Disruptive markets, competition and technology is now the norm rather than the exception. Consumers are more sensitive to bad service and poor quality products. Web 2.0 technology provides consumers with the power to create or destroy a business within hours.

Traditional change practices in organisations are too slow and expensive for organisations to use to adapt to changing business conditions.

And too many organisations continue to build their adaptive processes on sand rather than take a more fundamental approach and build adaptive infrastructure foundations on rock.

Organisation Change

Organisation change typically describes a major, transforming discrete event that impacts across the whole organisation. Transformational change has disadvantages. For example:

{    It is resource expensive and intensive

{    It exhausts managers and staff

{    the change is often just too big and managers give up.

{    Outcomes are often patchy

{    It can take too long to implement and the organisation continues to experience an alignment gap

These problems lead to managers and staff resisting new transformational change initiatives. The result is that organisational change can have the paradoxical effect of freezing the organisation preventing future critical alignment programs.

Organisation Renewal

Organisation Renewal is the process of achieving growth, agility and sustainability through the continual adjustment and synchronisation of strategy, culture, organisation, management, roles, skills, people, processes and technology.

This means developing manageable organic alignment processes and infrastructure so that organisations can continually adjust and synchonise performance factors to adapt to continually changing market conditions.

This framework can help organisations avoid the big bang, cage rattling change programs. A greater awareness of organisational renewal processes can help avoid organisation freezing and keep people open, positive and innovative all the time. This means change is sustainable!

Key Organisational Renewal Factors

Organisation renewal is a scientific, evidenced based approach to understanding the factors that enable organisations to continually adapt to their environment. The key factors are, have always been, and will continue to be;

{    Socio-Technical systems

{    Information Management

{    Culture

{    Organisation structure

{    People Capabilities

{    People engagement

{    Business processes

{    Technology

{    Knowledge Value Management – creating value from knowledge held by people in organisations

It is not necessary to be expert in these fields. However it is necessary to understand how these factors intersect and how they interrelate with each other across the organisation.  Avoiding Change Silos (see article posted in Organisation Renewal on 24 July 2008) is also critical.

Summary

Ironically, organisation renewal is not new. However in recent years it has been lost to the mumbo jumbo of change agents, fads and myths. Organisation Renewal means addressing the critical fundamentals in the organisation. Not to address these fundamentals is like trying to put icing on a cake that has not yet been baked!

Dallas Burgess

© PeopleAdvantage Pty Limited 2008.

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To achieve significant improvements in competitiveness it is essential that:

·        Sufficient in-house expertise in role design and remuneration exists

·        Effective collaborative mechanisms exist to ensure staff agree to, and adhere to key change outcomes

Job Design and Remuneration

Conduct an audit to determine the effectiveness of current job design and remuneration practices. Key indicators of poor job design and remuneration practices include:

·      People are unclear about their roles and do not understand what is expected

·      Pay is perceived to be inequitable; and it cannot be demonstrated that there are no such inequities

·      High performing people are not sufficiently rewarded

·      People cannot see the possibility of a career path and do not understand what they have to do to progress within the organisation

·      Focused, structured learning and development systems do not exist

·      Effective internal selection systems and procedures do not exist and the organisation cannot ensure that the right person is selected for the job

The existence of any of the above will result in staff resisting significant improvements in their work. 

Case Study

An organisation was experiencing lack of trust between management and professional staff due to the existence of the above problems. To improve trust the client needed to design new roles, career paths and a remuneration framework for the professional staff.

We helped the client to develop clear, transparent, objective role requirements, realistic career paths and a fair market based remuneration framework. As a result the professional staff enthusiastically embraced the new organisation direction.

Effective Collaborative Processes

Effective collaborative processes are not the same as consultative processes. Too many organisations confuse these concepts. The strength of the consultative committee can also be its weakness. Yes, it is essential that the people who do the work are involved in changing their work (strength), but change is threatening and this can deter many from pursuing major changes to their own jobs (weakness). Consultative committees can also be the platform to continue long standing conflicts rather than the basis for developing and implementing change. 

The alternative is to conduct collaborative based workshops. These are structured so that jobs and work practices are redesigned at the same time. Redesigning jobs and changing work practices simultaneously is complex and usually requires the assistance of an expert facilitator – it is the most cost effective method for identifying and implementing significant change.

Management can evaluate the proposals generated during the workshops and determine the impact on the business. Healthy facilitated workshops result in trust between management and staff to quickly reach agreement on what, how and when to implement the new jobs and work practices.

Organisations often forget, or ignore, that staff are knowledgeable about how to save costs and increase productivity. Structured collaborative processes are an effective means of tapping into the intellectual assets of the organisation. 

Alignment of Staff Performance to New Business Objectives

Collaborative based workshops cause staff to directly focus on critical business objectives. These objectives become the benchmarks or standards against which all proposed changes are matched. A proposal that does not meet the criteria is quickly eliminated.

Healthily structured collaborative workshops facilitate staff commitment to change.  Why is this so?  Because the more anxious staff feel about a change the greater is the resistance to change. However, healthy workshops provide a bridge between the old ways of working and the new. They provide the psychological security that staff need during the transition. This can have the effect of reducing staff anxiety resulting in greater openness, innovation and commitment to change. This is critical when the business is marginal and/or facing dangerous competitive threats.

Case Study

A client needed help to lead a consultative committee through the process of role redesign, development of performance criteria and modernise remuneration practices.  The consultative committee had been meeting for eighteen months with very little progress. By applying tested and proven role design principles and facilitating collaboratively based workshops the company was able to redesign roles and career paths, define performance criteria and develop a modern remuneration framework in less than three months.

Summary

To achieve significant improvements in competitiveness ensure the business has access to expertise to collaboratively redesign roles.

Dallas Burgess

ã Organisation Renewal Pty Limited 2008 All Rights Reserved.

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