Help employees visualize change
Fimiano knew he had to drive the change throughout the company and beyond. But first, he had to topple the initial domino by getting his employees on board.
“Before they can go out and explain it to a customer, they’ve got to believe it,” he says.
He started by communicating why the change was an improvement. This was easy to explain to the handful of executives who sat in on the Collins consultations; they had already examined the data and debated over the options with Fimiano. But when the message came down to the employees who would be most impacted by the change, he had to pump up his powers of persuasion.
“There’s got to be a lot of frequency and a lot of metrics and a lot of telling the story over every chance you get,” Fimiano says. “Every time I get a group of employees today, I tell them why we want to do design-build and the benefits of it. It is the best thing for the customer, it is the best thing for our employees and it is the best thing for our stockholders. You weigh all three of those things.”
To prove that the change was the best thing for each group, Fimiano looked at data from the company and beyond. Using both internal and national statistics, he compared the time and money demanded by both types of projects as well as the results in terms of price, quality and satisfaction.
But a change this big is overwhelming enough without a deluge of statistics. Condense the data to make it digestible for employees. The more you can convey through a quick glance — as opposed to wading through pages of numbers — the better.
“We try to look at big items in bar graphs so it’s not so much statistics,” Fimiano says. “We try to keep it simple. Honestly, a lot of numbers and statistics get crunched to make the bar graphs, but what they ultimately see is usually pretty simple.”
But repetition and statistics alone might not be enough to propel employees into execution mode. To motivate them to internalize the change, you need to make it seem tangible by painting a picture of what it will be like to reach your goal.
“When you get to utopia, what’s it going to feel like?” Fimiano asks. “We sat down with our crystal ball, if you will, and said, ‘What’s it going to be like when we get there?’”
That prediction comes partly from hopeful aspiration but mostly from data. Fimiano, for example, looked at satisfaction ratings from the two types of work to create his visualization that a design-build firm would sustain happier customers and happier employees.
“That’s helped a lot, just saying, ‘OK, here’s what we want to do and here’s our goal, but here’s what it’s going to feel like when we get there. Here’s why we want to get there,’” he says.