When a government announces major organisational change such as a merger and/or restructuring, the anxiety felt by employees can have a detrimental effect on productivity and on the change process. The Ministry were planning a merger with the implantation of a new structure and asked us to develop a tailor-made 2-week workshop for three officers to look at supporting staff who were going to be affected by this change whether it be redeployment, transfer, changing locations or taking on a new role with appropriate training or retirement. The programme was designed specifically to help the officers address staff concerns while also included the wider agenda of external psychological and social support. Main points of learning related to the actual change process and that organisational change doesn’t consist of a series of isolated events and does not happen overnight. It’s a process that takes time and has three distinct phases: Ending – Transition – Beginning and that employees may be at different phases of the process and the skill is to recognise where in the process an individual may be and to be able to provide relevant and appropriate support to help them cope through the transition, which can be difficult and turbulent at times, towards acceptance. At the end of the workshop, participants had created a detailed action plan to take back to the Ministry and were planning to transfer learning to several colleagues who were not able to join them
