Follow the North Star to Better Business Performance

An incredible number of things changed in the last 24 months in business. I experienced it firsthand as an operations leader for a Fortune 100 company. Over a handful of days in March 2020, employees were deployed to work remotely – some from home, others from any remote place they could find. 

At the time, our entire focus was to continue to service customers and provide goods. We brainstormed solutions to a bevy of challenges, placing bandages we hoped would get us post-pandemic. Processes altered overnight to ensure essential functional operations continued. New technology and tools were deployed with minimal training. People faced with changing processes and modified or new technology were left to adapt as well as they could, and they did! Most even managed to wear pants while doing it!

For any other organizational change, we would have been taking time to ask if our new processes or technology were efficient and effective. But the push from Covid had us scrambling for the answer to a simple “yes” or “no” question: Can it be done? 

If the answer was yes, we moved forward. If it was no, we likely figured out where to place the bandage and then moved forward. The pre-Covid estimate to implement remote/work-at-home strategies was 454 days; the actual time to transition was eleven days!.. We celebrated that the wheels were on the bus, the work was getting done and service was being provided.

We’re not going back to “normal.” Now it’s time to evaluate.

While the handling of such an unprecedented shift is to be congratulated (go ahead, pat yourself on the back), we’re quickly moving into the next phase – the realization that rather than going back to “normal,” we are instead redefining what “normal” means for our organizations.

The processes we designed and technology we placed, in many cases, were to be short-term solutions until we could “get back to normal” or even just pause long enough to evaluate a better option. But as often happens, those bandages become the new processes, whether they’re efficient or not. People work around the root issue because they must in order to finish their daily tasks. Many employees are waiting for their individual jobs to shift back to “normal” and as a result are not thinking about process improvements.

Are you prepared? 

Companies are experiencing stalled, if not deteriorating, results but don’t know exactly why. Perhaps it's in the form of seeing missed goals and slowed operational output. 

We really shouldn’t be surprised that our stopgap solutions aren’t yielding stellar results. We weren’t thinking about sustainability, just getting the job done! The adaptations we placed under “emergency” measures haven’t been evaluated for efficiency, efficacy or scalability for the future. 

We can’t expect pre-Covid business results with post-Covid arrangements without doing some evaluation.

You may be doing your own homework (a bit like going to WebMD for a headache and coming back convinced you have the Vid). Employees may say it’s the technology; business leaders may say it’s bad process. Executives perhaps point to people and the remote environment. The complete culprit picture likely has layers of each.

Here are three areas we start by analyzing and questions to ask yourself:

Technology- It may be in good shape, but also potentially underutilized. Could this be optimized? Are there features that would enable your team to work more collaboratively or perhaps help error-proof a process?

Processes were adjusted for survival – but are they sound and scalable? Are your teams dealing with time consuming, manual work-arounds rife with potential errors? 

People are working remotely and perhaps starting to get a handle on a new balance. Do you have mechanisms to oversee performance as well as employee well-being? Are your metrics and measures up-to-date and aligned with the current remote/hybrid approach?

One last obstacle, good talent is harder to come by. It’s a bad time to assume that people are the root cause – while people can be a cause of deteriorating business results, in my experience, people are rarely the underlying injury. More often, the underlying issue is an unresolved bad process or technology exacerbated by frustrated employees just struggling to make it work.

In my 26 years as an operations leader, I’ve learned it’s not one single thing. Rather, that some root cause has been bandaged and the employees and process have adapted around it. Similar to a minor tweak in your back. Unresolved, the initial injury causes a shift in gait to compensate, which then causes a new pain in your knee. Compensating for both, the ankles soon suffer. Identifying the true root cause is essential in creating sustainable solutions.

Talent is hard to come by, costly to interview and train.  Additionally, you are likely placing employees into a remote or hybrid environment, a “virtual environment” in which your leaders are still learning to not only survive, but to thrive. Perhaps you’ve lost some of your more experienced staff, or your new hires aren’t staying long. It is an expensive time to find out that employee engagement is down in a market that has people moving on.

This is the single most challenging time to be a business leader faced with deteriorating results. Do your due diligence and make sure you sustain yourself into the future. It is time to remove the bandages and make sure we’re not still bleeding. You did a great job with first aid – but are you, your team and your organization truly healed?

Don’t Guess! You need an accurate and unbiased diagnosis.

You can’t afford to guess. An accurate diagnosis is vital! This requires detailed, unbiased information. This is a really good place to do an assessment of your team, your tactics and your technology in order to understand EXACTLY what the root cause business problems are, to identify a few key solutions and implement. 

People are biased towards the tactics and technology that they facilitated and supported bringing in. As a third-party consultant, Cephei meets with your people, getting to know them and understand their work and processes, and how the technology supports it. By diving into the details with an unbiased perspective, we get the diagnosis right. It is likely some processes need to be adjusted, some technology can be improved, and some people aren’t in the best roles.

Just as spring brings a time for spring cleaning to pull out what isn’t growing and what may be choking new and healthy growth, let Cephei Consulting help you identify what may be getting in the way of your business moving from surviving to thriving.   

1: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/2021-year-in-review  McKinsey Publishing’s 2021 Year in Review