Organizational change: Unfreezing, changing and refreezing

Posted on June 13, 2012 by keithpounds.com

 (The following is another excerpt from my 2008 book “The Psychology of Management.” This excerpt explores how to implement “change” in today’s organizations.  As with other articles in this series, it will help managers improve organizational performance).

Managers today should understand that one of the most efficient ways to handle change is to use three basic steps. These include the steps of unfreezing, changing and refreezing.

No human or organizational system will change unless the current way of doing things is first “unfrozen.” While this a very important process, it actually involves very simple implementation. It involves “unfreezing” the way employees think about current processes.

One way of doing this is by showing employees how your new idea or process will benefit them, their jobs and the organization. You should show them the negative aspects of their current ways of doing things. This is a very important step because it first addresses any “uncertainty avoidance” or “fear of the unknown” that employees may have.

If you can show them the benefits of your new ideas or processes, and the negative aspects of their current ideas and processes, it helps employees see that there is a benefit “to them.” So, the unfreezing process involves training and “heading off” restraining forces. The important part here is that restraining forces are addressed “before” they appear.

The next step is the actual “change” itself. This step should be self-explanatory as it involves the actual new way of doing things. This second step will also involve training, but it will be more aligned with the actual processes: that is, how to do the new things. Because employees were first taken through the “unfreezing” process, they will be much more willing and open to learn the new processes and will help to implement the change.

One of the main reasons so many change processes fail is because management goes straight to the change process itself without first taking employees through the unfreezing stage. As we discussed above, doing so produces increased tension in the organization.

While unfreezing is such an important (and easy) process, the time and energy spent on it is worthless unless we “refreeze” the organization into the new behavior. This refreezing is out 3^rd step in the change process.

It does us no good if we unfreeze the way our employees think about the way they do things, and then we implement changes in how they do those things, if we don’t help to make sure that they continue to do those things or perform those new processes.

Our concern here is that without support from management, there is a very good chance that the organization will go back to “the way we were.” By this we mean that employees will go back to using the old behaviors and discard the new processes and ideas.

One good way to avoid this is to make sure that you, as a manager, recognize and reward employees when they perform the new behaviors that were implemented during the change process. This is something that should be planned for even before the unfreezing stage.