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[Music] hello thank you for joining my name is brian potts chief operating officer with third stage consulting group today we're going to talk about everybody's favorite topic or at least mine called organizational change management for those that aren't familiar organizational change management is the concept of managing people during your digital transformation we often find that companies these days are very familiar with the concept everybody's aware of the importance of it however it tends to be the first thing that is either overlooked discarded or abandoned once budget and time considerations become pressed during an erp implementation what we find is that a lot of this is due to the fact that when talking about organizational change it's generally a philosophical discu discussion it's easy to say oh it sounds good it's great to get everybody aligned but when it comes down to brass tacks the actualities and understanding of it is deeply misunderstood so today we're gonna uh be talking with with adam cheatham um with third stage also and talking about what it takes to actually realize organizational change beyond just the the conceptual understanding of it so as we get going i'd like to introduce adam cheetham uh director of transformation strategy with third stage he's going to be helping dive into this concept of organizational change asking some hopefully difficult questions and really get into what what it takes to succeed in your transformation from an organizational standpoint thanks brian uh the first question is simpler and sound but it's a bit more complicated as you as referenced why can you start by explaining why ocm is so important so there's a common three pillar statement of what transformation takes process people technology so if you look at it as a three-legged stool if you take one of those stools out being people it's going to collapse you cannot go through a transformation the the word transformation actually refers to change and and new way of doing things that requires people so if you look at changing of technology that's going to instigate change of process that otherwise it's pointless to go through a technology change in order to change process people have to change because people do processes so it all ties together if you pull out one of those legs it's not going to work and why can't i assume that change management will just happen i mean people want to work for me why would i not assume that they would want to work with this new system with all the great benefits that it's going to bring yeah people do most likely want to work with you and they want to work with the new system and they're all fully on board but the actual realization of change is difficult think about it's a new environment take a child for example learning to swim they want to swim they want to go in the water but you have to help them through it it's a process of learning same goes with technology that's a fantastic analogy i like it i'm going to have to use it um taking a little bit more along the lines of a less dramatic example of what happens if a child decides it's not going to learn to swim before trying what um what are some of the things that you've seen happen when ocm is disregarded during the implementation of technology well really what happens it one point or another the implementation stalls or you start to face what we call operational disruption what that means is you're you're working towards a new way of doing business but if they're if people aren't supportive of that that new way of business doesn't happen so operations become confused disrupted you get what we call workarounds people going back to their excel spreadsheets or older technology uh doing things as they're used to and again a lot of times it's not because they don't want to they don't know how to their people are attracted to their comfort zone and they go back there unless they they have help and and guidance to get to that that new future state and how do you recognize that these things are happening you know you're not standing behind everybody's desk to see if they're opening up certain spreadsheets right you're you're hoping that they use this software and hoping to see the benefits one way how do you tell if and when these types of challenges are arising yeah that where to use hoping is a dangerous word when you come into transformation so that's what we're trying to avoid we want to get out of hoping and we want to know but you're right how do you do that uh a number of it's really comes through assessments and and checkpoints there's a number of tools and assessment types that we use i don't want to get into the details of that now but what you want to do is make sure that you're you're tying in the concept of organizational change with your technology transformation so as you get into testing and you get into training making sure that people are doing what they're being asked to do and and testing to make sure that they they know how the processors are working and making sure that the technology has its implement is supporting the way the businesses needs to run i guess you could kind of think of those types of workarounds or reverting to what's familiar and what feels more comfortable is forms of resistance you know one way or another can you talk a little bit about what types of forms of resistance you commonly see in when change management isn't being given the proper level of attention yeah so we outline a number of different forms of resistance but we'll we'll focus on two two primary forms think about the there's a infamous iceberg example where you've got the experts sitting out here and you've got the bulk of the iceberg below that's associated with change management as well as other uh things that you below the surface concept the above the surface is what we call intentional resistance those are the people who basically come to you and say i don't want to do this i don't like this i hate this this is painful fair enough i mean you've got to contain that that kind of resistance but it's easy to identify the more common and the more difficult is what is the below the surface and that's the unintentional resistance so unintentional resistance is when somebody doesn't necessarily understand or realize that there could be resistance of this new new process or new technology take for example this the spreadsheet example where somebody has built a work around the current system or environment that is absolutely necessary part of the current process because the technology that's in place can't support it they put their value they put their worth in their you know their image to the organization on that particular uh workaround as soon as you threaten to take that away they know up front and they're going to say yeah this is finally we can avoid this manual effort this workaround that i've created but deep down and underline is the the question is what does my value become once this is automated once this worksheet is non-relevant what happens to my job my role my responsibility and that's why the ultimate goal of change management has to be the understanding of what's in it for me that's another good good way of putting it the the what's in it for me and when you start thinking about how somebody considers their place in an organization is really based on what value do i add whether it's in my role or in the things that i do and the way that you've phrased that i really like the way you boil it down to what's in it for me and how how you change those folks viewpoint is i can be more valuable so you have all these ideas on what the consequences of not managing your change effectively are and those are those are all easy to see how do i accomplish these goals so this is kind of one of those things that's uh so nebulous to say why can't it just happen how how do you go to about accomplishing these goals yeah and this this is where the rubber hits the road and this is where i think where people struggle with the concept of organizational change management is actually taking metrics and understanding what's happening so a couple of things that you can do immediately the first thing is is a form of organizational readiness assessment it's a it's a broad term for starting to assess the areas of resistance both above and below the water a number of ways of handling that and it's got a tie to your organization but you're asking questions and what we like to do is assume everybody that could potentially touch the system or be influenced by it to answer this questionnaire the the the first reason for that is because it spreads communication so the first opportunity sometimes that people you've ever heard about this