Congratulations! You've spent the last 6 months implementing a new change project that will improve ways of working, increase efficiency & productivity and increase profitability. Phew, it was hard work but it will be worth the effort when all these benefits are realised.
However, a further 6 months down the line and people have drifted back to the old ways of working or found 'work-arounds' for the new ways, efficiency & productivity have at best stayed the same and you're yet to see any financial improvement in profits.
Sound familiar? It is surprising how often an organisation never really obtains the full benefits of the improvement they spent time, effort and resource implementing. It's not because it was a poor idea and often it's not due to a poor implementation, though there are always things that could be done better. One of the biggest challenges to sustaining a change is the Control measures organisations put in place after implementation.
Those of you who follow our Blogs will know we love to follow the DMAIC process (Define Measure Analyse Improve Control) and in our opinion, key to embedding change is the Control step. We are always told to spend a significant amount of time in the planning phase of a project (Proper Planning Prevents P#!s Poor Performance) but often neglect to spend an appropriate amount of time thinking about what needs to be done to ensure the improvement is embedded and sustained.
So less rambling and more "How the hell do I do it?"
The first and possibly most important step is to ensure you have clearly defined the New Standards. What was once OK is now history and your new ways of working will require you to define New Standards. Involving staff in the creation of these will go some way to ensuring you have buy-in and in helping in the communication process. It's no good redefining the Standard if you then fail to effectively communicate it to staff AND ensure they have clearly understood what is required (message transmitted does NOT always equal message received!).
Here's another point for consideration - do people understand the impact of the change not only to their part of the process but also to their colleagues; customers; suppliers etc upstream and downstream? This becomes critical when they want to start improving or 'tweaking' the new process or ways of working - understanding the impact on the other parts of the chain.
OK so your New Standards have been clearly defined and communicated but if you want it to stick then you need to have the appropriate Metrics - What gets measured, gets done. Now it is very important that you get the right measures in place as all too often we see badly designed metrics driving the wrong behaviour and ways of working. Again get the staff involved in defining these so that you get ownership (after all they are going to be the ones filling in the data) and also to ensure that the Metrics are relevant. They must mean something to the people using them and they should feed in to higher level management Metrics (See Diagram below). And as we are always fond of saying: make sure your Metrics are Visual! Get them up on the wall, use tables, graphs or charts and keep them simple.
The final element of your Metrics is to ensure that whatever you are measuring, you are measuring it in a relevant time frame that allows you to intervene BEFORE you get a problem.There is no use logging a report is late, better to monitor it's progress against deadline so you can intervene BEFORE it becomes late.
With Standards and Metrics in place you are well on your way to embedding the change or new ways of working. All it now needs (and this is good Leadership practice anyway) is some Coaching. We're not just chucking this in as it's the latest craze to sweep business, we really believe in the power of effective Coaching by your Managers. We use a phrase "Gemba Coaching" which means Managers getting off their butt's and getting out on the shop floor or office every day and having real Coaching conversations with staff - "Where are we against the standard?" should be a frequent question asked. This is a fantastic opportunity (yes it really is!) for Managers to find out what is going on, how people are performing, what issues they face or what support they need. It is a chance to recognise and reward the right behaviours and where people are not meeting the standard, use Coaching to improve performance. It is important that Managers cast the right Shadow - remember people do as they see not necessarily as they are told!
So now you have some suggestions to help you ensure the next change you instigate is not only successfully implemented but becomes embedded and sustained providing you with the benefits you expected.
In-Place AND In-Use is the way forward!
If you find this article interesting please feel free to share it with colleagues. if you'd like to discuss more then get in touch, we're always happy to talk and help where we can.
