Episode 56 – Navigating Organizational Change

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRS a represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

I’m your host, Jason Risley. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast, interviews and insights by TRSA. TRSA is fresh off hosting its final in person event of the 2022 calendar year, the recently completed 11th annual health care conference in Scenic, Scottsdale, Arizona. Thanks again to everybody that joined us for the event. For those that were unable to make it, we will have a special treat for you in an upcoming episode of the podcast.

 

Highlights of a panel presentation featuring insights from several leading executives in the health care sector. Don’t miss it. On today’s episode, we’ll focus on a topic that may be on your mind as the year winds down and we look toward 2023, navigating organizational change. Whether it involves changing your culture, navigating a new business process, or employee turnover, it’s important to have a plan in place to keep your business moving in the right direction as you implement and experience change at your company. Michael Davids, senior consultant at Strategic Insight Partners, joins us to share his expertise in guiding organizations toward improved performance and effective change management.

 

So what are the essentials that you need to have for change management and effective change navigation? The list I’m gonna share with you are truly the essential items that need to be addressed as you’re going about change. The very first thing is what is not working? What needs to be changed? Is it a process?

 

A policy? Is it your overall business philosophy? Is it addressing issues in the the competitive market that you need to focus on? So what doesn’t work and what needs to be changed? That’s the absolute first step.

 

Communication is very, very important throughout change. You’re gonna want to communicate the need for change, that urgency. What is the burning platform? What are the consequences of not changing? And as you craft any kind of messaging and think about how you’re going to deliberate through the different channels, you wanna make sure that the message always conveys what’s in it for me.

 

We we refer to what’s in it for me as WIIFM, that internal radio station that that is playing in everybody’s mind as we go about our work on a daily basis. So you need to communicate, communicate, and communicate again. The need for change, the urgency, the consequences, and then what’s, you know, finally every message should always convey what’s in it for me. You need to plan how you’re going to reach this new future state, this point b. That plan is it’s gonna be your strategy.

 

The strategy is nothing more than the path that you’re gonna take to move from point A to point B. You always wanna be able to collect data and provide training on what you’re focusing on doing. If you’re looking to improve an overall process so that you’re improving, you’re increasing the number of pounds per hour per employee or labor hour going through your laundry, you’ve start collecting data. You establish a baseline. And then from that baseline, you start looking for the improvements.

 

And many times, you’re gonna see there’s gonna be a worsening of performance. You’re gonna see less pounds per hour going through your, wash cycle as you work on the improvements. And as you become better you’ll start to see some improvement. You provide the training. This is where the new world is gonna be.

 

This is the new way we’re going to do things And this means since you may be taking steps in a different order, you may be doing different things. That’s where you apply the, the training. And you establish those metrics that you monitor towards success. So you gather the data, you you create the dashboard with the metrics, and you monitor that as you move towards your future state and success. In the, change models, we talked about celebrating the early success reinforcement that movement to motivate, to build buy in.

 

And so you’re gonna focus on, here’s where we have made the early changes and the great success that comes from this. That reinforcement will help motivate. It will create buy in for those who don’t believe it because you’re always gonna have resistance to change. You need to watch who are the early resistors and who are the late adopters so that you can help create that buy in by clearly communicating and and showing them the success and celebrating that success. Got it.

 

Zen is a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement. It is applied to change management frequently, and we will hear that, organizations that do wanna change will go through kaizen to address a problem. They will say, what’s the reason? What is the base for this problem? Why does it have?

 

What can we do differently to to create the sense that it will not happen and doesn’t happen is it comes across the United States in a lot of different, applications including both the commercial laundry business, as some of our clients in, throughout the US use KINDZEN events to problem solve and improve their overall performance. Leadership is very important. I said you need to have that guiding coalition as the as you get started and you’re setting up your change. So what does being a good leader and having a good leading co, guiding coalition mean? It means to create that vision, and then you would list the leadership team and staff support, to support this overall process.

 

So you you do want the senior leaders of the organization to understand this is the vision and why we need to go there that sense of urgency. What we need to do the strategy of plan forward so that they can come in and support the overall effort. Many organizations, and I I strongly suggest that everyone designate a change champion or leader and give them that title as as the champion of change to provide transparency and accountability. Now that champion can be the CEO, can be the president, it can be a lower executive, but there needs to be a senior leader who has responsibility to see the change is effectively managed and implemented to provide that transparency and accountability throughout the organization. You need to develop a strong focused communication with all the pertinent messaging, everything that needs to be heard by your staff, your customers, the general public.

 

So you wanna talk about your vision and be very clear of what you wanna accomplish in the future state. The timeline, are you going to accomplish this in 3 months, 6 months, this is a year long project, or is this a multi year project? You also need to be able to communicate the progress as you move along your new strategy and your new path, and then there’s other topics. And one of those other topics is always the missteps, the errors, the mistakes that are made during change. It really requires you as an organization to have the environment to believe that the change champion and the leadership team can step up and say, we made a mistake.

 

We made a misstep here. Here’s what we learned from it. Here’s how it will not happen again. And we want to encourage you to go out and take the those risky movements, those those risky steps and change. And when you make a mistake, own it, recognize it and be willing to learn from it so that as you’re moving along, you continue to create the success that is so important and that motivation and that buy in that is so important to achieve the overall desired state.

 

So you’ve got a vision with a leadership team who sup and staff who are in support of it. You’ve created the change champion. You’ve got the communication plan. You’re out there. You’re talking about your vision, your timeline, your progress, and recognizing your mistakes.

