Engage Employees in Change: A Mini Case Study

 

One of Abudi Consulting Group's client’s wanted to engage their employees in change. This mini case study shares that story.

For this brief story, I’ll use the exhibit below.

The client is a retail organization that had changed leadership at the top. The new CEO and other newly-hired top executives had experience engaging employees in change and knew the value in doing so. Once the original vision of the change that was being proposed was shared with employees, Abudi Consulting Group, working in collaboration with the CEO and his team, requested the employees’ feedback. Given the complexity of the change, we allowed for three weeks in having conversations about the change in order to get feedback from employees. We provided employees with a variety of options to provide feedback, including via:

• Focus group meetings
• Department meeting
• All staff face-to face meetings (part of a change “road show”)
• Virtual sessions
• An internal web site specifically launched to support the change
• Directly to anyone on the leadership team via the group’s “open door” policy
• Via an online survey to all employees

With so many channels to share their ideas, concerns, thoughts and suggestions, we got more feedback than we could have imagined! Employees shared information about the change proposed as well as the vision for the change. Through the employees’ insights and contributions, Abudi Consulting worked with the executive leadership team to reframe the change initiative. We incorporated many of the ideas of the employees as well as addressed the concerns that they had.

The end result was a change initiative that was, effectively, shaped by the employees.

This is just one client story Gina shares in her book. Want to learn more? Purchase Gina’s book, Implementing Positive Organizational Change: A Strategic Project Management Approach, J Ross Publishing, 2017.