Change and Restructure Strategy
Ensuring your change or restructure is fast, effective and adopted by all your people.
If you want to design a business change and restructure strategy that delivers the outcomes you are looking for you will need a strategic plan that does more than simply win hearts and minds.
Whether you are looking at a merger, reduction in staff, competitive advantage, spin out a new company or something else, you need a strategy that will deliver.
At the end of the day, these changes must deliver the future you are looking for that may include cost savings, increased productivity, economies of scale or resolve shareholder disputes to name a few?
The sooner you start on designing a strategic plan the sooner you can deliver your desired outcomes, and there has never been a better time than now because the government is keen to support an economic recovery.
What’s In it For You?
Focussing on change and restructure in your business can bring many benefits to your business.
Cost savings
Companies are constantly looking to make savings so they can stay competitive and never has this been more important.
Focused workforce
A focused workforce means an easy life for you, better customer service and increased efficiencies across your company.
Happy customers
Your company is changing and so are your customer needs, they want to know you will continue to meet them and maintain quality.
Increased productivity
A change programme can deliver increased profitability and at the same time reduce waste and environmental impact.
To ensure you get all the benefits from your change and restructure strategy a different type of plan is needed. Simply focussing on number targets will not deliver all this. This is where we help you.
Addressing The Challenges
Whatever outcomes you are looking to achieve from your change and restructure you will face a number of challenges that need to be addressed to find success.
Cost savings
It sounds simple, cutting the number of people you have to save money. This may provide you with savings but leaves you short of skilled workers, low morale and uncertainty from your remaining workforce and can impact on customer service and delivery.
Time is money and a restructure can help you save time and money. Often a task you should have done sooner. However, cuts in time can negatively impact on the quality of your product or service and result in customers leaving.
As well as saving money change can cost you. Costs related to new technology, redundancies, training of staff, moving location, and so on. If your implementation of your change plan is poor you could end up worse off than when you started.
Focused workforce
You may find a poor commitment by your senior managers and directors. As a result, delegation and adoption of new working practices are slow or not at all, meaning the change has little or no impact.
Many of your workforce will fear the change coming. They do not know what it means for them, will they have a job, will their role change or will they have to move to another factory/site? All this leads to a poor culture and impacts on your business performance.
In many change programmes and restructuring, staff stay focused on work directly related to them and their department. This silo working means the overarching strategy is not followed and benefits of the change are not realised.
Happy customers
As your staff get stuck into the change plan and working on new products and services they often take their eyes off business as usual. Regular customers and tasks they have been focused on in the past are let slip and customers leave.
Customers expectations are not met because of a loss of skilled workers, or greater demands on them, resulting in a drop in quality. These pressures compound in the months ahead making matters worse.
The thought of new products and services as part of a change programme excites many in the workforce looking for a fresh change and new project. However, time and money invested in new products or services, including “pet projects” often, simply drain the bank balance and fail to meet customer needs.
As always, customers want cheaper products and services. Achieving this whilst there are rising costs from labour and materials is not easy. You need to find more and more creative ways of doing business that finds more margin to deliver all your stakeholder needs.
Increased productivity
For many they see the solution to a successful change programme as parachuting in consultants to do the hard work and increase productivity. Sadly, many consultants have no means of effectively integrating and embedding change principles with business as usual so that they remain after they leave.
Everyone in the workplace gets focussed on working harder and is rewarded for being busy. Sadly, the focus of their hard work is purely task focussed rather than outcome focussed with little or no gains in productivity.
To ensure change happens and happens correct, a plethora of meetings are started! To make matters worse, they are too long, with irrelevant people at them and often with no agenda. Rather than improve productivity, the meetings themselves have a negative impact on productivity.
Steps To Effective Change And Restructuring
Successfully implementing a change or restructuring plan in your company is easy if you know the right path. However, you first need to know where you’re going. We work with you to design a strategic plan that answers these questions and delivers your future.
Traditional business planning isn’t going to get you there. A 90 day plan doesn’t cut it. This is not about making some cost savings and increasing sales, or recruiting a new manager or director. These things do not give you a step change or mitigate risk.
Our approach to getting you on the right path uses the Concord process. Starting from understanding what you (and others) want to achieve from the change and restructure. It delivers an explicit plan, accelerates growth, and gets everyone including employees behind making it happen. You will be pleased to hear, we do the heavy lifting for you.