Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash

It’s all too common that a great and innovative idea is rolled out in a business, only to have poor adoption, or worse still, negative impacts on customer happiness and internal team morale. It’s often very tough to understand how a workforce, and ultimately the customers, will react to strategic and structural changes to your organization; being tough to assess does not mean it’s not worth understanding. Your business is most likely making a huge investment to roll out that new initiative or policy, marketing and buy-in is crucial to ensure it doesn’t fade out and become just another wasted effort. Worse still, poorly implemented strategies contribute to the workforce and customers feeling “initiative exhausted” and less likely to buy in next time.

In a lot of ways your employees are very closely connected to your customers. Do you spend time analyzing the customer to determine their win/loss scenarios? If that seems like a no brainer, then should you not also be doing the same with your workforce? Quite often, employees are the most valuable asset at a company, and their morale flows directly through to customer satisfaction levels.

It is never as simple as “if we implement this policy, then the employees will see this benefit”. Everyone lives in their own reality until you invest effort to bring those realities together. For any roll-out to be successful, your leadership team should consider:

A complete picture of direct and indirect impact to employees of all levels of the organization
How it would be perceived by any customers that may see the flow on effects of your initiatives
If the organization has parallel initiatives that will counter act the positive effects of each other
Communication planning; leadership teams often spend a lot of time on planning, and design, only to execute the plan with a solitary email that falls flat with the organization
Marketing and selling the ideas and policies, as well as training for your mid level leaders to ensure they can help the success of the initiative. Sure, your HR team can help with agnostic culture change, however, your front line leaders are crucial to successful change

These are the some of the steps required to bring change to a workforce; without these considerations you may just be wasting valuable time and effort. Importantly, it requires you to see the world view of the people being impacted in order to affect change successfully.

Modus has extensive experience in successfully bringing these two, often disparate, realities of a business and employees together.