Company profile:

• Award-winning integrated healthcare delivery system with 14 acute care hospitals, home health agencies, outpatient services, and skilled nursing facilities
• More than $4B in net revenues and approximately 20,000 full-time employee equivalents across Northern and Southern California and West Texas

Business challenge:

• Company needed to implement new service delivery model to standardize, improve effectiveness, and reduce overall HR cost
• Program had several complex and disparate projects across Benefits, Payroll/Shared Services, Performance Management, and Absence Management already underway without rigorous program or change management practices in place

Project management and talent management solutions provided include:

• Established overall program management approach, developed integrated work plan, re-baselined deployment plans where needed, and managed status reporting, issue management, etc. for the team
• Developed RASCI matrix to clarify team roles and responsibilities and performed organizational impact assessments for all projects
• Managed all communications, training, and deployment activities to enhance employee adoption
• Designed HR as Strategic Partner learning program to support transformation changes; Identified core competencies and developed custom curriculum for HR leaders and staff to transition into more strategic roles
• Designed and facilitated several Leadership Excellence workshops on multi-dimensional management to enhance leadership capacity across the Health System
• Supported design of a new employee wellness program and developed the pilot deployment strategy

Key business results:

• Turned around struggling projects and enabled successful rollout of new operating structures, business processes, and enhanced HR technologies
• Successfully delivered group workshops that resulted in expedited project planning, enhanced HR leadership decisions, and approved implementation approaches
• Established foundation for new organizational culture that unifies dispersed HR teams across the Health System through increased collaboration, improved partnerships, and enhanced service delivery

“Over the past year, we have relied on Plus Delta’s team to provide the critical support required to successfully transform our organization. They continue to meet that need – and then some – by leading not only the transformation effort but also many of our other important leadership development and talent management initiatives.”

- Senior Vice President, Human Resources

How many times have you said to yourself, “We could do so much better if we could only change XXX ?” At Plus Delta, we hear that constantly from our clients. The challenge, though, isn’t identifying the need to change – people do that all the time! The real challenge with organizational change is being able to design and implement that change successfully within the confines of the organizations in which we work.

One approach is to use radically different tools and techniques with them to get them out of their proverbial “box.” While it may be helpful for some organizations to be a catalyst for change by using this shock treatment (as we call it), we haven’t found this common approach for transformational change to be very successful. Instead, this approach is often met with the greatest levels of resistance because the people who are actually affected by the changes are not invited to participate in the change process and therefore do not want to make the forced transition.

At Plus Delta, we often take a different tack with our clients to implement transformational change more successfully. Instead of trying to force them out of their existing box, we intentionally keep them in this comfort zone and simply share new tools and techniques with them to help them extend the box further than they have ever pushed it before. By meeting them where they’re at, this gentler and more supportive approach to change engages everyone directly in the change process and actively enlists their support in shaping their own future. The power of this approach became very clear recently when Plus Delta was engaged by a local county agency to support their ongoing change and system conversion efforts.

The county agency was in the midst of a system conversion that would impact business processes across the organization. The organization has been undergoing a strategic culture shift for the past few years, and they recently experienced a lot of pain and suffering when they completed the first phase of the implementation effort. To enhance their change efforts moving forward, the HR Director asked if we could assess their readiness for change and facilitate a targeted learning program on managing change. They didn’t feel that they needed tactical change management support to be successful in the long run. Instead, they just needed access to new tools and to develop some new skills to be effective change agents. A highly-customized 1-day version of our Improving Performance through Positive Change^SM workshop proved to be the perfect solution for the agency’s senior management team. In fact, the HR Director who called us initially shared the following update with us recently. “The Operations Team has taken the Positive Change^SM workshop to heart and have already formed a communications team, branded the software implementation with name and logo, and have conducted introductory events to build enthusiasm. So all is ‘positive’ at the moment, and the staff is looking forward to all the benefits of the new system.”

Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to get on the right path. According to Richard Hackman (1990), creating a string of quick wins initially is a critical component for effective teamwork and it will likely bring your organization further, faster, and easier than if you push too hard right from the start. This spiral of success as Hackman calls it can help an organization gain the momentum that is needed to achieve any longer-term goals. With this county agency, a 1-day workshop for the senior management team was the first of what may be many quick wins on their path for success. From there, they designed a more effective change strategy that engaged everyone, especially those who are going to be impacted by the upcoming changes, in the change process.

