During these times of uncertainty, companies are finding themselves going through an abundance of change. Businesses are facing disruptions to their supply chains, consumer demand is shifting or being reduced, and workforces are adapting to remote work. These challenges can easily pause Business as Usual (BAU). But do they have to?

At Kenway, we believe a comprehensive Change Management plan and approach to any of these disruptions can help businesses continue their operations through Business as NEW Usual. Let’s analyze how organizations can confront these disruptions to the workforce, and successfully continue in a Business as NEW Usual mode.

Workforce Change

In a normal environment, companies take months to plan large-scale change initiatives – they analyze the impacts to their teams, they survey, they define the best approach, etc. With COVID-19, all of this has flipped on its head. Companies don’t have the time they are used to; they have had to move whether they were ready for it or not. The rapidly changing pandemic has forced them to fully integrate a digitized workforce, and so they needed to define their Business as New Usual world fast.

This change is a complicated one for many businesses because remote working requires certain technologies, including virtual communication, collaboration and instant messaging tools. Processes must be considered and amended to capture this change in environment. Most importantly, people must be considered as well. This switch to remote working will not be the same for everyone. Some may find it productive while others may struggle with web conferencing or managing distractions from their kids throughout the day.

At Kenway, we approach Change Management by integrating people, process and technology to ensure that large-scale transformations deliver value by placing end-user adoption at the forefront.

People

Remote working has the largest impact on people. Employees are now required to navigate their jobs from the comfort (or distractions) of their own home. It’s important to understand that this experience will not be the same for everyone. The following factors are essential considerations to effectively implement this change:

• Communication: Clear communications and expectations are critical to successfully implementing a change of this magnitude. It’s important to be authentic and craft communications that consider employee points of view. Connecting emotionally with employees during this stressful time is just as important as solving the business problem.
• Training: Since this change will be different for different people, it’s important to provide adequate training so that everyone can effectively use the virtual communication and collaboration tools available to them. Offering different times and options for training can ensure that everyone can complete it on their own schedule. In the current environment, recording all training sessions is a great option to create on-demand assets.
• Resources: Everyone should know where they can go for more information or who they can go to for help. Additional resources can include one-on-one working sessions or job aids. People will feel more comfortable if there is clear direction on what to do if they get stuck.

Process

An important consideration regarding the shift to remote working is the impact to business processes. It’s likely that BAU processes need to be amended or revamped to reduce employee confusion and ensure the organization is ready for Business as NEW Usual. A key consideration when amending business processes is the likelihood that remote working will exist in some fashion in the future. Taking this into account as these processes are being redefined will avoid continuous updates moving forward.

Onboarding new employees is a process that is best served in person. COVID-19 has forced many companies to conduct this process remotely. When shifting to remote onboarding, we recommend a few critical updates to process:

1. Provide a checklist of essential remote work equipment (e.g. computer, office supplies, computer monitor, etc.) and clearly communicate which items are covered by the employer.
2. Schedule tutorials and trainings on the firm’s communication and collaboration tools (e.g. Teams, Zoom, etc.) early in the onboarding cycle.
3. Plan virtual Zoom lunches, happy hours, or casual meetings with other colleagues to ensure the new employee feels welcome and part of the team.

Technology

Video conferencing is the new norm for meetings, and will likely continue to be for the near and distant future. This large-scale change can be challenging, especially given the lack of time to properly plan ahead. To ensure adoption, it’s important to prepare for resistance and ensure impacted parties clearly understand the vision and benefits of the change.

Resistance can take on many forms: fear of the unknown, unclear benefits, impact to current job and responsibilities, etc. In order to manage resistance, it’s important to proactively prepare and assess likely areas and resources that might oppose change, apply the drivers for change to weaken or eliminate the resistance, and routinely request feedback to ensure issues and concerns are addressed. As it relates to a new technology, creating open lines of communication are critical to receiving honest feedback about the tool, and ultimately ensuring the tool is effectively solving the business problem. Employees should feel comfortable expressing their opinions or ideas about the tool through these open channels, especially if the tool isn’t working, because new technology is only as effective as the people using it.

Effectively managing resistance allows companies to focus on adoption. One critical component to ensuring adoption of a new technology is to clearly articulate the benefits of the change to the end user (i.e., answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”). A benefit of a video conferencing tool allows for virtual collaboration and discussions with fellow employees without the need for an office or conference room. In the world of remote working, this type of tool is extremely valuable and necessary for employees to continue effectively communicating with each other. Reinforcing these benefits through various mediums of communication will help feed user adoption.

