To continuously improve amidst a volatile and ever-complex operational environment, organizations must embrace change to evolve and grow. Change isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s a “must do” to remain relevant in today’s highly global market.
Change happens for a variety of factors, from a shifting competitive landscape to mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. The reality of the situation is that change is unavoidable, and organizations need to determine how to successfully adapt and sustain change.
But the stats aren’t in their favor. Over the last 20 years, it’s reported that more than 70% of change initiatives fail (Beer and Nohria, 2000; Kotter, 2008; Senturia et al., 2008; Hughes, 2010).
It’s one of the reasons that organizations outsource functions like finance and accounting. Costs need to go down. Efficiencies need to go up. And, with limited internal resources set aside for change initiatives, it’s difficult to drive transformation within the buy-side company itself.
How to Support a Change-Capable Workforce
Gone are the days of “your mess for less”; BPO providers are now expected to step up to the plate and go to bat for change, continuous improvement and process excellence on behalf of the client organization throughout the lifetime of the engagement.
The greatest impediment to change is a workforce’s inability to change and adapt quickly. To promote organizational excellence, a provider needs to have a blueprint that includes both an effective change management program as well as a talent management program that helps build the capacity of its people.
Investing in all levels of employees, from front-line people to solution architects to senior management, is an effective method of mitigating risks involved in ongoing transformation. Capacity building boosts the skills and confidence of our human capital and engages them more deeply in the work at hand as well as with an eye toward to the future state.
The result is higher performing workforce, better compliance and greater agility and process excellence.
Benefits to Clients
By investing in our people and capacity-building processes and practices, the end result for the client is multi-pronged:
There is a proven system in place for scalable success
By improving your employees’ performance, you can “move the needle” from where your client operation is now to where it needs to be.
Your human capital is comfortable learning new approaches
The client is assured of a continuous improvement framework
You can better forecast outcomes and the implications of process change