Can Plus Delta help you and your organizations change for the better one day at a time? To learn how to improve performance through Positive Change^SM, give us a call at +1 (310) 589-4600 or send an email to info@plusdelta.net. You can also visit the Change Management page of our website for more information about our core services in this arena.

“Going Green” is a hot topic on today’s business and political stages. This is because many organizations have realized that green business practices not only help the environment but also provide a competitive business advantage. Beyond that, the U.S. government and many of our 50 states are offering billions of dollars in funding for companies who develop and implement new technologies and processes that will benefit our environment.

This realization, though, can quickly lead to frustration if you are unable to create rapid innovation and organizational support for your green initiatives. When campaigns like “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” come from the top, employees may not pay much attention to them. Oftentimes, they are perceived as executive-sponsored fads that will soon pass. In fact, green initiatives may already be underway at your organization, and you may not even know it! Perhaps they’re moving forward too slowly, or they just keep getting pushed down the priority list due to more pressing issues.

With the current business and sociopolitical environment, organizations have an opportunity to make a real difference in a way that drives increased employee engagement and benefits their triple bottom-line. The key is changing the way we approach how we “go green” and realizing that this transformational change requires a more disciplined strategic approach. Companies like Wal-Mart and General Electric have actually integrated their green initiatives into every aspect of their businesses, and thus they have produced new lines of innovative products and services as well as created boosts to their bottom lines. As Wal-Mart’s former CEO Lee Scott said, “It all comes down to who we are, how we work, and what we stand for as a company.”

Your organization may consider green business practices on several different levels. If you want to completely transform the way you do business, you must start with incorporating sustainable business practices into your company’s overall business strategy.

The first step is to get everyone on the same page. Complex changes like this require tremendous collaboration and coordination, so you need to gather the input and ideas from all of your key stakeholders – from employees and customers to vendors and business partners. Educate them about your vision for a sustainable future and involve them in the process so they feel like they are contributing to the end goal. They will be much more engaged in the process and are more likely to participate in any new initiatives if they participate right from the start.

The second step is to plan from the future instead of from the past. By imagining the organization in a sustainable future, stakeholders have the opportunity to look back to the present to determine what they can do now to create that future vision. This unleashes creativity and drives innovation to see what’s possible if transformational changes occur rather than simply creating incremental change by planning from the past.

The third step is to create an action plan with priorities and accountability to move your organization forward. Your future vision can serve as a motivating guide to implement new business strategies and keep your stakeholders engaged as they contribute to and make a difference not just within your organization but in the world around them.

If your organization is looking to go green on a smaller scale, you can find plenty of opportunities for grassroots movements too. One of our largest clients just did this by realizing how many paper cups were being used in their division alone. As a result, they decided to produce glass cups with their division logo on them and distribute them to everyone in the organization along with a note that said in order to support ongoing sustainability efforts and cost-reduction programs paper cups would no longer be provided to employees. Everyone now uses their glass cups with pride, knowing that they are making a significant contribution to the company and the environment every time they do. Other organizations we work with have placed recycling waste cans in every office, replaced individual plastic water bottles with central water coolers and filters, and instituted telecommuting and compressed work-week schedules for their employees.

The key to successful green initiatives is to design solutions that make sense to both your employees and your business as well as make a difference in your community and the world around you. To find out whether or not your employees and key stakeholders are excited about and ultimately will adopt any proposed initiatives, we recommend conducting mini-surveys before you go too far. Group feedback sessions can also be very useful when testing preliminary ideas – or even designing new programs – with select employees and business leaders.

At Plus Delta, our consultants are passionate about implementing sustainable business practices. If your organization is looking to integrate green initiatives into how you do business, our Positive Change^SM Transformations can provide the right foundation for such an initiative to succeed. Or if we can help your company “go green” by conducting an organizational survey or developing your internal marketing communications campaign, just let us know. You can always reach us at +1 (310) 589-4600 or send an email to info@plusdelta.net for more information.