How Kenway Can Help

Is your organization going through disruptions to BAU or struggling to implement a large-scale change across the business? If so, Kenway can help you with a transformational Change Management approach that drives employee adoption. Reach out to us at [email protected] and let us know how we can help.

Change can be uncomfortable, even under the best circumstances. But when your entire worldview is challenged practically overnight, it’s particularly difficult.

Over the past several months, people around the globe – Kenway Consulting included – have experienced monumental change with no time to prepare. Or did we?

Kenway, along with countless other businesses, was forced to respond to the changes brought on by the global pandemic extremely quickly, which often leads to a very reactive response. However, by leveraging our experience providing change management services to our clients, we were able to ease our employees into a new work model in a more proactive manner. Although this circumstance was unlike a typical change management engagement where we might help with a systems implementation or mergers and acquisitions, we were still able to leverage our methodology to plan and execute a change plan as we would in any situation.

From a purely “business as usual perspective,” existing remote working practices were put into overdrive. As consultants, we are not always co-located with our clients, so working virtually in an efficient and productive manner had already been proven. We did, however, quickly ramp up our staff on the additional tools and technologies introduced to enable and support our virtual model on a much larger scale.

Where Kenway excelled in this unprecedented time was from a culture perspective. Employees were abruptly forced into an unfamiliar social construct. We were cut off from each other, cut off from our clients, and many were even cut off from family members.

Kenway quickly mobilized a task force and leveraged existing communication channels to create a comprehensive communication plan. Messaging from leadership was swift and intentional, anticipating the anxiety and fears that employees were experiencing and providing them with timely information and updates. These all-company communications were supplemented with 1:1 touchpoints between employees and their internal career counselors to ensure messages were clear and questions were answered.

Additionally, our Employee Engagement team brainstormed ideas on how to keep the Kenway family connected through a variety of formats including virtual happy hours and lunches, a company trivia night, and by sharing useful tips and tricks spanning topics such as employee & family well-being, learning & development, productivity, networking and client engagement.

In keeping the individual in mind and applying Prosci’s ADKAR^® Model (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement), Kenway was able to better manage this unplanned change and guide employees along the journey. We helped each other adapt to the “now normal” by following these principles:

1. Understand the unique needs of employees, anticipate their concerns, and communicate with regular cadence.
   Tip: If you plan to discontinue or switch gears on how you will be communicating in the future, communicate it!
2. Provide adequate training to ensure employees know how to use new tools and technology.
   Tip: If a process is changing, ensure all stakeholders are aware!
3. Ensure employees have access to the resources they need to help them embrace the change.
   Tip: Remember, change can be emotional. Don’t dismiss the very human reaction to change!
4. Celebrate successes.
   Tip: Don’t overlook this important part of change, especially now. Even though you are not co-located, employees still need to know that they are valued for their contributions.

I don’t know what the future holds, or when we will get back to the life we used to know. But I do know that Kenway has the tools to adapt and lead us through whatever the change may be.

Does your organization need help executing internal change? Reach out to us at [email protected].

“All great changes are preceded by chaos.” I can't think of a word that more accurately describes the state of my closet this past January than “chaos.” Little by little, a fabric monster had grown out of control until the suitcase from my holiday travels lay still packed on my floor without a single hanger or square inch of drawer space available.

That was my breaking point. I was finally ready to do something about it and, lucky for me, I had just discovered “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” on Netflix.

For those who aren't familiar, Marie Kondo is the organization guru behind the international craze known as the KonMari Method. This new Netflix series that brought her home and closet organization method to the masses has resonated so well that thrift stores across the country are seeing a surge in donations. 

I dove head first into the KonMari Method. My ambitions even spread to my living room and kitchen. Over the next two weeks, I spent time every day moving piles and bags of clothes, and reorganizing cabinets and drawers until finally I was done decluttering my home. The outcome of this effort was life changing. Months later, my apartment is still organized and much easier to manage.

To Change or Not to Change

In life and in work, we are constantly assessing the relative risk between keeping things the way they are and changing.

