Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/65226
Change Management Change Sponsors (5 countries, 5 people) Change Agents (11 countries, 15 people) Field Change Teams (14 countries, 17 people) Beyond understanding local differences, the extended team brings knowledge of regional culture that helps the interventions be more powerful. For example, the Latin American field change team recognised after initial planning using a contact centre would be a departure for a region where people pride themselves on social, face-to-face interactions to do business. Centre Change Team (4 countries, 10 people) At their suggestion, unlike webinars and emails used in North America to help prepare managers, they communicated the change with a previously unplanned deliverable. That deliverable was an in- person training session that the field team could deliver business unit by business unit. This really helped overcome initial discomfort with phone/online transactions. As a senior marketing manager for The Coca-Cola Company in Argentina summed up when he learned about online checklists and phone services to support transactions, "It was easy and the support was very good." Another example involved designing training for the Asia Pacific HR shared services organisation to interact with Aon Hewitt. The change management operational structure and scale reflected both the partnership and the global challenge (see Figure 1). • Centre Change Team. Composed of experienced management, consisting of sub-teams from both partners with clearly defined roles and ownership for specific deliverables (e.g. change impacts, communications, training). • Field Change Teams. Senior HR business partners from all five global regions led variously sized teams (one to four change management personnel per team). • Change Agents. Global business executives advise the extended change team (Centre and Field) regarding change risks, strategy, and issues. • Change Sponsors. Business unit presidents provide change leadership via visible show of support, feedback on key recommendations, and resource allocation. The Rollout Managing the rollout even with such a rigorous structure was not without its challenges. The following four key takeaways can be applied to any global BPO effort. Takeway 1: Build and empower a comprehensive extended change team. Many large-scale HR BPO implementations require an extended change team, typically organised by business unit. Organisations usually roll out centralised communications and training, and report on any local readiness issues. With a complex, global project, an extended team becomes dramatically more important because local differences that could potentially affect service and adoption can be much more difficult to predict. The extended team needs to be empowered to tailor centralised change management tools and have the authority to implement their own practices to troubleshoot while staying true to the overall program. This was the last region to transition, and the centre change team intended to use the same approach that was successful in other the geographies. However, the field change team recognised that training approach which catered well to Western learning styles might not necessarily be the most effective approach for Asian cultures. The previous execution was a teacher-centreed classroom environment with a large amount of open discussion and Q&A. So classroom training was changed to a period of self-study combined with private consultations with key subject-matter experts. Philip Sweeny, the head of HR shared services in Asia, notes the approach "proved to be very effective since it allowed for employees to read on their own [and] raise questions with a subject-matter expert (SME) in a more private context." With an empowered, extended team, open communication with the centre team became critical to ensure consistency and relevancy of end deliverables. Weekly calls were held between each field team and the centre team, as well as a biweekly forum for all field and centre change team members. Takeaway 2: Carefully differentiate change impacts for global and cultural differences. While most global HR BPO projects aim to streamline processes as much as possible, there are many global differences in laws, regulations, and business practices. Maturity is also a factor. There is often variation between current state and the harmonised future state—countries, business units, and regions may be differentially mature in HR practices. Sometimes overlooked, terminology was also a consideration. For example, in North America it is typical to say that someone "stamps" a document, whereas in Asia the document is said to receive a "chop." WINTER 2012 | www.hroglobal.com [13]