Fortune 50 Retailer: Shifting a Business Model

Situation

Our retail client was preparing to shift their business model and looking to implement new processes and systems that would, among other things, significantly improve the way they planned for and executed customer promotions. Unfortunately, they had recently experienced several process and technology implementations that had failed due to lack of employee adoption, so they knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get leadership and employees galvanized around or believing in the promise of the benefits.

Action

We were engaged to help our client develop an innovative change strategy for the initiative, including a comprehensive communication and branding plan to involve employees in creating the future state; a training plan to help build employee skills that included taking a very individualized approach across various stakeholder groups; an adoption and measurement plan to monitor initiative progress; and a new organization design and transition plan to structure the organization differently to support their new strategies. Additionally, because they had so many set-backs with change in the past we developed and delivered a customized program for all company managers to grow them as ‘Change Leaders’ within the organization.

Result

This initiative is still in process and the tools are currently being piloted. Early results have indicated that managers and employees feel more positive and prepared for these changes then they have with prior change efforts in the enterprise.