

The change in question was one being introduced by a new manager who wanted to expand the information we collected and include, amongst other things, a question on what type of disability a student had i.e. is it physical or mental. Whilst the manager had a background in advice, it was not in the area in which we specialise and as such my colleagues and I could not see the merit in asking such a personal and at times awkward question. Whilst we continuously question the motive behind this, we were not getting a satisfactory answer and this was inhibiting any progression with the proposed change on the form.

After spending the day discussing Supporting Change in Organisations on the DPG programme Certificate in Human Resources Practice, I spent the coach journey back home thinking over what I had learned and whether it would be possible to apply any of the change models to this situation. My conclusions were nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The next day we had a team meeting and the question came back up. We again raised our objections to the inclusion of the question and the meeting started going around in circles so I decided to use the methods we discussed the previous day to try and resolve this once and for all

I took control of the situation and keeping Lewin's Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze model as my guidance, asked:

• Why did she want to make this change?
• Did we need information to influence government, NUS or another external policy?
• Did we need the information for management?
• Did we need funding from the University to ensure we were meeting the Student Unions vision and values?

Once we established that it was to support the vision and values of the organisation, I steered the conversation to look at if we were already getting this information.

Through this conversation we agreed that the information we had was not completely accurate as we only got the information when a student physically came in to the campus. We agreed that we would look at ways to get it over the phone and via emails as well.

Once we had agreed how we were going to do this we agreed to trial the new methods of collecting data for 4 months. After each month we would run a report to see how much information we had collected and compare it to the same period as last year as an indicator of how successful we were being. Then at the end of the 4 months we would review the process, see if questions, processes etc needed tweaking!

Result:

Everyone knew and understood why the change was necessary and:

• Knew what the end objective was
• Knew how we were going to achieve it
• Knew how we were going to measure this
• Knew their role and how they could support this change

Everyone has been involved and more importantly everyone was happier and morale amongst the team has improved.

So the moral of the story is….

No matter how big or small a change might seem, it can have a big impact on individuals, teams and across an organisation if not managed well.

All change needs to be supported and don’t be afraid to apply what you know!