Tips to Facilitate Sustainable Change

The pursuit of business sustainability or a personal sustainable lifestyle is a continuous improvement process. While a broad vision sets direction, movement forward is achieved by manageable and frequent implementations of change.

Successful businesses and individuals recognize that change can be unsettling, and it needs to be understood and managed. If you force change on people, or even yourself, you often encounter problems.

Sustainable change needs be realistic, achievable and measurable. Before taking action, ask a few questions:

•    What do we want to achieve with this change?
•    Why and how will we know that the change has been achieved?
•    Who is affected by this change, and how will they react to it?
•    Is the desired outcome within our control or do we need help?

Businesses often try to sell change to the organization as a way to attain agreement and accelerate implementation. Selling change to people is most often not a sustainable strategy for success. An alternative approach is to align business sustainability with the needs of the employee.

•    Focus on facilitating sustainability learning for employee development.
•    Encourage employee discussion about business direction
•    Stage implementation at a rate that is manageable for your workforce
•    Encourage feedback from stakeholders about change management processes
•    Take ownership in the outcome of each step and make improvements going forward

At Taiga Company, our sustainability consulting works with clients to build sustainability concepts into business core practices and employee personal lives. We work with individuals and groups to recognize the importance of change management as a key process in the pursuit of personal and business sustainability.