Creating successful change today in any organization is getting more difficult. However, making change successful is not a choice that we have. How is your organization going about changing systems and people? IBM’s Global Business Services survey, Making Change Work Study, asked more than 1,500 people involved with change management projects about their change management practices. Organizations consulted in the study ranged from small to very large.

The IBM research looked at a representative sample of small to large programs implementing a range of strategic, operational, organization wide and technological changes. Projects surveyed covered sales, customers, revenue, innovation, technology and market segmentation.

The predominant learning from the IBM research is its support of the key notion that organizations need to respond decisively and effectively in today’s volatile business environment. Bringing about change is now a “must have” skill in every organization’s armory. Unfortunately, many organizations have not got this core requirement right. In fact, the increasing volatility and uncertainty of the current business environment has only served to widen the gap between the skills possessed and the skills needed. Businesses are now in a crisis situation and must meet the challenges if they are to survive.

The IBM survey demonstrates that the proportion of CEOs anticipating sizable change has increased from 65% in 2006 to 83% in 2008. However, CEOs saying that they had handled change well in the past has risen from 57% in 2006 to only 61% in 2008. The size of the gap between actual and needed competencies has more than tripled in the intervening short period. Why should this matter? Well, for the very important reason that botched change programs leave behind budget blowouts and disheartened and burned out employees.

How well do organizations bring about change?

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Is it time to update your employee handbook or manual? Are you wondering if you should handle the task internally or hire a human resource management consultant to work with you on the project? While the matter of how much help you might need is a function of how much time and expertise that you have within your organization, it’s a fact that working with an outside consultant to some extent is something that can benefit virtually every organization dealing with an employee handbook update.

Four Benefits of Hiring an HR Consultant to Update Your Employee Handbook

1. Separating Policies from Practices

When updating or finalizing policies and procedures, it’s always beneficial to get the perspective of someone with expertise specific to both state and federal laws who doesn’t operate under the influence of how things are carried out on a day-to-day basis within your organization. Bringing in someone with an unbiased point of view to review or help with the development your company’s policies can be a great way to make sure that your organization isn’t burdening itself with unnecessary restrictions in some areas while establishing standards that are too lax in others simply because that’s how things have “always been done”.

2. Third Party Perspective

A consultant can provide feedback and insight regarding how policy wording comes across to an “outsider”, which can be invaluable when evaluating your policies for clarity. Those within your organization, particularly individuals who are involved with enforcing policies and who were involved in writing the policies originally, know how the policies were intended and how they are interpreted and applied on an ongoing basis.

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Are you thinking about enlisting the services of an HR consultant? Whether you need professional assistance creating an employee manual, if you are seeking guidance regarding how to handle the difficult employee issues that arise from time to time or if you are in need of some other type of employee relations assistance, it’s important to choose a skilled professional with the expertise and knowledge necessary to provide you with the help that you need. While there is not a licensure requirement for human resource consultants, there are steps you can take to ensure that any individual or company you are considering hiring has the expertise required to provide you with the guidance you are seeking.

5 Tips for Selecting an HR Consultant

1. Look for Senior-Level Certification

If you are bringing in an outside consultant to provide issues or guidance on matters of significance, look for someone who holds a Senior Professional in Human Resource Management (SPHR) certification. When you select a consultant with this credential, you can be sure that the person you are hiring has knowledge on all key aspects of HR at an executive decision-making level, and that the individual stays current with what is going on in the field by keeping up with continuing education requirements. You can verify that an individual holds a valid certification at HRCI.org, the official website of the HR Certification Institute.

2. Verify Significant Work Experience

To have the skills necessary to provide high-quality human resource consulting services, an individual should have significant work experience with increasing levels of responsibility demonstrated over time.