To keep things the way they are often means to live with inconvenience and dysfunction. The nature of technology is one of planned obsolescence, meaning that whatever inconvenience with which you are dealing now compounds exponentially with each product launch and iteration of software updates.  In other words, change brings more inconvenience and dysfunction, but if done correctly, reduces or eliminates it over time.

One would think that embracing change would be the obvious choice, but it often isn't. Why? Because the decision to embark on a change means to temporarily live with increased inconvenience and dysfunction. I had chosen to live with a messy closet rather than take the time to organize it in the same way that I have seen clients hang on to floppy disks, mainframe systems written in COBOL, and an active email chain that started in 2014. (Yes, really.)

Large transformative change is a hard choice to make because it requires you to finally come face to face with the things you pushed to the back of your closet.

Find Your Marie Kondo

Once you decide that a transformative change is necessary, you must face some hairy logistical questions:

• As it is, my team and I work full time. How can we possibly add another project to our plate?
• Is this really the best solution to our situation/problem?
• How long will this take? How much will it cost? What is the return on investment?

In my case, I had the capacity available to do the work, I just needed Marie Kondo’s guidance around the strategy and methodology of home organization.  Like me, you might find yourself in need of a guru to guide your company through a business problem or major change – enter Kenway.

At Kenway, we are dedicated to providing the right-size solution for each client’s enterprise transformation needs – whether that be strategic insight and planning to executing a corporate restructuring initiative, or ground-level change management expertise to transition from a legacy software system.

While we don't have a Netflix series just yet, we’d love to talk to you about the “Kenway Method.” To learn more, reach out to us at [email protected].

Election season is in full force, and, as you would expect, one of the more prominent themes of this year’s campaigns is “Change.” Our candidates are going to reform healthcare, immigration policy, corporate tax laws, education, and so on and so forth. I don’t have an issue with our candidates running on a platform of change, as I believe that positive change should be embraced and even celebrated. However, the one thing that troubles me when I hear most of our candidates speak about “Change” is the frequency that our candidates use the word “I” when they speak about their plans for change.

In order for large scale “change” to be accepted and, in the best cases, embraced, change must be a “We” thing—it cannot be an “I” thing. This is not to say that everyone impacted needs to participate in the decision-making process, be an advocate for the change, or even agree with the change. In large scale initiatives, that is not feasible. However, each impacted individual must understand the reasoning behind the change, and they should have the opportunity to be involved in shaping how change is going to impact them, their organization, or their country.

For the purposes of this article, I am going to focus on Organizational Change, as I don’t have the time or battery life on my computer to continue down the path of discussing National Change. To increase the likelihood of your organizational change initiative resulting in complete cultural adoption, here some best practices:

Get Your Key Stakeholders Involved as Early as Possible

One of the biggest failures I see when working on enterprise or organizational change management initiatives is that there is often a strong sense of “I” in the early stages of defining and initiating the organizational change initiative. Individuals or small groups of leaders will decide what needs to happen, define the benefits, and convince decision makers that a change is needed. Often, key stakeholders or those impacted most by technology, process, or organizational changes are not engaged or even identified until after the planning has been completed and the execution begins.

The stakeholders who are most intimately involved and/or impacted by the proposed change are critical to the success of a change event. Leveraging their subject matter knowledge in developing the “Whys” and “Whats” of a change event will immediately ensure that your stakeholders are accountable. This goes a long way to ensuring the successful execution of the proposed change. By allowing stakeholders to ask and answer the questions “Why is this change taking place?” and “What’s in it for me?” stakeholders will feel ownership of the business benefits identified in the business case. They will be champions of the change within their organizations and will want to help their group adopt and embrace the pending change.

Plan How to Engage the Rest of the “We” in Driving Change

With your key stakeholders onboard and fully accountable for the success of the change event, the next critical task is planning how to communicate the change to all the other impacted parties.  As soon as an initiative moves out of the planning phase and into the execution phase, it is imperative to begin thinking about the rest of the “We.” That is, who else will be impacted by this project, when and how does it make sense for them to be informed about the change, and how should they directly affect the change?

By completing a Change Management Plan that includes an impact analysis and a communication plan, you will ensure that you understand the rest of the impacted areas and that the appropriate steps are being taken to involve them in critical project deliverables (e.g. Business Requirements and Business Process Redesign Documents). It is also important to plan the volume, schedule, and channels through which you will communicate with various types of impacted individuals. Most importantly, you should plan for the training of impacted areas, as appropriate.

