Today, a company does not often have the luxury of considering ‘whether to change’. External circumstances in the form of statutory regulations, market conditions or changes in client demand, makes it a fait-accompli that organisational change is required. A need to decrease financial costs and staff rationalisation are also a major driver for change.
When transformational changes are spoken of, it is always important to remember KPMG’s research which found that “80% of major changes failed because the ‘human factors’ were ignored or only superficially dealt with. If the people part doesn’t work the rest is gone”.
This research and supporting statistics including that –
• 65% of all major changes in organisations fail
• 50% of restructures deliver expected benefits; some damage businesses
• 75% of all reengineering projects fail to achieve their aims
So initiating, implementing and managing change is not to be undertaken lightly, but thoroughly and with good anticipation and management of what can and often does go wrong.
Today we are writing about our involvement in a major transformational change programme for one of clients. The client is a well-established multi-national organisation selling their products to the ‘mass-consumer retail market’, operating in the gaming sector. For them, new statutory regulations were the chief enforcers of change, with the other precipitators supporting this fait-accompli. The board was therefore faced with decisions about the scope of the changes (defining the ‘what’), ‘when’ the changes were to be scheduled and implemented and ‘how’ to undertake and complete the change cycle.
The Need
Facing major changes both from external to and within the company, the board of directors and management set an aggressive group of goals as the outcomes of their transformational change initiative. They saw the need to develop the internal change management capabilities of their leaders and senior managers as the first stage of their company-wide transformational programme. The company had minimum internal capability at that time. They considered various options to achieve this end and decided to train and groom their existing management and supervisory strata to become efficient change agents, capable of implementing the full transformation programme.
The Solutions
We were asked to create and develop the internal management capability in the arena of change. So we designed and conducted a thorough ‘Change Agent’ skills training programme, with follow-on workshops with 80 key ‘Agents of Change’. Then we designed the ‘on-the-job’ learning and development processes that would help them integrate the skills into the every-day operations. Together, these provided the platform for the successful implementation of the transformation programme which necessitated not only technological changes, but operational and systems change.
In the second phase of the project, Corporate Alchemy provided ‘change awareness’ workshops for the 1,000 staff employees, as part of engaging staff in the transformation. This allowed for senior executives of the company to attend, answer questions and generally offer support, information and clarification to all employees, of the changes already made and anticipated. This promoted engagement, commitment and participation by all members of staff as the transformational programme was undertaken.
The Benefits
The solutions supported more consistent, efficient and cost-effective transformational implementation across the company’s operations. Internal ‘change agent’ skills and capability were dramatically improved; meaning, that their skills and facility were available for tackling the company’s future changes.
Employees were more engaged and participatory in the transformation process and were able to be kept abreast of progress. These assisted greatly in the company achieving the change programme’s targeted outcomes earlier than had been expected, at lower financial cost, decreased disruption to normal operations and lower loss of performance by staff.
If you’d like to know more details about our work in the transformational change arena and would like to receive the full case study of what we did, let us know and we’ll send it to you.
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