How do you bring about sustainable change to avoid as many cuts to people and services as possible?

Everyone is now clear on the intentions of the coalition government in the UK to take the tough decisions and reduce public sector costs. This will be repeated in many parts of the private sector, where many organisations are facing lower profitability and the only route to survival is often seen as being through cuts.

In this paper OsCar Systems explores how through coaching for engagement, we can take a different approach than simply cutting jobs or services. We also show how, even where these cuts are necessary, we create an environment to achieve a positive, rather than negative, outcome.

In many cases this is inevitable and equally, there are many cases where this course of action is sure to damage the organisation even more, particularly where human capital is concerned.

Whether you have to cut or determine to progress through improvements, bringing about change is inevitable. There are two components of change, starting and sustaining; the first is easy, the second is many times more difficult and starts and ends with your people.

For organisations to thrive in this economic environment, an engagement strategy is not only fundamental to the way they do business, it is critical to their business.

So how do we achieve a return to strong results?

1.         How do you get people on board for change?

The critical first step is achieving and communicating “clarity of purpose”.

Expressed differently, each person and team needs to be aware of what is expected and what their contribution is to be. It is particularly prevalent in the bureaucratic environment of the public sector, for employees to feel undervalued and disconnected from the strategic policies of their employer.

To achieve the subsequent ‘buy in’ to this common purpose, employee engagement is critical. Simply, it may be termed “involvement”: but it is much more than that.

Managers firstly need to recognise that employee engagement is not capable of being applied or enforced. An organisation does not engage its employees ……….. Each individual must engage with the organisation through deliberate choice.

Involvement is specifically that each person knows what is expected, how they can contribute and that they are to be kept informed. Most importantly; they have an opportunity to be listened to when they have new ideas to improve the situation. While an employer can't bend to every request, employees must feel that their input is considered and used when appropriate.

What comes out of this is the clear necessity for leadership and communication in the form of feedback – the awareness of recognition. Coaching is a prerequisite rather than a soft option or a luxury at this time. People cannot be expected to simply toe the line or accept management edicts; if success is expected to bloom, then coaching is necessary to find what inspires at an individual level and to develop the belief that they can truly make a difference and it WILL be recognised.

To achieve this recognition, the management messages and activity needs to be positive and encouraging. If the management message is of doom and gloom, then employees will believe it, possibly look to leave and the messages become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Involve, communicate clearly, coach, provide consistent feedback, respect your people and they will certainly do extraordinary things for you.

2.         Parameters for establishing change

So when we have clarity of purpose, an engaged work force and an environment of open communication, what next?

We have found that our “intelligent change” practice combines the essential elements of success during change. These necessary elements are; coaching, the development of lean and systems thinking within individuals and then training in their application.

There are many ways to bring about change, when the right environment for bringing this about has been created in your organisation. However, change for the better requires universal awareness of taking a careful balance between twin needs for organisational dexterity and buoyancy. It is important to communicate the need for change but also to make clear the limitations so that GOOD change is achieved.

There are two broad definitions of dexterity and buoyancy, in this context. Dexterity (or nimbleness, agility) is the ability to consistently see and grab opportunities for your organisation.

Buoyancy is the organisation's ability to absorb changes in the business environment, to survive and live to fight another day.

This can produce a trade-off, requiring considerable thought, between efficiency and resilience. If we consider this as a balance between dexterity and buoyancy, it will be recognised that both are good but when working in harmony they are excellent.

Dexterity

There are distinct ways in which organisations can be dextrous:

Tactical dexterity is very much the systems thinking outcome we would expect and is the ability to consistently see and develop opportunities to pursue growth and control costs.

Strategic dexterity is the ability to spot “gold nuggets” that create disproportionate value to the initial investment

Optimisation dexterity is the ability to take resources out of stable business units and redeploy them to more promising opportunities, as exemplified in the Jim Collins book ‘Good to Great’. It is always perceived as a risk, moving people from where they are excelling but they should be where they can add the most future value.

Buoyancy

Operational buoyancy requires an organisation to efficiently monitor, react to and anticipate threats to the normal operations. Vital to operational buoyancy is the right balance between formal procedures and personalisation.

Too many strict formal procedures will detach the individual and leads people to lose sight of the ‘common purpose’. Personalisation and individual accountability, should result in actions taken up by those employees closest to the ‘coal face’ and thus most competent to deal with them

It is clear that bureaucracy, to some extent, is necessary in large organisations, but is also fixed and introverted. Organisational structures that encourage an individual to have responsibility and accountability for their own decisions will enable resources to be reallocated more quickly and flexibly. The question needs to be asked, ‘does this bureaucracy add value?’

3.   Now, how do we make it sustained change?

Throughout or coaching projects, we have found that there are three essential commandments to make change sustainable.

Pleasure not fear

As we stated at the outset of this paper, many people, particularly in the public sector are in fear of losing their jobs. Through positive communication, this fear can be allayed and with coaching, the factors which influence the pleasurable conduct of their work and life can be explored to find the right motivation for going the extra mile for their employer.

There may have been a time when managing by bullying and faces having to fit to progress but it is certainly not now, yet this still prevails in many organisations. “When I want your opinion, I will tell you it” remains prevalent today, amazing as it sounds.

An alternative is to encourage, reward (with attention and praise) and make the idea of improvement fun and interesting. This produces exceptional results…… every time!

Good Ju Jitsu practice

No, not throwing people around but using the same concept of using momentum to make change easier. By adjusting an existing practice rather than creating a new one, change can be more effective without it appearing onerous.

As an example, a service has been introduced by a company with a huge impact on individual savings; by simply creating a personal savings account for someone this account is added to by rounding up every card transaction they make with the ‘loose change’. Thus, the only change in behaviour that is required is to sign up for it, every time afterwards it is not a new decision.

Positive impact of peer pressure

By creating groups, working together with a common and simple goal each individual works to the benefit of the whole.

In Lean Six Sigma, this translates as a ‘Kaizen event’ where a problem is highlighted and the sole purpose of the group is to work together to find a solution using their own knowledge of the function and the training we provide in gathering and analysing data. Through coaching we develop their analytical and problem solving skills to bring about a positive outcome.

4.  Summary

Change is all about us and without it the organisation will not survive. We have not heard of anyone feeling that change for the worse is a desired outcome but nevertheless, change is resisted. Imposed change rarely works effectively and many planned changes are not sustained, a little like New Year resolutions.

Therefore to make change work and be sustained many factors need to be introduced in harmony and in logical sequence.

• Communicate the big picture clearly elucidating every individual’s role within it and how they can contribute.
• Engage each individual through two way communications, rewarding each person with the respect of listening and providing feedback.
• Provide coaching to unlock barriers and discover motivational needs at an individual level.
• Establish the parameters to achieve the right balance between dexterity and buoyancy for the organisation to thrive, ensuring that where a proposal creates an imbalance, this is communicated back to the proposer.
• Utilise pleasure and not fear as a tool for introducing and implementing change.
• Seek out the adjustments to practice not wholesale change wherever possible.
• Develop and encourage groups as teams not individuals and ensure each individual is engaged with the group.

OsCar Systems have great experience in bringing about sustained change across many organisations and would welcome a conversation to explore how we can help your people become evangelists of sustained change……for the better.

A partnership with OsCar Systems enables your organisation to design, implement and deliver an employee engagement strategy. We can be contacted by phone on 02070431636.