How To Accelerate Progress

Choose a pressing business or organizational problem to solve by using time more effectively. Give people the freedom to contract with one another differently around their working time. The point is to trust the people who do the work day in and day out to come up with the answers. How do people feel about these changes? What are their fears? And there’s a personal element to all of this as well as the team or organizational element. What unconscious habits will individuals need to unlearn? What positive behaviours will they need to role model? How can we help people to say ‘no’ when necessary, or constructively draw attention to unhelpful time practices? Guiding all this work requires some skilled facilitation and the active involvement of leaders, as you’ll see shortly. What does a strategy like this require in terms of resources, skills and budget? The good news is that by avoiding a big branded corporate programme and focusing instead on solving business problems, this is mainly about bringing together the right people and giving them the freedom to think differently. Further down the line, there may be changes required to tools or systems or an increased investment in training, coaching or mentoring programmes. Their role is to protect people as they experiment, help resolve broader issues that they may run into and proactively influence other senior leaders. Choose participants with the appetite to get involved and the right organizational development skills for this kind of work. They are the people tasked with solving a business problem or achieving a target outcome by managing time more effectively. It’s important to choose people who ‘get’ what this is about and see the need for a better way of managing time. These data may be ‘owned’ by other functions or individuals, so the senior sponsor can help facilitate access to them.

Its All About You

They can elevate the story by telling people about what the trailblazers have done, and they can visibly role model the new ways of working and talk positively about these. How quickly can we get going? What should our plan look like?’ No doubt these questions are uppermost in your mind at this stage. They aim to provide a starting point for you to tailor as necessary. It’s deliberately pacy, dynamic work. If you play it safe and proceed cautiously, you’ll likely see very little meaningful change as a result. This timeline really challenges you to compress the elapsed time between the important discussions and working sessions, so you keep the momentum up and don’t lose sight of the goal as the weeks roll by. Leadership discussion about the ‘how’. Set out your guiding principles and describe the impact you want to achieve over the next nine weeks, or whatever timescale you wish to define. Appoint core and trailblazer teams. Identify one or more business teams who are critical to the outcomes you want to achieve. Brainstorm some potential improvements to test with stakeholders. Test with stakeholders.

Human Nature

Road test your big ideas with the people whose help you need to make this happen. Reflect on stakeholders’ feedback and work up the proposed changes more thoroughly. What does this mean for different audiences, including ‘me’? What would success look like? Share with stakeholders. Work up the detailed process, materials, messaging and measurement that you need in order to conduct the trial. Be open to continuously evolving it during the trial period. Alongside your trial, gather feedback and run diagnostics to see how well the changes are being received and what impact they are having. What’s worked well and less well? How will you incorporate that learning next time? Share the trial results, agree how you will share this with the wider organization and then plan from here. Communicate more widely. Publicize stories about what the team has achieved to create awareness and demand. Explain the forward plan and how others can get involved. These may take longer to set up and run. Once the trials have reached critical mass and people are adapting successfully to new processes, behaviours, roles and/or tools, then you can start embedding the changes to sustain them over the longer term.

Life Is Just A Breath Away

At this point, they become ‘the way we do things around here’. By sharing stories about what you’re seeing and learning, you will stimulate people’s curiosity to get involved. As you embark on Stage 3, keep recruiting those who ‘get it’ and are passionate about playing a role in growing this movement. Your aim is not to control things rigidly from the corporate centre, but to encourage the movement to expand while keeping it true to your original goals and guiding principles. Again, this timeline deliberately doesn’t specify timings for each stage. These will vary according to the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve, the size of your organization and the shift in experience you want to create for employees, clients and external partners. In a nutshell, it is down to human nature. Successfully changing the way people work requires a deep understanding of human mindsets and dynamics, and an ability to influence these thoughtfully – skills that are often overlooked in promotions and senior appointments. You can avoid these pitfalls by painting in tangible terms the change you want to bring about and linking this to the things people care deeply about. The pain of organizational change can be lessened by challenging expectations about how quickly you can move, but it’s still essential to plan interventions over a sustained period of time to prevent your progress from stalling or slipping backward. Last but not least, ask what you can stop doing in order to manage time better. Productivity is about choosing carefully what you will do and what you won’t do, then finding the most efficient ways to work. In terms of linking the change to the things people care deeply about, what are these? The answer may vary by age or personal situation, but if you’ve taken time to assess your data through a diversity lens, you’ll have a good sense of what different groups care most about.