In today's dynamic business environment, organisations need to keep changing through innovation in business models and operations.

When organisations resort to any of these change initiatives, employees' morale usually becomes the first casualty. They have a lot of concern regarding their future job status, possible displacement, new reporting structure, ability to cope with new product, process and IT solutions.

Every change initiative is fraught with multitude of challenges and requires meticulous planning for change. Business managers usually focus more on monetary and infrastructure aspects, whereas the intangible people's aspect is either ignored or considered in a cursory manner.

Some business concerns showed a knee- jerk reaction to external pressures generated by the global financial crisis. When the global economic crises started hurting industry in terms of shortfall in revenue generation and high cost of operation, the first thing organisations did was to lay off employees.

Overnight shedding off a layer of employees rocked the psychological bondage of residual staff and consequently the most wanted talent started getting depleted. Those who still remained 'gelled' to the organisation suffered heightened stress, loss of focus on the job, resulting in low performance at individual as well as organisational level.

By virtue of their spontaneous reaction and lack of proper change management strategy, these companies suffered serious dents in their market branding and ability to rehire talent. Right-sizing is just one aspect of change management and it is mainly focused on cost containment. What about other change initiatives, which are aimed at revenue generation like change in product, process, services, structure and operations?

As a concept, organisational change, management process has three phases. Phase one consists of unfreezing the status quo which comprises readiness assessment and conditioning of people's mindset, to build an appetite for change. This requires addressing staff concerns and giving a clear message that desired change is aimed at improved organisational performance, which will, in turn, benefit staff.

During any change initiative, it is natural for many in the staff to often greet change with frustration, incrementally accepting, experimenting, understanding and finally embracing the change.

In a risk-averse society like Pakistan, where life-time employability, traditional bread earner in the family and status quo mindset are quite common, expecting people to meet change with open arms is unrealistic.

Employees also look at the change from “what is in it for me” perspective. Some financial or non-financial incentive can entice people to show flexibility and be more inclined towards change. This can act as catalyst in entire change process.

The next phase of change management involves physical launching of change. That requires a consistent effort backed by full operational preparedness, using a system approach because an attempt to change a part of system may not bring desired results.

An ineffective post-care of the new system can also lead to quick evaporation of change. This refreezing stage requires proper feedback loop for candid upward communication and a full sensitivity to address the identified issues during execution.

A global study on various change management initiatives reveals that “less than 10 per cent strategies, effectively formulated are effectively executed.” That is probably because organisations are mostly obsessed with execution of change, without paying due cognisance to pre-post phases.

The bottom line in all change initiatives is to improve organisational performance based on individual performance. At employee level, the performance is the outcome of suitable combination of three major inputs. First is the knowledge and skills. Second is the motivation. Third is the provision of enabling environment, i.e. systems and tools required to do a job in a productive manner. The deficiency of knowledge or skills is a training area whereas deficiency of motivation and environment are “non training areas”.

At the organisational level, human resource unit (HR) takes care of training of employees; whereas there is no dedicated function to take responsibility for non-training areas. When organisations change, they do address non-training areas, but this is usually done in a piecemeal manner and training and non-training solutions are not properly aligned with each other. Thus the attainment of change objectives is put at risk.

The organisational development (OD) has assumed greater significance in the aftermath of a recent global study on performance issues, which disclosed that 85 per cent of performance problems stem from non-training areas.

The OD requires a holistic and integrated effort to “institutionalise change” that contains the negative fallout before, during and after the change process . That means planned change for integrating individuals, group and organisational-level variables for transformation of organisation-- a system approach for high performance work culture. The result is improvement in productivity, return on investment and employee satisfaction.