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Workplace coaching can come in a variety of forms. It can exist to enhance technical, professional, business or leadership skills. Its purpose may be to help with immediate skill application in the employee’s current role, or it can be used to develop the employee for a future role. The latter purpose is more usually described as “mentoring”. In setting up a coaching program, other than agreeing the purpose of the program, your key question that you will need to answer is who will play the role of coach. Your options here include the employee’s manager, a trainer, a technical expert and a professional coach, amongst others. Which is right for your program will depend on your particular circumstances. In this article, I will look at each of these options in turn.

Manager

I include in this option anyone with a supervisory or management responsibility that sits in the organizational hierarchy in a position above that of the employee. So, this option includes:
• immediate team leader, foreman, supervisor, manager, etcetera
• manager’s manager
• immediate manager’s peer
• three levels or above manager
• three levels or above manager’s peer
• executive or director

Here, I will refer to all of these positions simply as “manager”. The immediate manager is mostly used for assisting with the application of technical skills. Where the manager actually possesses the skills in question, this can be a prudent choice for three reasons. Firstly, it can serve to strengthen the personal bond between the manager and their direct report. Secondly, it allows the manager to provide up-to-date information on their work objectives and to give accurate and timely feedback on the employee’s job performance.

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Purpose of Team Building

Team building is necessary to support change in organizations. It is a collaborative effort between the employees who will carry out change initiatives and the managers and executives who provide leadership, guidance and vision for the proposed change.Team building is conducted for a number of reasons in organizations. It serves many purposes such as:

• Improve communications
• Motivation
• Creating a shared vision
• Goal setting
• Establishing rules and procedures
• Identifying strengths and weaknesses and how to overcome them
• Improve productivity
• Practice collaboration

Despite the intent behind team building, the effort is meaningless unless it is fully understood.Team building is often mis-characterized and leaders in organizations are only partially successful in implementing it. The reason is there are actually two objectives to team building:

1. The attitude or sense of teamwork – camaraderie and collaboration. This is the popular definition for team building. Although necessary, it does nothing more than to establish that everyone who is a member of a team is friendly and gets along with one another.
2. The formation of people based on skills and ability aligned with an organizations business objectives. This is the more measurable form of team building based on defined goals linked to specific people in an organization who can carry out the tasks to create real change

Team building to support change in organizations can happen as long as there is purpose and objectives illustrated here are built in it.

How a Business Process Management Consultant Can Help With Team Building

Business process management (BPM) consultants can help executives and managers build teams in organization in a number of ways once a team is established.

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This morning I received an email from a contact of mine. It went something along the lines of “Just listened to your new audio. I have some feedback if you are interested.” Oh dear, I thought. That doesn’t sound good.  I’m pretty sure that if the feedback was positive, the email would have sounded like another email I got recently – “just listened to the audio. Fab by the way. Can’t wait for parts 2 and 3).” So, I sat there this morning, having a really good think about whether I wanted to hear this feedback or not.  You see, as small business owners we’re taught that any feedback (good or bad) is a good thing. And bad feedback is actually brilliant news because it helps you to improve. But, here’s my take on things. I don’t believe that receiving every bit of feedback is helpful or useful to your business.  

The reason I say that is this.  I think there are three types of people who give feedback to businesses and that you should generally only be listening to one of them: 

Type 1 are people who are genuinely angry and are making a complaint about you or your business. These are the people who you should listen to and go out of your way to sort out. This sort of feedback, while usually not good is definitely worth listening to and doing something about. 

Now here are type 2 and 3 which you should be very careful about listening to:

Type 2 are people who want to sell you their own products and services. They will deliberately criticise what you’re doing and tell you that they can do it better for you. Listen to these people at your peril.  

And type 3 – well they are just people that like a good moan. Nothing will ever please them and they delight in passing back their negative feedback to make themselves feel better. Of course, they’ll never admit that though! 

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If you wish to run your own business under a major brand name then you may want to become familiar with the term “franchise consultant”. Franchise consultants are essential in the business sector today because they play a proactive role in the franchising of businesses for franchisees and franchisors alike. They offer numerous advantages in business for both parties and can help to place the right budding entrepreneur into the right opportunity. Before you seek franchise consulting help, you should understand the role of franchise consultants.

