Posted by: Jonena Relth, President
Let me introduce our featured writer this month:
Esther Groves, Sr. Consultant for TBD, has 11 years of planning and implementing change efforts for Bank of America. Her experiences have honed her knowledge for executing and communicating change to ensure that organizations experience positive morale and increased efficiencies before, during and after a change occurs. She knows all too well that when communicated effectively, change is the catalyst to getting things done better, cheaper and faster while capitalizing on the talent and enthusiasm of the workforce.
MAKING CHANGE WORK: 5 Essential Steps
A word to the wise: Never underestimate the true costs of change.
If you recognize the impacts and plan carefully for change, you will be rewarded with lowered resistance and ultimately a healthier bottom line. The following five steps will propel you toward that goal:
1. Acknowledge that all affected areas of your organization are a key part of the process.
2. Articulate the strategic rationale for the change – why it’s good for the organization.
3. Alert affected employees as soon as possible and tell them what’s in it for them.
4. Carefully plan communication and training for affected employees.
5. Follow up to ensure performance changes have taken place.
Anything that alters the way people think about or perform their jobs can be defined as change. And the way they respond to the change can have a small or serious impact on the business and its bottom line.
In their article entitled “Leading and Managing Change,” Christopher G. Worley and Yvonne H. Vick of Pepperdine School of Business and Management note:
Any organizational change is preceded by personal change. Senior managers too often spend time at off-site meetings arguing over the need for change, forging new ideas, and creating strategic initiatives. After such meetings, they issue memoranda to the organization and assume that everyone will see the brilliance of their decisions, drop what they are doing, and perform in new ways without so much as a question or concern.
However, people don’t work that way, and it is insulting to assume otherwise.
Change is more often resisted than supported in organizations because people rarely are given the chance to understand the reason for the change. No one bothers to explain to them the “why.” And few organizations spend time thinking about “What’s in it for the organization member?” That is, individuals must believe that it is in their own best interest to do things differently.
In our respective practices, we have not known of a single person who on one day could drop a set of behaviors that served customers or added value and on the next day could perform perfectly a new set of value-adding behaviors. Change involves time and the opportunity to learn, and learning is often inefficient. So don’t expect performance improvement too quickly.
It is important to keep in mind:
· All change involves personal choice -- involvement breeds commitment while lack of involvement can breed stress, resistance and, worse, sabotage.
· The transition from understanding the change to actual performance is not instantaneous.
· Employees need to understand how the change connects to the business strategy.
Let’s compare two real-world scenarios:
Like most businesses, Company A and Company A Plus schedule regular product or system upgrades to improve efficiency and service. The result? Employees must regularly learn and adapt to new product features, as well as new procedures, screens and tools.
Company A, still operating in the 20th century, uses a low touch/low tech process to roll out product or system upgrades while Company A Plus recognizes the importance of communicating with and educating employees to accelerate and enhance adaptation to change.
The great news is that a well orchestrated change effort results in increased capacity to face change in the future!
Are your employees for you or against you in times of change? You can use TBD Q™ to assess your organization’s knowledge, skill, motivation and readiness for your next change effort.
Let us show you how.
TBD Q™ can:
· Proactively speed the change process
· Quickly gauge organizational readiness in a quantitative way
· Reinforce ideas and behavior
· Facilitate adjustments on the fly
Let’s look in on each of them as the change process begins…
Company A |
Company A Plus |
· Project Managers, systems analysts and programmers work behind the scenes to engineer system changes.
· Project managers report progress to senior leaders in regularly scheduled update meetings.
· Senior leaders inform stakeholders such as frontline employees via memo of changes and new performance expectations.
· Frontline employees learn by doing through trial and error. Costs include: lost productivity, errors, customer impacts, resistance. |
· Project Managers, systems analysts and programmers work behind the scenes to engineer system changes.
· Project managers report progress to senior leaders in regularly scheduled update meetings.
· Project managers and subject matter experts meet with the Training/Communication Department to identify what frontline employees will need to know and do differently when the change takes place.
· Training/Communication Department develops materials to alert frontline employees to the changes well in advance and prepare them to think and act differently.
· Project managers and Training/Communication in partnership with a few representative frontline managers and employees strategically determine rollout plan based on complexity and potential impacts of changes.
· Training/Communication along with frontline supervisors begin to feed rationale, timelines and snippets of information to employees (What? Who? Why? When? How?), alerting them to the coming changes. Perhaps most importantly, people need to know “What’s in it for me?”
· If changes are complex, classroom or web-based training may be provided.
· Training/Communication assesses frontline employees to ensure they are well prepared when the changes are implemented.
|
Results |
Results |
· Project plan drives activity.
· Senior managers are well informed and have input.
· Frontline supervisors and employees are an afterthought and must rapidly absorb change rationale and new expected behaviors.
· Frontline employees learn by doing through trial and error.
· There is inevitably an impact to morale, service and productivity as frontline employees struggle to catch up.
· Full compliance may never come about .if frontline employees may not understand the importance of the change or buy into it. |
· Senior leaders fully recognize the importance of employee knowledge, performance and acceptance in a change initiative.
· Training/Communication is recognized as a key component to change initiatives.
· Training/Communication is engaged early in the process to allow adequate time to bring all stakeholders up to speed prior to implementation.
· Training/Communication efforts are proportional to the extent of the changes and fully acknowledge the impacts.
· There is little or no disruption to service or productivity.
· Frontline supervisors and employees feel included, know what they need to do and are invested in the outcome of the change.
· Hidden costs such as inefficiencies sabotage and customer dissatisfaction are minimized.
· Assessments highlight performance or knowledge gaps so they can be addressed. |
**For more info on TBD Q™, click here.
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