Make employees the center of your change management initiative's design
Sun Life Financial change management expert discusses how to design change management initiatives based on what employees want
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Following the PEX Live: Change Management and Culture Change for Business Processes 2022 event which took place on 26 – 28 July, PEX Network decided to exclusively release the insights offered during the opening session.
The session titled Getting the most out of your data: using voice of the customer and data analysis to implement internal change was presented by Anna Foat, responsible for design literacy and education strategy, global digital enterprise center of excellence at Sun Life Financial. The session looked into how to support major change management initiatives through design.
This article outlines the key highlights of the session.
Design is change management
In today’s world change happens faster and with less warning or pattern than ever before. As such, demonstrating this change and convincing staff that a new way of working is necessary can be extremely tricky, according to Foat.
“It is very difficult to tell senior leaders that what they believe to be true is, in fact, not true,” she stated. “The best way I have found to create change at the highest echelons of organizations is not to tell people they are wrong, but to show them an alternative reality.”
Related content: Managing change during transformation at Asahi
In these instances, Foat explained that the design of a new, improved system or product can be used as a tool for delivering effective change management. It can serve as a far better communication of the necessity of change than a simple explanation.
“Design can be a critical change management tool, because thinking about what people want and not what the organization wants is a new way to challenge people to work,” she said.
Ask the people what they want
According to Foat, one of the biggest issues in change management initiatives is the need to rework them based on the feedback of the employees who will be using the solutions. Giving an example from IT transformation she noted that in many cases IT builds large and complex solutions and then ask employees what they think and what needs changing.
Related content: Using design thinking to achieve customer service process maturity
“Most IT projects, especially big ones, tend to be over budget, over time and often do not deliver the value that was promised to the people that they are designing for,” she noted. “A lot of the time this is just because no one asked those people what they wanted.”
Foat explains that the solution to this is simple. Change leaders can check in with the people the solutions are designed for before and throughout the course of implementing major changes. This way change leaders can not only keep their fingers on the pulse with regard to what is needed by the organization but also make adjustments to any change initiative based on the feedback received from employees.
For further insights from industry experts on how to manage change in your organization, you can watch all sessions on demand here.
Has your business been guilty of implementing solutions without proper understanding of what employees want? Let us know in the comments below.
