Brief

Our client is a relatively newly formed division of a bank and experiencing – financial under-performance, siloed teams and low employee engagement. This necessitated rapid re-alignment to meet external and internal customer needs and expectations. A key enabler of this realignment was a new operating model which would better align business structures and roles to customer needs. This would ultimately maximise revenue-per-employee and minimise cost-to-serve.

Whilst having specific project resources in place to manage the transition to the new operating model, Blue Seed’s expertise and resources were sought to manage broader people impacts of the change and to ensure close alignment of the change process to organisation strategy, leadership, employee engagement needs, change metrics and the overall program roadmap.

Blue Seed had already developed a Best Practice Operating Model Implementation Framework from our extensive experience helping leaders implement similar changes. Under this framework, we advise leaders that planning and execution of the change must take place with the ultimate end-state in mind: to have a highly engaged, high performing workforce, post-change. This means thinking beyond just the transitional period even while executing the difficult people changes.

Solution

Working closely with key leaders we took a structured approach to identify and manage the people impacts of the immediate operating changes.

The key elements of this structure were:

1. Facilitating an offsite to align senior leaders to a set of change leadership principles which underpinned every conversation they had with teams. This maximised the likelihood of employees having a positive experience of the change, thereby enhancing their subsequent engagement.
2. Tracking awareness and commitment of key leaders to highlight who needs what support week-by-week.
3. Defining approaches to launch and communicate the new organisational strategy, to make it understandable and relatable to employees, thereby maximising strategic commitment and team engagement.
4. Coaching leaders one-on-one, to understand their challenges, concerns, strengths and weaknesses and provide advice or help them find the answers they need to proceed with certainty.
5. Building the change leadership capability of mid-level managers through a series of learning sessions. This either brought new skills to the business or at least sharpened the saw of experienced hands, ensuring confident conversations with their team members about the impacts and their future.

Results

Blue Seed’s work had a significant positive impact for the immediate change as well as setting this business on a successful forward path;

1. Identifying unrecognised impacts, risks and issues (by consulting widely and sharing at leadership team meetings) meant these could be proactively managed, ensuring cost-saving targets could be realised with no over-runs.
2. Delivering change leadership training to leaders in preparation for the immediate change meant leaders were better equipped to help themselves and their teams navigate through immediate and future changes more effectively, preventing decreases in staff engagement or productivity and reducing the potential for the loss of high revenue-generating talent.
3. Compiling an integrated change program roadmap with upcoming impacts ensured visibility of all major changes impacting teams, enabled leaders to refocus resources, thereby minimising disruption to business-as-usual sales activities.
4. Furthermore, change offsite facilitation, created a shared vision which enabled a more cohesive leadership team with increased recognition of the value of working with peers and helped galvanise a newly formed leadership team, preparing them for further changes in the next year and leaving impacted leaders more ‘change capable’ than when we started.