The Change Of People Management in HR Technology

Every transformation carries along with it a story. In the world of technology, change is the only constant thing. People Management changes come in various forms. Be it the small and medium scale organisations shifting towards automation or large scale organisations migrating their legacy systems to the cloud, and it’s all a part of the change.

The question that arises here is: Do these changes take place abruptly? The answer is: Of course not! People Management Change begins with a dire need or one big idea. Changes of any kind need to be adequately planned. Especially in the domain of technology, the smallest of change can bring about a lot of chaos. Hence the change in technology needs to be managed well.

While change of people management is indeed a challenging path towards the transformation of a business, it still needs to take place. The sheer fact that a lot of transformation projects encounter failure is not due to the change in technology. It is, in fact, the flawed change management processes carried out within an organisation that is responsible for these failures.

Let’s take the example of an organisation that is struggling with upgrading their HR Technology. The organisation, in this case, is not alienated to the fact that they need to support the growing workload without raising their cost margin. Since they see their business rivals transforming, they do understand that this change is the key to stay relevant in the business. Such an organisation is perceived to stall when it comes to the part of actually taking steps towards unlimited scalability, agility, and reduced costs.

What’s the reason behind this stall?

While the concept of cloud computing is indeed a transformational one, but it also requires a significant paradigm shift. You will be faced with the actual cost of IT and human resource savings when you begin to explore a consumption-based IT model. This can act as a red flag for the stakeholders who are quite stringent with their budgets or their jobs.

However, you can see the real bigger picture when these costs are exposed. The interesting thing here is that it is very often the things that provide the maximum business value are the ones that cost the least resources.

The fact of the matter is that humans by nature are not entirely open to change. The moment a certain change idea does not seem to suit the present mindset, we as humans tend to reject it forthright without any question. Moving forward on people management is indeed crucial for any business. The important part here is to get over this mental block on change as early as possible.

One of the ways to perceive and consider change is to consider the organisation the change model. This model was developed by Kurt Lewin in the late 1940s. It is popularly known as Unfreeze – Change – Refreeze. This process utilised the example of transforming the shape of a block of ice. The thing about this process is that it has relevance and holds true even in the present day scenario regarding the change.

Let’s analyse this process step by step.

Unfreeze: The first phase of any change entails convincing the organisation to acknowledge the fact that change is required. The traditional IT models need to be challenged, and this transformation towards digitalisation needs to be validated, explained, and proved to all the relevant stakeholders. User stories, application stories, and system owner stories are the keys towards change management in the cloud.

Change: It is only in a perfect world scenario that his journey from unfreeze to change is likely to be painless, quick, and clear. However, you need to understand the fact that just because change is important, it is not likely that people will instantly agree to it. For an organisation to transition from a physical infrastructure based IT model to a cloud-based IT model, the technology needs to be proved, predictable, and to be able to deliver as promised without fail.

Refreeze: Transformation to the cloud digitally is predictable, agile, and flexible. Once this transformation is complete, and the new way of work has been accepted, it is time to refreeze and allow these changes to sink in and become part of the day to day business.

Change people management in the cloud requires a different approach to the processes. If the right path is adopted, it will help to ensure a repeatable, predictable, and scalable migration with minimal disruption to the business.