Changing Change Management
Research tells us that most change efforts fail.
Yet change methodologies are stuck in a pre-digital era. It’s high time to
start catching up.
Change
management as it is traditionally applied is outdated. We know, for example,
that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely
due to employee resistance and lack of management support. We also know that
when people are truly invested in change it is 30 percent more likely to stick.
While
companies have been obsessing about how to use digital to improve their
customer-facing businesses, the application of digital tools to promote and
accelerate internal change has received far less scrutiny. However, applying
new digital tools can make change more meaningful—and durable—both for the
individuals who are experiencing it and for those who are implementing it. The
advent of digital change tools comes at just the right time. Organizations
today must simultaneously deliver rapid results and sustainable growth in an
increasingly competitive environment. They are being forced to adapt and change
to an unprecedented degree: leaders have to make decisions more quickly;
managers have to react more rapidly to opportunities and threats; employees on
the front line have to be more flexible and collaborative. Mastering the art of
changing quickly is now a critical competitive advantage. For many
organizations, a five-year strategic plan—or even a three-year one—is a thing
of the past.
Organizations
that once enjoyed the luxury of time to test and roll out new initiatives must
now do so in a compressed period while competing with tens or hundreds of
existing (and often incomplete) initiatives. In this dynamic and fast-paced
environment, competitive advantage will accrue to companies with the ability to
set new priorities and implement new processes quicker than their rivals.
The
power of digital to drive change Large companies are increasingly engaged in
multiple simultaneous change programs, often involving scores of people across
numerous geographies. While traditional workshops and training courses have
their place, they are not effective at scale and are slow moving. B2C companies
have unlocked powerful digital tools to enhance the customer journey and shift
consumer behavior. Wearable technology, adaptive interfaces, and integration
into social 2 platforms are all areas where B2C companies have innovated to
make change more personal and responsive.
Some
of these same digital tools and techniques can be applied with great
effectiveness to change-management techniques within an organization. Digital
dashboards and personalized messages, for example, can build faster, more
effective support for new behaviors or processes in environments where
management capacity to engage deeply and frequently with every employee is
constrained by time and geography.
Digitizing
five areas in particular can help make internal change efforts more effective
and enduring.
1.
Provide just-in-time feedback The best feedback processes are designed to offer
the right information when the recipient can actually act on it. Just-in-time
feedback gives recipients the opportunity to make adjustments to their behavior
and to witness the effects of these adjustments on performance. Consider the
experience of a beverage company experiencing sustained share losses and
stagnant market growth in a highly competitive market in Africa. The challenge
was to motivate 1,000-plus sales representatives to sell with greater urgency
and effectiveness. A simple SMS message system was implemented to keep the
widely distributed sales reps, often on the road for weeks at a time, plugged
into the organization. Each rep received two to three daily SMS messages with
personalized performance information, along with customer and market insights.
For example, one message might offer feedback on which outlets had placed
orders below target; another would alert the rep to a situation that indicated
a need for increased orders, such as special events or popular brands that were
trending in the area. Within days of implementing the system, cross-selling and
upselling rates increased to more than 50 percent from 4 percent, and within
the first year, the solution delivered a $25 million increase in gross margin,
which helped to swing a 1.5 percent market-share loss into a 1 percent gain.
2.
Personalize the experience Personalization is about filtering information in a
way that is uniquely relevant to the user and showing each individual’s role in
and contribution to a greater group goal. An easy-to-use system can be an
effective motivator and engender positive peer pressure. This worked
brilliantly for a rail yard looking to reduce the idle time of its engines and
cars by up to 10 percent. It implemented a system that presented only the most
relevant information to each worker at that moment, such as details on the
status of a train under that worker’s supervision, the precise whereabouts of
each of the trains in the yard, or alerts indicating which train to work on.
Providing such specific and relevant information helped workers clarify
priorities, increase accountability, and reduce delays.
3.
Sidestep hierarchy Creating direct connections among people across the
organization allows them to sidestep cumbersome hierarchal protocols and
shorten the time it takes to get things done. It also fosters more direct and
instant connections that allow employees to share important information, find
answers quickly, and get help and advice from people they trust. In the
rail-yard example, a new digital communications platform was introduced to
connect relevant parties right away, bypassing middlemen and ensuring that
issues get resolved quickly and efficiently. For example, if the person in
charge of the rail yard has a question about the status of an incoming train,
he or she need only log into the system and tap the train icon to pose the
question directly to the individuals working on that train. Previously, all
calls and queries had to be routed through a central source. This ability to
bridge organizational divides is a core advantage in increasing agility,
collaboration, and effectiveness.
4.
Build empathy, community, and shared purpose In increasingly global
organizations, communities involved in change efforts are often physically
distant from one another. Providing an outlet for colleagues to share and see
all the information related to a task, including progress updates and informal
commentary, can create an important esprit de corps. Specific tools are
necessary to achieve this level of connectivity and commitment.
Those
that we have seen work well include shared dashboards, visualizations of
activity across the team, “gamification”
to bolster competition, and online forums where people can easily speak to one
another (for example, linking a Twitter-like feed to a work flow or creating
forums tied to leader boards so people can easily discuss how to move up in the
rankings). This approach worked particularly well with a leading global bank
aiming to reduce critical job vacancies. The sourcing team made the HR process
a shared experience, showing all stakeholders the end-to-end view—dashboards
identifying vacancies; hiring requisitions made and approved; candidates
identified, tested, and interviewed; offers made and accepted; and hire letters
issued. This transparency and openness built a shared commitment to getting
results, a greater willingness to deliver on one’s own step in the process, and
a greater willingness to help one another beyond functional boundaries.
5.
Demonstrate progress Organizational change is like turning a ship: the people
at the front can see the change but the people at the back may not notice for a
while. Digital change tools are helpful in this case to communicate progress so
that people can see what is happening in real time. More sophisticated tools
can also show individual contributions toward the common goal. We have seen how
this type of communication makes the change feel more urgent and real, which in
turn creates momentum that can help push an organization to a tipping point
where a new way of doing things becomes the way things are done.
Digital
tools and platforms, if correctly applied, offer a powerful new way to
accelerate and amplify the ability of an organization to change. However, let’s
be clear: the tool should not drive the solution. Each company should have a
clear view of the new behavior it wants to reinforce and find a digital
solution to support it. The best solutions are tightly focused on a specific
task and are rolled out only after successful pilots are completed. The chances
of success increase when management actively encourages feedback from users and
incorporates it to give them a sense of ownership in the process.
Article Reproduced from Mckinsey Digital
No comments:
Post a Comment