As field service organisations grow in both scale and strength of operations, key decision makers often have to relook at their resources and assets to ensure processes are being run smoothly and efficiently. To this end, most businesses implement what is commonly known as a ‘change management plan’ — a blueprint that ensures the company is still maintaining product and service quality levels to meet customer expectations, despite drastic changes in management. In the tradie space, change management plans are used to help ease new processes into team operations, while ensuring minimum risk to the existing infrastructure. Here are 5 tips to implement a solid change management plan for your electrical business:
Prioritise your objectives
Every field service business has multiple stakeholders, each with their own set of deliverables and objectives.
For example, as a marketing manager, your objective would be to improve market reach and increase customer satisfaction without causing a bump in service costs; whereas as a lead technician, your objective would likely be improving efficiency and bolstering the skillset of your tech teams. Hence, it is a challenge to implement a change management plan that achieves all objectives, which makes prioritising them an important step.
Define clear leadership roles
Change management plans are only as effective as the key stakeholders who are given the responsibility of seeing it through. Hence, before executing any change management plan, it is important to perform a thorough assessment of potential leaders already employed in the organisation — particularly those who can help you take a stock of all operation teams and understand their styles of working. This will help you properly choose future leaders who will better align with each particular team’s style of working. Finally, ensure that each leader is aware of their responsibilities and understands the gravity of their new role as a key decision maker.
Map out expectations
Any change management plan should have clear objectives right from the beginning. While expectations may not be set in stone, chopping and changing objectives after every step results in most projects getting derailed. The statement of work should be extremely clear from the get-go, and the roles and responsibilities of the people involved should be clear to everyone. Ownership expectations need to be defined for every step of the plan in order to ensure synergy in the team.
Set milestones and celebrate them
While defining clear objectives for your change management plan is essential, breaking down these objectives into achievable milestones can greatly help track progress and measure the effectiveness of the plan. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity to commend your workforce for putting in the efforts to align with the new management’s vision. Several management theories over the years have reaffirmed that positive reinforcement always encourages employees and drives them to do better than what they have been doing so far. Setting meaningful milestones means that everyone involved in the process can see the tangible progress that their efforts have resulted in.
Implementing a change management is a pivotal step not only for electrical businesses but for any field service organisation. A successful execution of a well-planned strategy can reap a ton of benefits. So, set your electrical business on the course for growth by ensuring you have the right change management plan in place.
