Change analysis You have interviewed an executive of a company that provides outsourced services.

What key insights can you get from the following excerpt of your interview about managing the changes that result from outsourcing? Do these insights also apply to manufacturing?

Explain.

I have an example of a situation where we’re often dealing with senior management when we are in the contracting process, but then, when we are doing the work, we are engaged with people at much lower levels in the organisation. The senior leadership has decided to engage with us because we can help them significantly change the way they do business:
better, faster, cheaper. All that great stuff! Management goes back to their organisation, and they say, ‘We are contracting with [my company]. We’re really excited about this; please work with them. This is going to make our business better.’ Often that is about as much as the staff absorbs. . . ‘better’. They don’t necessarily get that it is going to be cheaper, it’s going to be different, and you need to commit to change the way you’re doing things. So they make their cultural assumptions about what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘how it’s done.’ Then we start doing the work, and we run into these disconnects and where the change from the individual employee’s point of view, let’s say the department head’s point of view, is a lot bigger than that person was ready for or that they understood would happen to them. And they can feel very put upon. We do a lot of work with our client’s senior management around how to talk about change with their business. Proactively. And you know it’s still a challenge, frankly.
People don’t like change. They are pretty sure they know the right way to do things, and so it’s often an ongoing challenge for us to help people get their head around the idea that we’re really doing it a much different way. “You mean the way I was doing that before isn’t the way we want to keep doing it? Oh no!” Often in the first year of a contract there is a lot of change management that has to be done with the broader organisation of the client. To help them actually understand how much we meant it when we said ‘change’! We will have a client’s senior management showing back up in front of the staff meetings talking about what is ‘better’.
Really, I’m looking for them to say, ‘The pressures of a marketplace are driving us in these directions. Our workforce is changing in these ways, and we have to be ready for that.’ They really need to get a little bit more practical; so that the department heads are appreciating why it is that their world is changing.