All business turnaround situations are different, however,
there are one element that always have to be on top of the agenda: Employee
buy-in.
Any manager who has struggled through a turnaround knows how
crucial employee buy-in is – they also know how time-consuming and difficult it
can be to secure. Management need to be able to tell a compelling change story
that motivate employees.
Here are three ways to gain buy-in from your people during a
turnaround:
Create a dialog
Too many managers assume that communications is a staff function, something for human resources or public relations to take care of. In fact, communications must be a priority for every manager at every level of the company.
By organizing discussions throughout the organization,
spreads the company‘s vision and competitive situation so that individuals and
teams can accurately align their own activities with the company‘s new overall
direction. Storytelling can be a powerful tool.
Consequently, organizing early conversations between
different parts of the company and making those conversations an important,
sanctioned part of the change process is a critical task. Early, open-ended
conversations often result in the most productive outcomes.
Managers at all levels must learn to see things differently.
They must put themselves in their employees’ shoes to understand how change
looks from that perspective. People aren’t going to consider anything until
they are convinced there is a problem that truly needs to be addressed.
Create targets
Break down the main targets into sub-targets and communicate these. People need to see who the can contribute to the overall targets. By sharing numbers with employees, you can increase employees’ sense of ownership. But you need to make sure your employees are trained to understand financial statements and have enough insight into their own jobs to know how to affect the numbers.
