I recently talked with Chris Jacobs, Director Advisory Services at Grant Thornton LLP, to discuss how organizations can succeed with their transformational change initiatives even when they struggle at the beginning of the process and below are a two of the key we topics discussed.
Q: What does an effective escalation plan look like for unforeseen problems? Who is involved? How high up the organization chart does it go?
A: An escalation plan’s structure depends on the change initiative. Just like effective change management, an escalation plan must be tailored to specific organizations and situations. To be clear, however, an escalation plan is an important part of any change initiative — a project would be thrown into chaos if everyone went to the CEO with small issues (or was afraid to voice any issues at all). On the other hand, a strong escalation plan also includes visibility to emerging issues for an organization’s leaders, who should have built-in processes to address the issues and make adjustments to the living change plan. The lack of an effective escalation plan is something we’ve seen in our client engagements, and it can have a hugely negative effect on project outcomes. In these cases, we work closely with the client to implement a specific, tailored plan that addresses key risks and creates a specific line of escalation for various types of issues. For example, escalation to the CEO might be appropriate for issues related to a potential catastrophic event like a system failure. But normal issues might be escalated to a supervisor, who has a specific spreadsheet item to fill in and pass upward. The need for escalation can also come from unforeseen organizational changes. For example, with heavy staff turnover, there might be broken links in training and understanding new processes. In this case, developing and executing a strong(er) onboarding plan for new employees can help. Another key factor is making sure the change initiative has an ongoing support model to identify and fix any issues or challenges that emerge, such as a power user network within the organization to create a hierarchy for issue resolution. This is not a way for executives to avoid participation. The ongoing support of the executive sponsor(s) is critical for any change initiative to succeed long-term.
Q: How do you communicate improvement initiatives within the organization without people thinking that this is going to drain human capital and/or resources?
A: Communication should start early and continue throughout the project. A solid communication plan should focus on the positive organizational effects (rather than the resources being utilized) and should include reinforcement of the WIIFM for every person in the organization. The WIIFM concept goes beyond those directly affected by changed processes. It is also important to help the entire organization understand change initiative benefits and how they are positively and individually affected. Keeping staff buy-in strong and sustaining their engagement are thus very important communication plan elements. Also, a critical message to continue telling is that all change initiatives are an ongoing journey, and the organization is committed to them from the top down. One way to achieve this is through collecting feedback along the way to help in adapting to new challenges and requirements. This type of ongoing feedback doesn’t have to be tedious; for example, one of our clients successfully used a reward system where employees got a cash bonus for suggesting improvements.
If you would like to learn more you can join APQC and Grant Thorton for the free webinar ‘Making Transformational Change Last’ on May 20th at 11am (CDT).
Chris Jacobs is Director of Advisory Services at Grant Thornton LLP. You can follow Grant Thornton on Twitter at @GrantThorntonUS.