Involving People in Change

Change is a word that I do not feel comfortable with, I don't like it. Change immediately makes me feel defensive and I am a positive person! I much prefer evolve and evolving your business to succeed. So if you want to succeed in evolving your company to create future success, you need to involve people. Here is an idea that I have used that excites people, the team I was leading was a customer service team and the goal was to improve our interaction with the customers. Here is what I said at a team session
"I need your help, I know that we need to improve and learn how to succeed in the future. You are the guys at the coal face, speaking to the customers, you know the problems and I wbelieve that you are the best people to come up with ideas that will continue to take this team forward. I want you to make teams of 6 people - use it as an opportunity to work with people that you don't normally work with - and here is £200 for you to go out, spend a day in the retail space to look for answers. Look for how people interact with you, what makes you feel special, what makes you feel devalued as a customer. The only thing I ask is that you come back and give me a taste of what you learned during the day - present solutions that you believe will work. We will all see each others work and then we will give a team vote to decide on the top 3 priorities that we will work on together"

Did it work - I have never seen so much effort - outside of work hours usually! - put into a presentation. The top 2 ideas were the major factor in increasing customers satisfaction by 15% within the year. The best bit is that we created "change" in our process and everyone wanted it to happen....morale up, cross team working up, the list goes on....