 

So you create that plan, that strategy now to get to point b. The and here’s where you start identifying individual products to drive achievement and create the and name those milestones as the checkpoints. Those milestones could be every quarter. You have a a check-in with a town hall meeting where you share the overall success. It could be on your plan.

 

Here’s the number of times we’re gonna communicate and how we’re gonna communicate. 1st, we’re gonna have a town hall meeting. We’re gonna follow that with an email, and then we’re gonna have some postings to the bulletin board so that people get to see what we’re doing. And finally, we’re gonna show our progress towards the change with the metrics we’re tracking on dashboards and make those widely available and public knowledge to show our success. Once you get involved and started on the change process, you wanna build and empower teams to drive success.

 

What do I what do I say about building teams? Well, you’ll have essential people who are doing the the tasks of creating the change. You want to empower them so that they know that they have the resources, the time, and the energy, and your support to go and create actions, make decisions, and drive the the change to success. This will help you continue to build momentum. It creates that enthusiasm and also the buy in on the organization.

 

On a regular basis, whether it be weekly, monthly, quarterly, but it’s certainly cannot be annually Only you monitor the progress and you execute the communication plan with the organization. So you share the results regularly throughout either in writing and newsletters, mass emails, bulletin board postings, town hall presentations by the champion and the leadership team. It’s all about getting the message out that you are effectively going about the change and achieving great results. When you have to admit the fact that we did we’re not achieving great results, that we need to to to learn from our missteps and our errors and move on. So throughout this process, you take every opportunity to celebrate your success.

 

You do it early on and throughout the journey. We decided that when we got to a point in this project of changing the culture and we started to see effective and improved communication and better teamwork and a, less turnover. We started to see a lot of different metrics that said we were improving the culture of the organization. We decided to throw a New Orleans style burial funeral with a complete with a coffin, a mournful jazz band that was trailing the coffin. And we we took the, coffin out of the building with the jazz band playing the mournful tunes.

 

And when we got to the outdoors to say you know, we wanted to mark the fact that the culture the old culture was gone. We set the casket down and started the, great celebration of our success that the new culture was taking taking root. We wanted to show people we were excited about it and happy about it, and so we enacted the, New Orleans style funeral that involved mourning, recognizing the grief of the loss of the old culture, but then to celebrate the new culture and the new life we are going to have. So remember, take every opportunity to celebrate the success early and throughout the journey. So what you wanna make sure you focus on as you’re leading change is focus on that continuous improvement as the norm in operations in dealing with the public.

 

So the it’s it’s once you start changing, I’m gonna tell you the change never stops because if you’re focused on continuous improvement you’re always looking for the next thing that can help improve overall performance, improve the satisfaction of your clients, improve the overall processes within your production system. So you’re gonna wanna make those, improved processes, those greater successes, the norm in your operations. It’s the normal state. It’s what you do on a daily basis. And finally, you wanna make sure that you’re you’re sharing all of this with your public and your customers so that you can point to the the improvements you’ve made and say, see how this is helping you do your job on a better basis.

 

The change management has been around since the 19 twenties, and it has continually involved evolved to include some of the best practices when used to provide drive positive sustainable change. How does it how is change management evolved? Well, we we see in the, John Connor’s model in the 19 nineties of the 8 step process, the prosci ADKAR model created by Hyatt in this in the same time period. Those were evolving processes. They were they were building on the success and what we had learned about group dynamics that started way back in the 1920s.

 

So we were looking for ways to drive that positive sustainable change and that sustainable change comes from reinforcement, from celebrating, from creating the messaging that says what’s in it for me so people embrace and get really excited about the change that is happening in the world. Effective change management is always gonna be hard work. It requires an extreme amount of focus. You need to provide lots of energy to achieve the future state, and there are resources that are needed. You need to spend time and money and involve the people in this.

 

So you’re using all of the resources that are at your fingertips to achieve the overall future state and that positive effective change. The vision in your change sets the end state. It tells people we are going to be the best at what we do. We are going to have the best workplace where people are motivated, they are provide empowered, they are provided the resources to do great work utilizing their their skills on a daily basis. That’s that future end state.

 

It’s be being it clearly articulated helps you paint the picture of what success looks like in the future. There’s gotta be a robust detailed communication plan that will begin to build stakeholder engagement. It will continue with the buy in. It will continue and support and recognize the enthusiasm of the workforce as you work together. Stakeholders and workforce must be engaged.

 

This is the processes that are dealing with people and moving people from point a to point b. So you need to have everybody engaged. You need to allow for their input about where were you going with the organization and what you’re doing, and you allow them to provide feedback as they are going through the change. Many times we use surveys. It’s as simple as going out and doing a paper and pencil survey.

 

You can also do interviews. You can do focus groups to gather that information so that you get the feedback as you move forward. There’s always gonna be metrics showing results that prove work is being done. It’s monitored. Oh, what we pay attention to is what gets done in the in the workplace.

 

We all know that. And then use use that information, the metrics and results to continually improve so that the the change cycle never stops. You’re always looking for the next best thing to improve overall performance. It’s an arduous journey. There are many difficulties along the way, but if you you have diligence, fortitude, you can achieve great success.

 

And by following the models that are out there reinforcing the change and the positive endpoint, you can create that sustainability. If you have any comments on today’s show or suggestions for future episodes, send an email to podcasts attrsa.org. That’s podcasts attrsa.org. If you liked what you heard on today’s show, please subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Itunes, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. For the latest news and information from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry, subscribe to our newsletter, Textile Services Weekly, and our monthly print publication, Text Style Services Magazine.

 

Additionally, don’t forget to follow TRSA on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.