A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
Atlantic Technologies
Embarking on a Salesforce Project?
At Atlantic Technologies, we do not just provide companies with greenfield deployments of Salesforce, but we also rearchitect systems to realign them with businesses to- ensure an increased customer and employee experience, and an enhanced amount of ROI on the platform. We do this by ensuring that Change Management is brought forward and directs the program itself.
Key Aspects of Change Management
• Manage Change: Change management and the ability to reimagine your business in the digital age are key to a successful Digital Transformation
• Integral People: Co-operation and communication have vital roles throughout the transformation. Look to your leaders and company culture to ensure a successful digital transformation and identify potential barriers.
• Long-term Thinking: Digital transformation is more than a one-step process, and requires long-term training and reinforcement for a team that is enabled and enthusiastic in using the new technologies.
• Engage Employees: Involve employees at the design stage, and maintain excitement through gamification to create a team that is both empowered and interested.
Digital Transformation takes traditional company problems and uses technology to solve them, right? That is just half of it. Our Head of Change Management, Richard Stone, takes you through the real steps to success if you are about to embark upon a Digital Transformation adventure. This advice can be applied to any business changes you are managing.
“Digital transformation is not just about digital technology.”
With ‘transformation’ comes change, and as you know from your business experience so far, careful change management is imperative.
Digital transformation is not just about using the latest digital technology, it’s about improving the experiences of your customers, partners and ultimately employees… therefore it is critical that Change Management is at the forefront of any digital transformation projects
This is where we empower your employees to benefit from the technology smoothing out their day-to-day routine, rather than focus on the discomfort that new routines can sometimes bring.
Step 1: Understand the People
“Ensuring leadership is aligned to the transformation is the first critical element for success. If leadership is not aligned, the business will not be either. Then it is worth looking at the impact of the change on your people. Is the change fundamental to the organization and will it heavily impact your staff? Or is it a subtle cultural change that is more hearts and minds? Depending on which one it is should naturally change your approach. Assessing existing company culture is important as this is your ‘As-is’ state, but it is much more important to understand the impact of the ‘to-be’ and how much effort will be required to get there.”
Step 2: Organize the team
“Once the impact has been assessed and the requirements understood, effort should be made to ensure the right amount of co-operation exists between the project or transformation team and the business departments. You need to ensure there are dedicated resources and the correct people are allocated to conduct your digital transformation.”
Step 3: Communicate Clearly and Manage Expectations
“Developing a communication approach should be next on the agenda. Organizations live or die based on how well they communicate. This is not just about sending out emails. Developing an identity, tailoring your messages and choosing the appropriate senders must be something that you consider. Then decide, what story are you telling and what expectations do you want to set.”
Step 4: Training, Support and Reinforcement
“Ensuring that training is relevant and interactive and that management are a role model and reinforce desired behaviours is the next set of critical elements to change success. It is commonplace to hear, ‘IT just released the technology with no training’ or ‘We were given some training but afterwards, there was nowhere to go for support’.
Step 5: Empower and Excite
“Involving your employees with the design of the solution and then getting them to take ownership as an SME or Champion, empowers your employees via ownership. This allows them to take responsibility for the tools that they are provided with to meet the needs of their cust omers and should support the long term embedding of the tool – this should eliminate the traditional perspective that ‘I was given this tool but it’s not right’. With the introduction of gamification, you can continue to engage and excite your employees.”
By taking a bit of time to understand the people and the company culture, you can shift your employees from potential barriers, to onboard, enabled and empowered. That is success.
The evolution of the workplace shows no signs of slowing down. In order to survive such an ever-evolving world, we must teach our employees to be more resilient and embrace change.
Check Out: Top Change Management Consulting Services Companies