If you would like to see an example of a Change Management Plan, e-mail us at [email protected] and we’ll send you a sample template!

See Your Change Through and Execute the Plan

Now that you have built your approach to the “We” and identified the means and frequency of communication, your change event should not be as daunting or as lonesome. By getting your colleagues and co-workers from all impacted areas vested in the project at a very early stage, you have positioned your project to create more informed and effective project deliverables (e.g. requirements, designs, business processes). Shared accountability for the success of the pending initiative should be felt throughout the organization, positioning your change event for success. The final phase in ensuring that you are enabling your organization to be successful is to stay focused on the end goals, see the change through to the end, and continually revise and execute your Change Management and Communication Plans. Depending on the size and complexity of your change initiative, dedicated program or project management help can prove to be invaluable in staying the course and identifying potential risks and mitigation strategies as early as possible.

As you are following the campaigns and their promises of change, or perhaps even planning a significant change at your current organization, understand the benefits of creating an environment conducive for change. Furthermore, recognize that the first step in creating an environment conducive for change is to create an environment of inclusion. In other words, make sure that change is a “We” thing and not an “I” thing.

If you would like to learn more about effective Change Management, or you are about to lead a change initiative, please contact us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

There is only one thing that is certain in life – and that is change.  It is all around me, personally, professionally, and it even presents itself when I least expect it.  Professionally, as a consultant, I find myself helping my clients through change on a daily, if not hourly, basis.  I find that change is one of the biggest challenges with which my clients deal on a consistent basis. Change in the form of deciding to bring in consultants, change in the form of a new strategy or direction, change in the form of starting, stopping or completing a project, and change in people, processes and technology.  As I sit back and reflect on how we as a consulting company get our clients interested or comfortable with the prospect of change, I often times personalize these challenges by comparing them to events in my personal life.

Over the past 5 years, my career has gone through a major transformation.  I went from the advertising industry, which I knew well, to the consulting world, where I was a bit of a novice in comparison to my peers.  Not only did I find myself in a new work environment, but I also had new lingo to learn.  Suddenly, the familiar phrase “I’m really busy” was replaced with “I have no bandwidth.”  (“Who says that”, I thought?  Everyone, it turns out).  That is just a minor example, but because of my career change I was now able to relate to clients and the thought processes they go through with regards to change.  In fact, when I stopped to think about it, as a consultant, I was doing a lot of the same activities as I did in advertising.  We just did not attach “Software Development Life Cycle” terms to them or use words such as “project plan”.   Once I started creating a framework and comparing my former advertising tasks to my new consulting tasks, my new career started to take shape.

Whether I am dealing with a client or embarking on a new frontier of my own, here are a few steps I take to help facilitate change:

Communication – Start your communication early and communicate often.  Clients, your spouse and your kids will be more open-minded about change once they are prepared and understand when and from where it is coming.  This gives them time to plan and understand the impacts and what they may need to do in order to prepare for that change.

Documentation – Documentation is critical when presenting changes to impacted parties.  Documentation comes in many forms such as user guides, glossaries, job descriptions and mapping documents.  It can be formal, on chalk boards, on the refrigerator or on a Post-it note.  Either way, start working with those being impacted early to understand their processes and how they work.  This will allow you to understand which type of documentation will be the most useful to them.

Presenting the Value – One of the biggest hurdles with change is that people often view it as additional work or a hardship.  It goes a long way to explain the value of what you are doing and how it helps the company, peers and themselves.  For example, changing the process, documentation and rigor in which you capture requirements may be more consuming up front but will ultimately decrease the number of defects and time spent on quality assurance.  Regardless of the change, painting a picture of the positive future state is critical.

Training – Documentation and communication are often not enough.  Hands-on training is often needed and should be given through the proper mediums.  Again, understanding your audience and their processes will help you determine the best training plan; whether it is classroom, virtual or self-based.

Support – Make sure you leave time for support once the change is rolled out.  Ensure those impacted by change know where to go with questions or issues they encounter and a process is in place to adjust to any additional changes that are needed.

Kenway has found that if approached in the right way, change can be invigorating and exciting rather then dreaded.  Fortunately for myself, I joined a company who is well-versed in helping their clients adapt to change.  This allowed me to come up to speed quickly in my career and in turn, allows me to help my new clients deal with change in their daily lives as well.