Organizational Structure as a Roadblock to Change Management

Employee training programs are important elements of change management in the business world. These programs often seek to change the behavior of employees en masse and often involve the use of outside consultants and experts to design and run the training efforts. But these programs can leave employers and managers disappointed with the results.


Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Michael Beer, Magnus Finnström, and Derek Schrader point out the huge amount of money spent in the United States and around the world on training programs relative to the perceived benefits. “American companies spend enormous amounts of money on employee training and education—$160 billion in the United States and close to $356 billion globally in 2015 alone,” the authors write, “but they are not getting a good return on their investment. For the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things.”
Beer, Finnström, and Schrader note that one of the reasons many of these programs fail is that employees aren’t empowered to put their training to use. The organizations they work for have certain policies, cultures, or managers in place that stifle the potential benefits of these programs. In discussing examples of real-world situations they’ve studied, the authors write, “The problem was that even well-trained and motivated employees could not apply their new knowledge and skills when they returned to their units, which were entrenched in established ways of doing things. In short, the individuals had less power to change the system surrounding them than that system had to shape them.”
To avoid these issues, the authors argue that this system must be changed first in order for subsequent employee training to have an environment in which to take hold. Otherwise, employers are often given a false sense of achievement based on immediate feedback from a training program, while employees are left frustrated and disenchanted with change efforts when they find they aren’t free to put what they’ve learned to use.
Beer, Finnström, and Schrader offer a six-step process for implementing effective change. They note that these steps often overlap but say the order is important to help drive home the importance of prioritizing the first steps.

1. Define values and strategic direction.
2. Gather feedback, anonymously, from managers and employees to identify barriers to strategy execution; once identified, put mechanisms in place to address these barriers.
3. Provide ongoing coaching to help employees become more effective.
4. Add training where needed.
5. Use metrics to assess improvements.
6. Make adjustments to methods for selecting, evaluating, developing, and promoting talent as appropriate.

Companies spend a lot of money trying to promote change within their organizations. To make this expenditure worthwhile, it’s important to do it right. And a big part of getting it right is to make sure the tools you spend so much money training your employees on can be effectively utilized.