Workplace Engineering

Unless there are clear tangible and intangible benefits from the new arrangements there can be a significant tendency to revert to old ways of doing things.

Investing the time and energy to make the partnership and the relationships with in it are the only prescriptions for ensuring that the change holds and continues to deliver value. Using Prosci’s ADKAR stages of change can provide an effective gauge of personal and organizational progress in a transition

• Awareness - Identified that a change is coming
• Desire - A willingness to change (have decided to support the new over the old)
• Knowledge - knowing how to change
• Ability - implementing new skills and behaviors
• Reinforcement - maintaing the change once it has occurred

(Adapted from “Employee’s Survival Guide to Change by Jeffrey M. Hiatt)

It’s quite a time consuming and resource intensive process to find and transition in new ways of doing things. It is the small interventions all the way through that ensure that the change becomes as embedded as the old way of doing things.

Introducing a new partner into an existing environment or creating a whole new environment out different parties coming together to form a team creates a new dynamic that needs to be worked through to enable the team to perform effectively.

Without knowledge of how involved the client team should be in the day to day running of the operation, there may be a tendency to stay out of the expert’s business. Until there is a problem, that is. 

With pressure from above of dissatisfaction from the recipients of the service there is huge temptation to intervene directly to resolve the problem and become highly directive. Where the partnership was set up to effectively just out-task items or just use the labor of the other party this may not be such a big deal. In partnerships where the goals are more wide ranging, potential strategic benefits can be quickly lost.

In fact, these behaviors are the result of people using “common sense” to fill a vacuum and make an ambiguous situation workable. Preventing this needs management tools that work. 

Understanding and agreeing escalation processes, decision rights and mechanisms for correcting poor performance is critical as is understanding and agreeing the objective criteria for measuring performance and ensuring that a mechanism is in place to collect and share them with the people that need them.