In The Face Of Change
How Dealing with the Human Side of Technical Change
Can Increase Team Productivity
The only constant is change. Companies big and
small deal with it on a daily basis, but employees are
the ones who feel it the most. How can management help
ease the pain of coping with major change?
Steelcase, Inc., Grand Rapids, Mich., has
been tackling that question for years. Through
considerable time, effort and persistence they realized
that approaching change from an emotional side was the
best way to transition. Leaders can make it easier on
employees by showing empathy to their concerns and
keeping them well informed.
Read on to see how high-participation
communication methods can make a difference in the face
of change.
Can team-management efforts go awry for big
companies as well as for small ones?
“You bet they can,” is the
emphatic answer from Dr. David W. Mann, who has held
academic and commercial posts in survey, market and
strategy research.
“Steelcase has found that attention paid to the
human side of technical change pays dividends in faster,
more successful implementation—but it hasn’t
always been that way.”
Mann is senior manager for Operations Change
Management for Steelcase, Inc., Grand Rapids, Mich., the
world’s leading producer of office furniture and
architectural interior products. He has been involved
directly or indirectly in all of Steelcase’s
teamwork efforts over the past 11 years while supporting
a variety of cross-functional, technical and professional
project team activities.
“Why has our drive to establish a
sustained, team-based culture taken 10 years?” he
rhetorically asks. “At the beginning, our
enthusiasm outstripped our judgment about what was
actually feasible,” he quickly answers. “We
were excited about the potential of employee
participation and of work teams solving problems.
“But what didn’t we do? We failed
to define a clear business need that provided a
compelling rationale for the programs.
“People in executive and staff
positions thought it would be a good idea to improve
productivity and morale in a teamwork effort, but it was
like giving a party and no one coming. As an organization
we were sowing seeds on barren ground, promoting programs
without recognizing the conditions required for their
success. It was a classic example of corporate
push.”
A Quality Revolution
To explain creating teamwork conditions at Steelcase,
Mann refers to a news report concerning the General
Motors Opel plant in Eisenach, Germany.
“The plant was built on the site of a
huge, communist-era plant that produced the Wartburg line
of automobiles. In 1990, its last year of operation, the
plant’s 12,000 employees built 70,000
cars—not world-class productivity. Today, things
have changed. The Opel plant at Eisenach gets a lot of
corporate attention as a model for teamwork,
participation and profitability. The plant relies on its
team leaders and line workers to improve workstations,
monitor quality, fix problems and take responsibility
when things go wrong. It values teamwork, demands
discipline, rewards performance and responds to employee
suggestions and complaints.”
What motivated the Eisenach revolution? The collapse of
the Soviet economic system—an obvious need for
change.
According to a leader in the Opel Eisenach
union, you cannot introduce a new system and run the old
plant. “In our case,” Mann continues,
“repeated efforts to foster teamwork ran into a
culture designed to promote individual performance and
individual effort.”
Among the examples Mann cites was a pay
system rewarding individual or small group piecework
inventory practices covering over one million square feet
equivalent of automated storage and retrieval systems;
all part of a design that supports individual effort and
output.
“Our problem,” he points out,
“was that our enthusiastic effort toward team
management was like trying to force a round peg into a
square hole.” For teamwork initiatives to take
root, not only the culture, but the system itself may
have to be redesigned. He stresses the things that
interest people involved with the technical aspects of a
new process, structure or merged organization are not the
kinds of things that interest people who will be affected
by the change.
“For us, the piecework incentive pay
systems are out as are lots of inventory. We have
installed close linkages among work centers and tight
interdependence between operations and operators. New pay
plans are in effect. As various areas go through the lean
transformation product line by product line, dramatic
changes in physical production processes drive a number
of cultural changes. One result is that cooperation and
teamwork are now in the best interests of production
employees as they themselves define those
interests.” The corporate “push” has
been replaced by informed employees for the long
“pull.”
One for All, and All for One
Mann goes on to say that the firm’s new
interdependent processes mean that when one element
stops, all stop. This requires closer attention to how
the process is running and how people are working.
