In today’s competitive business environment you might feel like you are in a constant cycle of responding to outside pressure, and at other times fighting to get ahead of it. Technology is constantly developing, your competitors are evolving and therefore the needs of your customers are becoming more demanding.
This creates a pressure to introduce new ways of working which produce an incremental, sustainable boost to productivity, customer service, and overall business results.
Why then, do 70% of large-scale change programmes not reach their goals? Hurdles to success include a reluctance to change company culture, a lack of clear vision, poor or non-existent cross functional collaboration and a lack of data analysis: all of which is encompassed by poor change management.
Poor change management
For large scale change to be effective, there must be buy-in from the leadership team. This is despite the fact that first indication of what needs to change or what could be improved is more likely to come from employees who are at the coalface of the business; processing orders, interacting with customers and making sales. Why then, is the support of the leadership team so important?
Digital transformation does not have to be expensive, if taken incrementally. However there will most likely be the need to put people, processes and tools in place to deliver value to the bottom line. This will require some level of investment and management.
A proactive leadership team is responsible for setting the tone of a company’s culture. A leadership team which is open to technology change, delivering value to their customers and improving the working practises of their employees is more likely to foster a culture of continuous improvement and a “what could be done better?” attitude in their employees. It is important that this curious mindset is encouraged rather than stifled.
So how do you foster an environment of continuous improvement, whilst keeping a transformation plan on course?
- Have clear short-term goals, with an overall long term vision. As mentioned earlier, transformation can be incremental and provide lots of short term wins but it is important not to lose sight of your original goal. Make sure you are not distracted or taken too far off course if you unearth further areas for improvement. Ensuring that you are regularly referring back to your long-term vision (and adjusting if appropriate), analysing company data, as well as regularly feeding back to the CEO/leadership team will help to keep your project on track.
- Have the right people in place. Ideally, you will have the resource to either hire or promote an employee into an Operations Director or Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) role, with support provided by analysis from the finance and HR functions. This will ensure that decisions are data driven and made quickly, keeping the project(s) on course. If this is not possible then there are outside digital transformation companies, (such as Winsoc Digital!), who have the ability to see the business with fresh eyes and suggest a transformation plan which is externally managed with close internal collaboration.
- Track the bottom-line impact of initiatives. Change for change’s sake is not the goal here. Successful transformations will either make you more efficient and save you money, or make you more appealing to customers and increase sales. Have the right tracking tools in place to make sure you are making a quantifiable positive impact.
Poor change management focuses on individual initiatives with little regard for how these initiatives could positively impact on neighbouring departments. For example, bringing your ordering system online into one centralised system not only improves the life of order processors, it should positively impact operations, sales, invoicing, customer service, and it gives your marketing department something to shout about!
The key changes embraced by companies big and small in recent years include; remote working, migration to the cloud, moving to online purchasing or service delivery and investing in data security.
If you know you need to embrace change but don’t know where to start, give us a call for a no obligation consultation!
