“Step-up” Business Transformation - Change Transformation

Start from the top, Lead with culture

The Situation: One of Singapore's largest secured data company (DataCo) is preparing to embark on their next phase of growth, after acquiring a number of companies, as well as creating new business lines in the past decade. At the point of our engagement, the company was suffering from high staff turnover, lack of coordination across units, inefficient allocation of resources with high overtime costs incurred.

The current staff were all used to the traditional business and to embark on this new stage of growth requires a radical shift in the company culture, as well as changes to the way they conduct strategy planning within the business units. DataCo engaged KeyHole Insights to implement a "Step-up" business transformation programme to enact a change in the company's culture and improve their business performance.

At a Glance

>200

# of employees empowered

>10

# of business units involved

Lead Progress Workshops

Our Approach

In this project, we broke down the various stages of the change transformation process to: 1) CREATE sense of urgency, 2) BUILD guiding coalition, 3) FORM strategic vision & initiatives, 4) COMMUNICATE Change, 5) ENABLE action by removing barriers, 6) GENERATE Short term wins, 7) SUSTAIN acceleration and 8) INSTITUTE change.

Working with finance and the HR team, we began to CREATE urgency for change. By developing a story using a combination of internal and external data, we helped paint a picture that change is critical to the company's continuous survival. Next, we BUILD the guiding coalition through creating a task force of advocates and getting sponsors for the programme, ensuring that the CEO endorses the programme at each and every step. Through a series of management strategy workshop, we help define the purpose, stretch growth and how success looks like to FORM the strategy statement for DataCo and to get "buy-in" from middle management.

A series of change management workshop were conducted across the entire organisations to COMMUNICATE the change required. To ENABLE action by removing barriers, we also conducted 1-1 interviews with all the head of departments and key appointment holders to understand the pain points and challenges faced by the organisations. Additionally, employees engagement survey and analysis was launched and personality profiling for mangagement conducted. Subsequently, we facilitated a Townhall session for management to share the company's BHAG, strategy statement, findings of our interviews as well as the corporate level OKRs. Finally, KeyHole Insights worked with each BUs and departments to set the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) necessary to brought forth the change required.

Recommendations

Some of the analysis and solutions delivered as part of this engagement include:

1. 1 x Kick-off workshop
2. 2 x Strategy workshop
3. 1 x Townhall
4. 4 x Lead Progress workshops
5. 6 x OKR workshop
6. 20 x 1-1 interviews
7. Employee engagement Surveys for over 200 employees
8. Hogan Assessment and feedback for senior management
9. 360 degree employee feedback survey for HODs and KAHs
10. 3 x Team Role development exercises
11. 4 x staff development training workshop
12. BHAG, Strategy Statement
13. Organisational restructuring recommendations
14. Interim and final report

Outcome:

Following the engagement, KeyHole Insights helped identified the key issues and challenges for DataCo. This has led to restructuring of DataCo along with cost cutting measures, based on the recommendations from the engagement. DataCo has also started to measure and track the metrics that we’ve identifed for them. This includes conducting employee engagement survey and NPS amongst others.

Morale of the DataCo has started to improve and at the same time, the HR has started to address key areas such as training and development, compensation and benefits as well as internal communication among management and employees to work upon.

Through the Hogan personality profiling and feedback evaluation, we’ve provided suggestions for business succession and continuity. The CEO has also begun to start restructuring the company's organisation design to better implement the business strategy that we have set together with them.

DataCo is currently in the process of implementing Objectives, Key Results (OKRs) as a management performance tool to drive the organisation towards the Big Hairy Audacious goal (BHAG) and Strategy Statement that we’ve helped in deriving at the beginning of the engagement.

* While the name of our client have been changed for confidentiality reasons, the results are real.