Over the last few weeks, several trends have emerged during workshops, seminars and working with clients which have raised the questions:
- How do you engage the workforce?
- How do you identify and recognize valuable contributions to the change effort?
- How do to support the whole end-to-end transformation process, from concept to value?
Creating Engagement - a Critical Differentiator
Engaging the workforce in a sustained way has historically been elusive for many organizations. On one hand, the leadership team lives on a daily basis with the competitive threats and opportunities that demand an ever faster pace of change to maintain an edge. Conversely, the workforce and extended enterprise are increasingly fatigued with the change burden being imposed on them, particularly when it is not clear what is expected of them, and recognition of contributions is often scarce on the ground.
Let’s focus on this change burden on the employee. Typically, it is hard for employees to engage in an organization’s change agenda for a number of reasons:
- It is often imposed from top down (with weak buy-in or shared planning processes)
- Integrated systems to support the delivery of business change (concept to value) simply do not exist – so all this work is handled in a highly manual way, limiting wider engagement and slowing down dialogue and decision-making
- It is often hard to get involved and contribute to the change process (poor awareness of what’s going on, weak processes and systems to enable contributions).
There is a need for a balanced approach to change management, namely a combination of Top-Down, Bottom-up, and X-functional approaches, also known as TBX-change. Top-down, it is important that leadership set the direction. Bottom-up, employees across the organisation, need to be able to understand, engage with the strategic direction, and deliver initiatives that support it. Lastly, but in my mind most importantly, is the cross-functional/cultural change, which allows horizontal creativity, debate and collaboration to flourish. This can also mean supporting the partners, suppliers and stakeholders who are important contributors to the delivery of change.
Recognition - What’s In It For Me?
- Visible leadership comments of support for a specific initiative and contribution by a team or individual
- News feeds showing recently created and delivered initiatives, highlighting those involved
- Leadership using widespread employee participation to solve tough business problems.
The new Enterprise 2.0 technologies now make this personal recognition feasible and sustainable and needs to be added into all leaders’ toolkits.
A Process View of Transformation - From Concept to Value
Managing transformation as a core business process requires a new approach. Existing models for change are typically flawed, with:
- manual, piece meal reporting (dash boards, PMO)
- disparate and cumbersome methodologies requiring specific training
- poor engagement strategies across the organization, the list goes on….
Another way to view the challenge is to think of any change journey as a process from concept to value. The process is highly dynamic with a large amount of variability i.e. different projects will need to shape and address the change in different ways depending on the nature of the project. As well as this, the level of human involvement (as opposed to mechanistic process steps) is high, and relies on discussion, judgement, creativity, analysis, wisdom, and other cognitive capabilities of the staff. Supporting these tasks in one environment also allows an organisation to draw upon the experience and knowledge of the extended enterprise, as often a key element of the solution lies outside your own workforce.
Successful transformation management needs to facilitate these human processes in sharp contrast to the normal way in which transactional systems and traditional workflow systems support more automated business processes.A single system, such as xpoint™ from element8, is the first software solution to support this complex combination of diverse projects and creative human processes in a sufficiently structured way to enable successful delivery of change. Critically, its pervasive nature and collaborative features, also provides the perfect vehicle for employee engagement and recognition.