Move quickly
A few years ago, MACTEC switched to an Oracle accounting-based system. One of the accountants told the then-CEO that there was no way the company could roll it out in less than a year because there was too much required to get it done. Instead of saying OK, that CEO told him he wanted it done within six months but that he’d like to see it in four.
By four months, MACTEC had pretty much finished it, and by the six-month deadline, it was fully integrated. In contrast, another large company had made the same transition, and after a year, everything was still a disaster because that company dragged it out too long. The lesson Massey saw in this was that when you decide to make changes, you need to move quickly.
“If you’re going to make wholesale changes, you need to plan well, schedule well and move quickly,” Massey says. “Otherwise, everyone gets too absorbed by the change, and they then do not focus on the business.”
So when her teams had found solutions to broken processes, they also had to come up with implementation strategies that involved both communication methods and action items, much like a normal project they would have for a customer.
“Those changes are treated as projects,” she says. “They have a project manager within their group that runs that project. … Like any project, we have scope, schedule and budgets.”
Identify someone to lead the change. It may be someone in the affected department or simply look for people who have been successful in the past.
“Find a project manager within their own firm, someone who has a track record of being able to roll out a new process or system,” she says. “There’s no magic tool. It’s the individual and that individual’s knowledge of how to run a successful project.”
Then decide a time frame for implementing the change. For instance, sometimes with process changes, MACTEC doesn’t roll it out to the entire company at once. Instead, the company may start in maybe four large offices.
“Then we get feedback, and then we identify problems and get those issues solved before we go companywide with it,” she says.
With a point person and schedule in place, then you have to tell your people what’s going on.
“We start with the communication of why we’re making the change and what the benefits of making that change will be for the employee, and then … we communicate the schedule and when it’s going to impact different offices,” Massey says.
The more employees know, the more likely they are to buy in to your change.
“Too often we assume that with employees, the less they know, the better off we are,” Massey says. “That’s a poor approach, and I would encourage anyone to give employees obviously all of the good news you can find, but when you do have bad news or have to make changes that will impact them directly, be as honest and direct as to why you’re making the changes, why you’re taking actions that you’re taking.”
When you do that, employees respond better. For example, a year ago the team decided that it needed to reduce health coverage while also asking employees to pay for more of it. In any organization, that’s not going to go over well, so Massey made sure to give them far more information than they had ever received in the past about how much the health program costs the company. Sharing that financial information was key to fostering buy-in.
“Because of the communication and the honesty and why we were doing the change and the impact to the bottom line, most of the employees, their reaction to it was along the lines of, ‘I don’t like it, but I understand it, and, ‘I understand why the company had to do it,’ so there was an acceptance, and I find that to be true of many things,” she says.
