In a blog post by Anne Field of Register Rep, the author writes about the importance of communication and collaboration when implementing a change and then offers practical tips for adoption.
From the post:
You know what they say: The one constant is change. That said, there’s another eternal truth: The one constant about change is that people hate it. And since your employees undoubtedly are people, you can expect that they, also, feel uncomfortable when facing the prospect of a disruption to their routines. But that can make it very difficult to try to introduce changes, large and small, into your practice. We’re talking about anything from a new CRM system to an all-out revision of strategic direction. Making matters even trickier, according to Daniel Crosby, an organizational psychologist in Huntsville, Ala., who specializes in change management for financial advisors, the natural inclination for many results-oriented advisors is to move at top speed, completely ignoring the time-consuming spade work they might need to persuade their staff to get on board.
Trouble is, if your employees don’t embrace whatever change it is you want to introduce, you can forget about it: You won’t succeed. “Trying to make a change without staff buy-in is a recipe for disaster,” says Crosby.
Still, introducing change is quite doable if approached with sufficient finesse and patience, as Story discovered. “Change is a process,” says Crosby. Understand what’s involved and you, most likely, can make just about any change stick.
First place to start is a reality check. That means acquiring an understanding that you and your employees might regard a specific change very differently—and that you need to respect their point of view.
Like any sale, however, introducing change ultimately is about convincingly demonstrating the benefits of whatever you’re pushing. In other words, you need to show employees how the move will help them and the practices do better. “When people are well-informed and understand the decision, change is much easier,” says Palaveev. In some cases, that might take some doing—but the effort is essential.
After you’ve made your case, then you have to persuade employees they have a stake in the outcome. And you do that by, as the jargon goes, getting them to assume ownership of the change. Best is to identify the people directly affected by the change and incorporate them into the decision-making process.
By getting employees involved in the decision-making process, you also can save time in unexpected ways.
How are you including your employees in decision-making processes, particularly when it relates to new procurement processes?
From renewable energy credits to frozen turkeys just about anything can be run through the reverse auction. And now a young lawyer named Robert Grant Niznik has developed a website that allows individuals to post their cases online and lawyers then bid on the cases via a reverse auction.
Some in the legal industry oppose the idea, calling the site the “eBay of lawyering,” and argues the reverse auction style service will lower the integrity of the legal profession.” But Niznik argues that “the site enables attorneys to expand their client base and gain credibility” and that “lawyers have nothing to lose and “everything to gain” from joining the site.” He adds that “financially challenged clients who ‘get turned away from legal aid’ can use the site to obtain affordable legal advice”, as supported by an ABAJournal.com post last year describing how many in the middle-class are stuck in legal limbo because they make too much money to qualify for legal aid, but not enough to afford an attorney.
What do you think? Do you think it’s an appropriate and respectable to market legal services? What are the advantages? Disadvantages?
Interesting read from Supply Chain Review about the rising interest in demand for procurement solutions- including reverse auctions.
Large enterprises are back in the market driving big deals, while mid-market firms are implementing sophisticated procurement systems for the first time.
Cloud computing is behind most of the positive trends in this market, including increased adoption, improved collaboration and new forms of application functionality.
I expect 2011 will be a strong year for the procurement systems market.
Reverse Auction Success Story: Even very large companies are engaging our services
eBridge recently engaged with a Fortune 500 company that had used reverse auctions in the past, but experienced limited success because their purchasing team was not fully engaged in the process and nor were their suppliers.
Knowing the reverse auction procurement process is now a best practice and that they needed to adopt it into their procurement strategy, they began looking for new reverse auction software solutions to purchase.
eBridge presented our full service solution and it resonated with them. They saw that there was no software to purchase and maintain nor extensive internal training and that eBridge would immediately come along side their team to deliver a fully managed reverse auction process for them. They valued eBridge’s leadership in the process in addition to the years of reverse auction experience to help them make the process change internally and to their supplier base.
When asked for their feedback, the senior procurement officer provided the following tangible results of implementing eBridge’s reverse auction services:
– A more efficient procurement process
– An expanded supplier base
– Knowing we are buying “at market” in every transaction
– Innovative technique has energized our purchasing team
– Pocketing an extra 10-15% to our bottom-line
A few weeks ago I wrote a post entitled, Organizational Change and Reverse Auctions. It stated “organizations don’t change, people do or they don’t”.
Expanding on the topic of the individual’s role in change management, the Change Management Learning Center states, “The essence of change management is encouraging and enabling individualtransitions resulting from a project or an initiative. Because change happens one person at a time, change management provides a critical component for achieving project outcomes and results.”
When applied to the reverse auction, organizations will not realize the efficiencies of the new technology if individuals are not challenged to do his or her job in a different way. The reverse auction is not a big change, but it is new technology and management is asking employees, as individuals, to do their jobs slightly different to yield greater results.
This makes having an effective change management strategy that focuses on the individual in your organization essential to affecting change and sustaining change.
How are you focusing on the individual to take advantage of new opportunities for your business?
The debate on American’s dependence on foreign oil is not a new topic. For years Americans have debated opening up ANWAR and other domestic oil producing sites to help decrease our dependence on foreign oil. But in recent months the debate has been magnified due to the unrest occurring in Libya and other major oil producing countries overseas.
Last week the Weekly Standard wrote an article discussing legislation that U.S. Representative Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) rolled out called “A Roadmap for America’s Energy Future”.
