Supporting Employees While Managing Change

THE SITUATION

How do you get stakeholders and employees to willingly embrace important system and process changes? This was the task presented to Blue Beyond by a global Fortune 500 technology firm that was preparing to implement a new procurement system. Blue Beyond partnered with the client to equip its global workforce to adopt the critical new automated system without a hiccup, enabling the business to run smoothly and scale for growth.

WHAT WE DID

Working closely with the company’s IT, Organizational Readiness, and Procurement teams, along with the technology vendor and systems integrator, we helped our client outline and implement a strategy and plan that would assist them with managing change. The plan included four key strategies:

1. Soliciting input and active participation from key stakeholder groups and “most frequent users” of the new system. Through a series of engagement sessions, we asked questions, listened, learned, and incorporated user requirements and feedback from front-line users across the company. This ensured the system and processes would be designed effectively for their use. These sessions also provided useful insight about what users would need to understand in order to incentivize and equip them to adopt the new system.
2. Built awareness the change was coming, but more importantly, why and how it would benefit employees. We armed the Procurement team with briefing materials for leaders, produced a fun and creative internal “marketing” video ahead of the launch, and drafted a series of compelling, clear communications. This ensured employees knew what to expect when, and the actions they needed to take.
3. Created a change champion network to promote the new system and serve as on-the-ground points of contact across the company. The network answered questions, gave demonstrations, and reinforced key aspects of the new system and processes. We also coordinated deep-dive training sessions globally ahead of the launch to ensure system “super users” and the change champion network would be well equipped to use the system on day one and support others as they came up the learning curve.
4. Gave employees real-time support to learn the new system and processes. We created a library of quick and easy video tutorials – supported by downloadable quick reference guides – that could be accessed in the moment they were needed. A dedicated landing page on the intranet also provided additional information, resources, and avenues for direct support.

Following the launch, employees received a “Tip of the Week” in their inbox to highlight specific system features or important reminders about process to encourage ongoing adoption and effective use of the new tool.