About this time last year, we had an inkling that the economy was turning. The reason was that our internal communications practice shifted from promoting Employee Value Propositions, Performance Management and Leadership and Diversity Programmes to reorganisations - in the space of two weeks.

We are now supporting our 12th reorganisation in as many months. I’m glad to say not all are downsizings (to use the vernacular). Some are companies making the most of the opportunities in a recession and changing to keep pace with their own growth. But most are organisations merging, trying to do more with less and/ or chasing that seemingly elusive productivity increase.

The common thread through every single change is to make sure the organisation realises the results from the investment they are making.

Organisational change costs. And sometimes more than it should. Multinational professional services firm Towers Perrin estimates that companies are investing US80 – US$145 billion a year on change initiatives that fail to achieve their collective results. That is a huge amount of money that is not being used as effectively as it could or should be.

From our experience working with senior leaders, the most common cause of failure is when not enough attention has been placed on the people aspect of change.

Any change requires people to let go and move out of their comfort zone. When that happens people feel less secure and it can impact on work productivity and relationships.

Change requires people to accept something new – new rules for success, new relationships, new behaviours, new competencies. All this creates a high degree of unpredictability. People’s resistance to change is a huge force when it comes to some of these transformation programmes.

How to deal with it? Knowing what resistance looks like helps, as does understanding there are two sides to resistance – a rational side and an emotional side.

The rational side is more controllable – it is the business case, the project plan, the new responsibilities. This is the side most organisations are good at.

The piece organisations struggle with is the emotional side: How change is going to affect someone at a very personal level. This is the side that most organisations don’t spend enough time on, with a very direct result on productivity and the bottom line.

At a granular level, it is about understanding that staff go through gates as they go through change. The first gate is to understand what the change is and how they will be affected. Then it is important that they get some ownership and have a voice in the process. A consultation process done well or a strong change management communication programme helps support this too.

The next gate is trust that the organisation is going to meet its goals and that leadership is being open and honest. If staff have that sense, they will be much more ready to commit and to change their behaviours, and to think that what is going on is reasonable.

So a strong business case is just part of the picture. Leadership, communication and involvement all help make sure the investment in change achieves what it sets out to do.