According to the Weekly Standard, one key insight the legislation hinges on is “advances in energy efficiency are often inextricably linked with energy production.” As a result, if the US opens up domestic resources, Nunes proposes that “any profits the government makes form increased domestic energy production would go into a trust fund for renewable energy sources, as well as new research and development.”
Nunes further suggests using reverse auction technology to disperse the newly created trust fund monies. Companies would compete in a free market environment on energy contracts, based on who can produce the most energy for the least amount of money.
What do you think? Do you think his proposals will help America be more efficient in creating renewable energy sources?
In Dr. Frank I. Luntz’s latest book “Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business From Ordinary to Extraordinary,” he highlights “11 phrases for 2011′ calling them ” the phrases that you should or would be hearing if the political and business leaders really were listening to America”.
Check out the phrases below. Are you taking your business from ordinary to extra ordinary?
LUNTZ’S 11 for ’11:
–’Imagine’ is still the most powerful word in the English language because it is inspiring, motivating, and has a unique definition for each person.
–’No excuses.’ Of all the messages used by America’s business and political elite, no phrase better conveys accountability, responsibility and transparency.
–’I get it.’ This explains not only a complete understanding of the situation but also a willingness to solve or resolve the situation. It’s short, sweet and effective.
–’If you remember only one thing…’ is the surest way to guarantee that voters will remember the one point that matters most to you. This is essential in complicated situations like the upcoming debt ceiling vote.
–‘Uncompromising integrity.’ Of all the truthiness words, none is as powerful as ‘integrity,’ but in today’s cynical environment, even that’s not enough. People also need to feel that your integrity is absolute.
–’The simple truth’ comes straight from billionaire businessman Steve Wynn, and it sets the context for a straightforward discussion that might otherwise be confusing or contentious.
–’Believe in better’ comes from BSkyB, the satellite television provider owned in part by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. empire. Of all the corporate mission statements of the Fortune 100, ‘believe in better’ is the second-most popular — and it applies to politics as well.
–’Real-time.’ This is not a pitch for Bill Maher. Many Americans were furious that they couldn’t get the details of the health-care legislation in a timely fashion. ‘Real-time’ communicates receiving information at the speed of life.
–’You decide.’ No, this is not paying homage to Fox News. The lesson of 2010 is that Americans want control of their lives back and they don’t want Washington or Wall Street making their decisions for them.
–’You deserve.’ This comes from DNC Chairman Tim Kaine and it was first employed by him in his highly praised 2006 SOTU response. It tells voters exactly what they should expect from their politicians and their government.
– ‘Let’s get to work’ was employed by Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) in his successful campaign. No other end-of-speech rallying cry is more motivational to voters.
In an OpEd today’s New York Times, David Yarkin, the former deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of General Services, highlights the efficiencies and cost savings the State of Pennsylvania has achieved through strategic sourcing and urges other states to follow suit.
While I commend his leadership in procurement innovation, I wonder if Pennsylvania and other states have considered adding reverse auctions to their procurement strategy. The reverse auction is an online web-based online, like eBay, but instead of buyers bidding a price up, suppliers place lowering bids, driving the price down.
States such as Indiana and South Carolina have used reverse auctions to purchase over $50 million of goods and services, saving approximately 8% or $3.9 million. Online reverse auctions save an average of 10-25% and have been used by most Fortune 500 companies since the early 1990’s.
Mr. Yarkin is right- strategic sourcing is an excellent way to create efficiencies and savings in purchasing. But I challenge Pennsylvania and other states to take this a step further and incorporate online reverse auction procurement to their purchasing process!
Finding ways to do more with less
By Paul Davidson, USA Today
The post recession American workplace is a leaner and more productive workforce. Today companies across the US are finding ways to do more with less and are operating as a team that shares jobs/responsibilities and enjoying higher job satisfaction.
For example, a bank branch of Anderen Bank in Orlando has a frontline team of four employees today vs ten. This team of four are not chained to their stations but are cross trained to fill in and help out as needed as tellers, customer service reps, new account salespeople. Bank deposits at Anderen have gone from $35 to $100M.
Increased workforce productivity across the country (up 3.5% in 2009) is the new normal.
It is predicted 2.4 M jobs will be added in 2011 but won’t recover the 8.3M lost. That is due to efficiencies that businesses achieved in the downturn. Many combined two to three jobs into one and have become more efficient through implementing new technology and software into their process.
Human resources CEO Harry Griendling of DoubleStar said, “The downturn forced companies to re-examine everything they were doing and come up with a new model.”
“I think there is a generation of leaders who went through a crisis and are going to manage and lead this way for the next 10 years,” said Walt Shill, managing director of Accenture.
eBridge’s fully managed reverse auction procurement team has become an innovative part of company’s new business model. Their efficient online procurement process (with no upfront costs) delivers net savings of 10% to 25% on purchases over $100k and assures their clients achieve an ‘at market’ transaction every time.
“Change management and poor communications among stakeholder groups on IT projects is a key contributor to failure. For many organizations, cultivating communications on technology-enabled business projects appears an almost insurmountable problem.
Communications in this context means explaining the business impact of technology decisions to a non-technical audience. That impact likely includes process changes that may affect employees in a variety of ways.”
How is your organization tackling organizational change to stay up to date with technology?
Check out the full post by Michael Kringsman, author of the blog IT Project Failures by clicking here.