“In one product area that has just
converted to lean, supervisors have discovered that with
our conventional 1-30 ratio they can’t provide the
close support needed in the new, more precise production
system. As a result, there has been a new floor
organization structure with an intermediate position
between supervisor and the production floor. Referred to
as “zone leaders,” they are skilled in shop
floor leader needs and they work with small groups of
7-15 people.
“Such a change,” Mann continues,
“requires considerable time, effort and
persistence, but the pull of a well-defined and willing
system is far more effective than an ambiguous corporate
push.” According to Mann, it’s a process that
goes slower now in order to go faster later.
“As in Eisenach,” Mann goes on to
say, “our new system values teamwork, demands
discipline, rewards performance and responds to employee
suggestions and complaints. We are now operating within a
system designed to support teamwork and
participation.”
How does the “cultural side” lead
people through this period of change?
“It is characteristic of humans to
resist change,” Mann admits. “However, we
have developed a direct, principle-based approach that
rests upon three areas of concern: the emotional side of
change, informed timing and the dynamics of
leadership.
“We explicitly assume 95 percent of the
people in our factories and offices are reasonable men
and women, so we must be prepared to share the
information that convinced us change is necessary. We
refer to the case for change as involving the three
C’s: customers, competitors and capital markets
[these determine company worth and holdings of our
shareholder employees]. These are the factors which drive
change.”
Mann goes on to stress that leaders must be
prepared to address employee concerns with empathy and to
deal with all the impacts of change—technical,
policy and procedural, and personal and emotional.
“When leaders are able to project
themselves into the future,” Mann declares,
“they are much better prepared to persuade people
to go with them toward it.”
In its leadership training, Steelcase stresses the
importance of keeping leaders well-informed and
well-prepared to respond to employee questions.
“We use a structured four-step process
with a mix of individual, small group, role-play and
whole group techniques,” Mann continues.
“First, we make sure leaders have basic program
information, both technical and personnel policy related,
and we answer their initial questions about the program.
Second, they identify anticipated employee questions.
Third, they develop answers to the anticipated questions.
Fourth, they practice the answers, including responding
to challenges and follow-up questions. Finally, they get
feedback on how they did.”
Mann goes on to point out that the major
difference between conventional and participative
communication is in two elements: the presentation and
the invitation.
The presentation is brief, often less than 15 minutes of
a two-hour session, and the invitation is not only to
show up, but to come expecting to participate in a
carefully planned, supported and structured way; to be
“talked with” not just “talked
to.”
“Our experience over the past six years
has been remarkably consistent,” Mann says.
“When employees are given information about a
change and then given the opportunity to respond with
questions and concerns, they have invariably brought up
issues that even the most careful project teams had
failed to see.”
Having earned his Ph.D. in psychology from
the University of Michigan, Dr. Mann is also keenly aware
of how words can make a difference.
“When the supervisor hears news at the
same time as the team, it’s demoralizing for the
leader and has a worse effect on the team.” Mann
states, “‘I don’t know; I just heard
about it myself!’ isn’t an answer that
inspires confidence. An important element of our approach
in preparing leaders to deal with partial information, or
how to tell a person something when you don’t know
everything, is simply to use the key phrase, ‘Let
me tell you what I know.’ This direct approach is
highly effective in that it allows leaders to talk with
employees about what they are hearing. It treats
employees as responsible adults.”
Mann’s group developed and supports the
cultural change component of two major initiatives for
Steelcase, a $3 billion manufacturer with approximately
7,000 manufacturing employees in North America. It is
implementing the Toyota Production System as well as a
finite capacity Advanced Planning and Scheduling program.
In addition, his group’s approach to change
management is currently being adapted for use in
Steelcase’s external consulting practice.
“Change management in major projects
such as Enterprise Resource Planning or lean
transformations put an organization’s performance
at risk. Real participation in the front line is needed
to balance theoretical with practical. To bring this
about,” Mann concludes, “requires
high-participation communication methods, participative
design and an all-important role performed by an
effective change management lead. They can make the
difference.”
March 2001 News for a
Change Homepage
Issue Highlight —
Someone To Watch Over Me
With A Little Bit
Of Luck
