8 Best Practices for Managing Change in the Workplace
Gregg DavisUpdated 10 min read
Every organizational change, such as using new employee lifecycle management software or upgrading infrastructure, can impact workflows.
If people don’t understand or embrace changes, projects stall and productivity drops. That’s why you need a clear and people-focused approach to change.
In this article, we’ll share eight best practices to help you lead change with more confidence and better results. This is about the people side of change: getting teams to understand, accept and adopt something new. If you’re looking for how to control changes to IT systems (change requests, approvals and rollback plans), see our guide to building an IT change management process.
What Is Workplace or Organizational Change?
Workplace changes occur when your organization makes a significant transformation to how it operates. This could be as simple as introducing new processes or as complex as switching systems and restructuring teams.
For your IT department, it often means changes to workflows, IT management tools, or data management. These modifications might seem technical, but they affect people first.
Failing to manage change effectively can lead to confusion, frustration, and delays.
That's why it's important to follow a solid change management strategy. This helps your staff adapt to an organizational transformation faster and keep your business moving forward.
Organizational Change Management vs. IT Change Management
The two terms sound alike but answer different questions. Organizational change management asks how people move from the old way of working to the new one: who needs to know, what they need to learn, and what will make them resist. IT change management asks whether a specific change to a system is safe to make: how risky it is, who approves it, and how to roll it back if it fails.
A large project usually needs both. Replacing your HR system, for example, involves dozens of controlled changes to integrations and data, and it also asks every manager and employee to work differently. This article covers the second part.
Types of Workplace Changes
Here are the common types of organizational changes:
- Technological change: This involves acquiring new technologies, such as communication platforms, automated onboarding software, HR systems, and license management tools. Before using these new tools, you need to provide technical training, system testing, and user support to maintain business continuity.
- Structural change: It happens when reporting lines or team roles shift. For example, a certain department merges with another, or business leaders restructure the IT function entirely.
- Process change: This refers to any update in your current business processes. Common examples include adopting an onboarding checklist or changing ticket routing.
- Cultural change: It involves shifts to a company’s culture, such as values, attitudes, or accepted behaviors. Moving toward remote work or transparency affects how teams share, respond, and engage.
- People-centric change: Leadership transitions, promotions, or employee departures can impact team structures. It can also affect morale and trust, especially when long-time employees leave or roles evolve.
- Strategic change: This focuses on growth or efficiency that changes the status quo of your company. For example, cloud-first business strategies or vendor transitions often require full IT support, from planning to rollout.
8 Best Practices to Effectively Manage Change in the Workplace
Below are some expert tips you can follow for an effective change management process:
1. Understand the Change Management Process
Before implementing changes in your business, you should understand the entire change process.
This means knowing the different stages involved, such as planning, communication, implementation, and follow-through.
Start by breaking them down into phases: what’s changing, who’s involved, what systems are affected, and how it impacts users.
Never assume your team gets it immediately. Map the changes using visual project timelines, checklists, and status updates.
When you understand the entire process, you avoid surprises and mistakes. That’s especially important during transformational change, when entire systems or strategies shift.
It also supports professional development by giving people structure, clarity, and a chance to contribute at every stage.
2. Identify the Drivers of Change
Now that you understand the process, you need to ask yourself what’s driving significant change in your current workflows.
Generally speaking, change doesn’t happen without a reason. It could be external (such as new cybersecurity compliance rules) or internal (like a push to improve response times or reduce costs).
For IT teams, drivers of change often include tool upgrades, security demands, or shifts in how users access systems.
Maybe you're moving on-premises systems to the cloud. That single change can impact workflows, access controls, support tickets, and even training needs.
Once you identify the driver of change, you can clearly explain the “why” to your team. Make sure your employees understand organizational transformations to build trust and avoid potential resistance.
3. Develop a Clear Plan
If you want to ensure a successful change within your company, you need to create a clear plan.
Start by setting your objectives. What does success look like?
Next, break the work into stages and key milestones. Consider using project management tools to stay on track. Then, assign tasks to team leaders, list required resources, and block time for testing and feedback.
Include backup steps and specific actions in case something fails. You should also plan for training, user adoption, and support. The more detailed your plan, the more confident your team will feel.
Once everyone sees what’s coming and what’s expected of them, the proposed change sticks. You significantly reduce confusion, limit downtime, and maintain business continuity.
4. Involve Key Stakeholders Early
Getting buy-in early makes everything easier. Don’t wait until rollout to involve the people your workplace change will affect.
Engage stakeholders as soon as the idea takes shape. These may include end users, department managers, security teams, vendors, and HR teams.
Schedule regular meetings, share updates, and ask for feedback during each phase. Make sure communication goes both ways.
Early involvement shows respect, builds trust, and helps you spot problems before they grow. It also gives your team a voice, which can strengthen your organization’s culture over time.
