3 Simple Keys for HR to Manage a Successful Org Change

As an HR professional, you are bound to get a request to manage an org change. Your business will need to scale up or down in some areas, change people’s roles, or build a new structure from scratch. These are strategic changes and this is your chance to establish HR as a strategic partner.

Before you get that request, prepare to manage a successful org change by remembering these 3 simple key concepts that we’ve learned from supporting merger integrations, reorganizations, and downsizing processes:

  1. Get your data in one place
    • If you have to open several systems and documents to understand your organization, you will drown in administrative tasks before you even start to make strategic decisions. Before an org change starts, discuss with your team how you can get all of the data you need into one place. Perhaps you already have a system that lets you work with different scenarios in the safety of a secure sandbox. If not, assess if an online tool that is quick to set up could meet your needs (for example, try a free account on our OrgWeaver software platform)
  2. Know who needs to be involved
    • Make a list of every stakeholder who will need to provide information or receive reports during the org change (Executives, Managers, HR, Recruiters, Employees, Unions, Shareholders, etc.). Org changes require a lot of communication, so it is important to identify ahead of time who will be in charge of gathering & sharing different types of information for different people on a regular schedule.
  3. Keep track of decisions
    • No matter how good an HR team’s intentions are during an org change, you will be required to answer difficult questions about how decisions were made. From the very beginning of an org change, keep consistent notes on who made decisions, at what time, and for what reasons. If you don’t have the capacity to track these decisions on your own, a software tool like OrgWeaver can automatically keep track of how decisions were made.

We’re taking our own advice here at BrightArch to “keep things simple”. We’ve simplified the name of our software to OrgWeaver (which everyone agrees is much easier to say than OrganizationWeaver). And we’re simplifying the way customers can pick up and use OrgWeaver to solve complex org change challenges. More to come in the coming months.