Employee Retention in Change Management Processes. Practical Experience

Abstract or Introduction

Retaining employees for the long term within the framework of change management processes is a challenging management task. In change management processes, a fundamental distinction must be made between incremental change management and radical change management.

While incremental change happens continuously and is integrated into everyday work, radical change represents a strategic realignment of the company, which is predominantly associated with staff reductions and is intended to change the corporate culture. This is particularly true in the case of turnarounds, where cost-cutting programs play a crucial role in ensuring the long-term survival of the company.

Employees are more willing to go along with incremental change, also known as continuous improvement, than with radical change, as these could also be affected by staff reductions. This stirs up fears among employees and therefore often leads to high turnover. Therefore, it is important for management to actively involve employees in the changes to empower them to act as change agents so that they can actively shape the change. To do this, it is crucial to identify the key personnel that a company cannot do without. The management and key personnel are given the task of actively accompanying the company's employees on the journey of change so that the company can grow sustainably again from a lower level after the strategic realignment so that the remaining employees have a prosperous future.

Open communication and excellent transparency on the part of the management, which should also act as a unit, help to bring the employees along on the change journey in a targeted manner. However, experience has shown that 50% of all change management projects in the industry fail and 20% are implemented inadequately due to two crucial reasons, namely power struggles within management and resistance from employees. For this reason, it is imperative that a company's management team select a leadership coalition of similarly rational members who also have sufficient empathy to successfully manage the change management process, which must be done together with employees and should not be directed against them.

The guiding coalition should develop a common strategic vision and practice a participative way of working involving everyone, since the goal of transformation is to change the thinking of employees, and transformation can only be brought about together with employees.