Leading Organizations -- Self-Assessment Based

Leading Organizations -- Self-Assessment Based on Lessons Learned

Often the conflict between part-time managers and full-time employees can be challenging to overcome, especially when a series of significant changes need to be made across a business. Full-time employees, many who have had the same position with a company for nearly a decade, see change immediately as a threat, and fear it. The role of part-time managers is to guide the change management initiative while at the same time assuring valued, long-time employees that they still have a place in the company. This is exactly the situation I faced when given part-time managerial responsibilities for the facilities and maintenance department at a local production center. The full-time employees were resistant to change, did not trust any type of ongoing shift in managerial direction, and did not trust me with their futures. It was a challenging situation to be in and made the concepts of resistance to change and change management very real during my courses.

Analysis and Learning Opportunity

The facilities and maintenance department of a local production center is both excited and terrified about introducing a series of new systems to track progress and performance. Many of the old timers there, those with over 20 years of experience, are calling it "1984" and "Big Brother," flaunting their seniority and lack of support for the new system. As a part-time manager, I was given the task of increasing the use of the new job scheduling and project management system across all employees, with specific focus on the ones who resisted it most: the older employees who had the majority of experience and were assigned the costliest jobs. They felt the system was being put into place to measure their productivity, and fire those that didn't meet some predetermined standard. They also felt that this was an invasion of their professional privacy and that the company didn't trust them anymore. To say this core team of senior maintenance professionals was threatened would be an understatement.

They also viewed me, a relative outsider with a manager title, as a threat and person that would not be able to fully understand just how troubling this new system was. It was very evident they didn't trust me as the relationship went downhill rapidly with the entire group as the system go-live date approached.

The one positive aspect of all this was that the younger workers, many who had iPhones, iPads and had thousands of hours on computer systems already, viewed it more as a game. They asked for the chance to post scores on the main board of who did the most work fastest, they wanted to have badges for how much they did. One went as far as to say "Can we make this like a Halo3 for maintenance? Can I post my jobs done as icons?" his co-workers laughed and one said it should be like Angry Birds. They clearly understood the meaning of the system. My challenge was many of the older, and most valuable workers, had no idea what Angry Birds is, or for that matter Halo3. Those where games, like social networks including Facebook, their kids used.

The younger workers did however provide excellent guidance on how to overcome resistance to change. I decided to take their idea of turning the adoption of the system into a game, and it would be one entirely available offline as well. This would give the older workers a chance to compete and see their progress. I devised a game of showing not productivity, but customer satisfaction -- a rare metric that was captured in our post-department surveys. The senior managers of the department had extensive dashboards on productivity alone and were at times too obsessed with it, I thought. People in the department considered their worth in productivity alone, not so much in the customer satisfaction they delivered. Focusing on that metric, I put together a short dashboard and had a meeting with everyone in the department, saying that the new system would be used for showing how they as a team delighted and excelled for our internal customers. Immediately the barriers came down with the older workers. I added that the team who came in with the highest customer satisfaction scores every month got a free day off (which was my idea and the senior management loved it). I also explained the system was not there to take away their autonomy, it was there to give them more freedom to better serve internal customers -- because it would show satisfaction with their great work.

Many of the older employees still didn't believe it, but when senior management backed me up and said they would be giving the team with the highest customer satisfaction scores a day off, the level of acceptance changed. Gradually at first. Many were still skeptical. After the first month of the system running, I held a meeting with the department and passed out he customer satisfaction scores by team. Satisfaction scores were highest for the older workers, who made sure every single maintenance request had a customer satisfaction survey filled out by the internal customers they served. The rate of feedback was well over 70%, also a new record for the department. Resistance to change was still there in the most jaded and skeptical people in the department. When the senior management team officially gave the worker team a full day off, then it became real. In addition, they were also given awards, signed certificates as Customer Satisfaction Champions, by the senior staff.