5. Communicate Consistently
Effective communication is everything when it comes to change management. You can have the best tools and plans, but if your team doesn’t know what’s happening or why, the change fails.
Don’t just send one email and expect your team to accept the change. Use multiple channels (Slack, meetings, dashboards, or internal systems) to keep everyone in the loop.
You should also share updates before, during, and after each stage. Be clear and skip the jargon.
Focus on how the change affects each team. Let people ask questions, and answer them honestly. Even when you don’t have all the answers, say so.
People want to know that their work matters and that their time is respected. Clear and consistent communication helps you prove that.
6. Provide Hands-On Training and Support
Training is where your change becomes real. It’s not enough to talk about new tools or processes. You need to show your team how to use them.
This step connects directly to communication. You’ve told them what’s coming, and now you need to help them do it.
You can set up live demos, provide one-on-one walkthroughs, or share an online course for more complex systems.
During technological changes, work closely with vendors to train your team on every feature. The goal is to make sure your staff can apply what they’ve learned on the job.
Training helps your team remain competitive. The faster they adapt, the faster they contribute to real results.
Be patient, give space to ask questions, and provide cheat sheets or videos they can revisit.
7. Assess Risks and Address Concerns
Every change comes with risks, such as missed deadlines, system downtime, or user resistance. If you ignore them, they grow and affect current workflows.
That’s why you need to recognize potential problems early and prepare for them. Don’t just focus on the complexity of new technologies. Look at how people might react.
Use active listening during meetings and check-ins to hear concerns before they turn into bigger issues.
When people feel heard and supported, they’re more likely to embrace change and help others adapt. This turns a top-down directive into a team-driven effort.
8. Monitor and Adjust Change Initiatives
Your work isn’t done once the change goes live. You need to track how it performs over time to achieve long-lasting results.
Start by setting measurable goals, such as system uptime, ticket volume, adoption rates, or user feedback. Track them weekly.
Next, use surveys, direct feedback, and analytics to understand what’s working. Meet with key stakeholders to review results.
Then, tweak your approach as needed. For example, if users struggle with a tool or process, revisit the training or documentation. If one team adopts the change much more slowly than the others, talk to its manager and find out what’s getting in the way.
This approach helps your team feel more confident and ready to face organizational changes.
When Organizational Change Reaches the Directory
Structural and people-centric changes don’t stay on the org chart. Every one of them ends up in your directory, and that’s where they most often go wrong.
A restructure is a mass mover event. When two departments merge or a new layer of management is added, hundreds of employees may need a new department, a new manager, new group memberships and new access, all on the same day. If those updates are made by hand, the org chart in Active Directory drifts from reality, approval workflows route to the wrong managers, and people keep access that belonged to their old role. Our guide to automating employee lifecycle updates to AD explains how to let the HR system drive those changes instead.
A reduction in force is a mass leaver event, and the timing matters even more. Access has to end when the employment does, for every affected person, without disabling anyone who is staying. A tested process for removing access for terminated employees is part of planning the change, not a task for the day after.
Both depend on HR and IT working from the same data. When HR records the change once and the directory follows it automatically, the joiner, mover and leaver process carries the organizational change through to every account.
Simplify Change Management With ezOnboard
Need help navigating people-centric changes within your organization? ezOnboard brings structure and automation to your current lifecycle management processes.
It seamlessly integrates your HR system with Active Directory. Once connected, every lifecycle change (promotions, transitions, or exits) automatically syncs across both systems. This reduces manual workloads and saves time for your IT team.
ezOnboard also simplifies onboarding and offboarding workflows by ensuring correct access from day one. It can automatically revoke access and reclaim Microsoft licenses once employees leave your company.
For large changes, you can run your rules against the whole workforce first and review who would be created, moved or disabled before anything is written. Limits on leavers and movers per run stop an unexpected mass change before it starts.
Book a demo today to see ezOnboard in action! You can also check this ROI calculator to see your potential cost savings.
FAQs About Managing Change in the Workplace
What is the difference between organizational and IT change management?
Organizational change management helps people adopt a new way of working through planning, communication, training and support. IT change management controls changes to systems through risk assessment, approval and rollback plans. Large projects need both.
Why do employees resist change at work?
People resist change when they don’t understand why it’s happening, fear losing status or skills, or have been through poorly run changes before. Explaining the reason, involving them early and giving them time to learn reduces resistance.
How do you manage change at the workplace?
Start by understanding what’s changing and why. Build a plan, involve your team, and explain the change clearly. Don't forget to train users, provide support, and address concerns. Finally, track results and adjust when needed.
What are the five stages of the ADKAR model?
Prosci’s ADKAR model describes five stages each person goes through during a change: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. First, people need to understand why the change is happening. Next, they must want to take part and learn how. Then they need the ability to do it in practice and reinforcement to keep doing it.