What Is Franchise Consulting?

Franchise consulting is not to be confused with franchise brokering. The latter offers franchises for sale on an indiscriminate commission basis, whereas the franchise consultant works with franchisors and franchisees alike in a much more proactive way. He or she will actively work for an individual who wishes to invest in a franchise to find the best possible one.

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I love my children and I know they love me.  In fact they love me so much they’ve been sharing all their germs with me. This time I’ve lost my voice and have an ear infection.

This all came about during a recent trip out to LA to attend Ali Brown’s last ever Online Business Success Workshop. Not only did I come away with some amazing marketing advice I also made some pretty big shifts with my own business which it seems is helping me get unstuck.

Have you ever reached that point where you know you should be moving ahead much more quickly than you are?

You feel like you are racing ahead but with the parking brake on.

Well, that’s how I’ve been feeling.  And being at the conference really opened my eyes to the possibilities for the next phase of my business.  But while my eyes have been opened, my throat and right ear have been closed.

It was half way through the conference that I got sick and lost my voice.  Everyone said it was a sign from the Universe.  I guess the Universe saw that I wasn’t responding to the quiet nudging and soft taps at my door so it needed to do something to shut me up and get my attention.

Ok, I’m listening.

Without my voice I have become aware of some interesting things.

1. People model our behavior.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, people can react very differently when faced with the same price for a product or service. In fact in most cases, we’ll never actually know what is in their minds when they consider a price and then decide to respond to it in certain way. So what does that mean for those of us pricing and selling our services out there in the market?

Typically, people who sell services go for an hourly rate. They use a process called “reverse competition” to determine what their rate should be. This is where you take a look at what your geographical competitors are charging, and you decide where in the range you want to fit on the spectrum of hourly rates. Inevitably, we choose a rate somewhere in the middle, so we can say that we’re not the most expensive, but neither are we the cheapest!

What kind of message are we sending out to our clients with this approach?

We’re showing absolutely no differentiation from any other company – just sticking ourselves straight down the line. In other words, we compete with everyone! Not a very prudent marketing decision. So pricing simply using an hourly rate that sits in the middle of the spectrum is, in my view, a wasted opportunity to create a point of difference with your offering. Let’s think more broadly for a minute about what we are actually offering to your clients: Regardless of what our specific offering is, we all offer some combination of:

•  Quality
•  Price and
•  Service

QUALITY
Quality has become an expectation – the minimum you need to be in the game. It is similar to a high school degree – no one cares if you have one, but watch out if you do not. Quality is no longer an effective differentiator.

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CEO’s have not been using a service that can provide them with great value. Historically CEO’s have relied on mentors and consultants for guidance and help learning the ropes of the lifestyle that is a CEO. After the ropes are understood there is no need for mentors or consultants, CEO’s are hired because they are resourceful, intelligent and adaptable people.

CEO’s need is a professional coach. They need a coach that relies on experience and process. It is very important for CEO’s and those in the board room to realize that they have the answers to most issues that are presented to them to solve. A highly trained coach who focuses on a process of pulling that information from the CEO is the most effective way for support in a job that feels quite unsupported.

Many coaching firms and individuals will tout that they have the experience to coach you, which is only half the equation. Experience and empathic understanding is important but can put that coach into a position of becoming that mentor or consultant CEO’s do not need.

“It is not necessary, for example, for the executive coach to have all the knowledge required to solve a particular problem. Instead the coach should have the objectivity necessary to stand outside of the problem, and the agility to assist the executive in recognizing what is missing and what needs to be done” (Altier, 1989).

The coaching process is the number one way a CEO can arrive at answers that will empower and support their natural leadership and problem solving abilities. A good process coach is like a good telescope; you have to purchase the telescope, learn to use it as the tool it is, then the coach will use the process to bring those things that seem blurry or far away closer so that the CEO can arrive at the decision that needs to be made. Coaches do not make decisions for their clients, they help them see the problem clearer not the answer.

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