initiative it's it's your opportunity to let them know that your input is is important in this get everybody essentially aligned and supportive of the initiative to start the second is to identify those areas of resistance so we're in that questionnaire you want to ask questions such as you know how do you feel uh you know is as direct as your management support how do you feel training has been in the past for other transformations how do you like your current technology are you aware of other organizations that are doing things better than you taking some very simple straightforward questions when you bring the cumulative effect of those answers together you get an idea of where people are tend to be resistant or potentially resistant across the organization you can break it into different work groups different functional areas or departments regions if you're a larger organization one thing we stress with this though is this is not something you can do internally as soon as an internal called hr executive manager sends out a questionnaire people are going to get defensive they're going to think that they're protecting their so your answers are going to be all positive and supportive what you need is to find a way to use a third-party firm somebody who guarantees an anonymity anonymity um in the in the in the review of the responses and can share that accurately without identifying individuals that's that's very very critical that gives you an initial brush of where are there differences it doesn't necessarily point out always the degree of of resistance but it points out areas of resistance that you can then deeper dive into you know things like focus groups and deep diving interviews if needed the second part of that is on the executive front depending on the team structure you could do a similar survey to the executive team we actually i recommend a third party called interviews and executive alignment exercises where we meet with individuals really break down their their areas specifically of bias expectation motivation and and look for alignment across the executive team because until you have executive alignment the project won't succeed so that's probably the i'd say the strongest need for change management right so i have executive alignment and i've completed the survey i've got all these results to tell me i'm good at this or i'm bad at this what do i do next so next you build you start to build out your change plan the first piece that most likely is going to be some form of communications plan everybody says communications without knowing exactly what that means a couple things with communications has got to be targeted and it's got to be consistent meaning multiple media so i i strongly strongly recommend that if you've got an email environment is that you use something you can use email but besides email to share messaging so multiple medium and have it targeted for the message that you want to get out don't broadcast to the entire organization that hey we're going through this great change some things are going to change all is good because different individuals based on that organizational readiness assessment will perceive that differently so you need to target communications to the group as they need to as they absorb and how it affects them directly and most importantly we need to keep it consistent so what that means is when giving an example when when one user hears different messaging from different leaders in the organization their immediate takeaway from that isn't oh i need to decide which way to go it's oh this doesn't really matter because the executive team is not aligned so we need to make that communication very very consistent as well as targeted so that's the first first step and does any of this change depending on the the size and impact of the change and how do you how do you address you know small changes are easy big changes are hard that's plain and simple to see but how do you address the difference well what ties into organizational change management is the concept of organizational impact and change impact so when you're going through your process definition you're identifying current state and future state the bigger that gap the bigger the change so the more you need to tailor your your organizational change plan to to address that do you have any good examples of tactics that sound like good ideas but at the in the end or or just absolutely stay away from them you know um i'll take the first stab at it the easiest one is well if they don't like it they can leave what other types of clean things that they look like good solutions that really aren't as effective as they sound yeah i wouldn't say that there's any necessarily bad approaches it needs to be customized for your organization one one way to look at this is i guess one bad thing to do is just to take an organizational change tool set and just try and throw it into your organization and use it as it is the the true value of organizational change is customizing approach based on your organization your communication style your culture and the results of a are called a readiness assessment and tailoring the approach for that it might be an organization if it's very hierarchical there are still many organizations around the world where the leader says something and it's done if you're in that kind of organization that message that you just shared might actually work it we find less and less in current day where that's effective but you need to fit the messaging style and the change management style to your organization gotcha that makes sense with all the types of changes that are that are necessary to accommodate the ways that we need to do business during this covet 19 era and the globe in response to the global pandemic what are some of the change management tactics that you suggest for handling that yeah that's a deep question um and there's a lot of ways to look at that one one consideration is that people have actually become more accustomed to change all of a sudden everybody's said you can't come into the office you got to work remote you've got to learn the you know new video communications that can be can be a good thing but we also need to consider the concept of of change fatigue meaning people have been asked to change so much recently that they might either be starting to blur it and and become numb to the concept of change or they're they're they're fearful of change meaning we don't know what's coming next and one of the biggest things we've found in the the recent pandemic is is that the biggest fear for companies and for people is the unknown not knowing if furloughs are coming not knowing if layoffs are coming not knowing if business is going to come back or when and and that level of fear is what's driving people um you know to hold basically hold off going through any kind of transformation so what we recommend is opening up communications even to a greater degree the the idea of transparency of sharing with people the effect that this has had on on our company what we're doing for it how we're doing it why we're now going through a digital transformation uh hopefully the towards the end of this this pandemic how the organization's going to benefit and how everybody as individuals within our company organization is also going to benefit from this change so i think just opening up realizing that change has become the norm but it's not you know it's always going to be an unknown and a fear driver if if it's left to the unknown that makes a lot of sense and you know is an organization that's about to undergo a significant change whether it be in a digital transformation in the form of software or some other type of business transformation what's the one piece of advice you would leave them with as they embark on that journey well related to the topic we've been discussing you know don't overlook change management and specifically don't assume that change management is not going to be an issue for your organization as maybe you're on some legacy technology that everybody hates everybody wants a change that doesn't mean that change management's going to be easy it means that everybody's on board with change but wanting change and realizing change are very different different scenarios well adam thank you i enjoyed talking about my favorite topic change management appreciate the the the insights and questions um thank you all for for joining as well i really appreciate uh the attention to change management um i'd ask if you like what you saw please subscribe to the third stage youtube channel and also would welcome any questions that you've got please contact me directly my information is outlined below and would look forward to talking in the future