Restructuring Tips

I attended an FCB Seminar yesterday, check out their website below.

http://www.fcbgroup.com.au/

These breakfast seminars have been of a continuous high quality and I would highly recommend you attend one in the future if you get the chance. If only for the opportunity to engage in the roundtable discussions with professionals from varying industries on ideas/plans you might have for your own business units – you may find someone who had been in your situation only a few months ago. Often presented by lawyers, you will also find they back up nearly every piece of advice with an actual case study.

The session was on "Optimising Business Efficiencies During an Economic Downturn" and the roundtable I attended was "Change Management and optimising workplace culture in difficult economic times". However there were other roundtables on Industrial Disputes and OHS.
Two notable points I took from the session were:

1. During a restructure be careful with your terminology. When communicating with employees you should refer to the structure as a “proposed” one. This is to ensure you allow employees the chance to comment and communicate on the restructure. If the restructure was to result in the redundancy of a position, the potentially to be retrenched employee should have the opportunity to present a business case to challenge the change. If you communicate restructures as stated fact from the get go you could be at risk of appearing to not have a genuine consolation with staff.

2. Something I had not thought of before – incentivising handovers. Sometimes handovers, particularly if the result of a restructure and or redundancies can increase the risk of poor information transfer if the leaving employee is disgruntled. Incentivising handovers linked to KPI’s could alleviate this by giving the employee a clear benefit to conducting a proper handover. A secondary effect of this is it formalises the handover process, something that particularly important to help avoid knowledge loss. A handover process does not need to be incentivized to make it formalised obviously, it is just a bi-product.

Change management on the rise

According to the latest Hays Quarterly Report, organisations will remain focused on retention and recognise the importance of holding on to the best people as the market picks up. Therefore, HR professionals who specialise in organisational development will also be in demand in the first quarter of 2010. (http://www.humanresourcesmagazine.com.au/articles/14/0C066714.asp?Type=59&Category=917)

Organisational development / change management is a tricky subject. It involves a huge range of factors internal and external to the organisation. Quantitative factors obviously form a staple for analysis such as company and competitor statistical data. However it's the qualitative factors which can be much harder to pin down and change or even define which are equally as important. Issues of culture; organisational or otherwise, generational shifts, social norms and tacitly upheld values - all of these and many more hold tight grips on how an organisation functions and sees itself. It is these issues which I believe if effectively engaged with separate true organisational transformers from change catalysts.

You can check out current salary trends here; just search for change management.

http://content.mycareer.com.au/salary-centre/