Stagnancy at a workplace, or when the productivity curve of a company tends to flatten, that’s the time when managers need to understand that something is not at par with the trend. Everyday we do a lot of analysis, analysis on how to be more customer friendly, more innovative, try to hit the blue-ocean, etc. The main motive to do all these predictive number crunching or maybe sometimes hit-and-trial mechanisms is to make the corporation, firm, or a company more productive with the highest and the best use of the resources in hand. Following trends have now become outdated; the main focus that is required during this time of intensive competition to grab the market share is to be a trend setter – thus here restructuring plays a pivotal role for any industry.
I was going through the recent Harvard Business Review, and came across an article titled “Restructuring Work for Better Decision Making” by John Beshears and Francesca Gino. While reading through the interaction section and complimenting the points with my thought process, I came across the following points, which I think can be the most crucial points to consider for a restructuring to be successful. Lets go through them in some detail.
Feedback from the ‘IMPLEMENTERS’: I think the most important resource of a company is its human capital, because whatever change you want to bring in, it needs to be accepted by the employees who have to believe in your vision. It is rightly said, if you can make your team view your vision, then your vision becomes the vision of your team and they work heart and soul to realize that. Management by Objectives (MBO) – or setting realistic goals and actions with your employees taking part in the planning phase is the most vital aspect of any restructuring activity. So taking feedbacks every now and then can work impressively well.
Show me the ‘DATA’: Nowadays everything is data driven. So one cannot simply afford to have a gut instinct alone to go through a massive restructuring process. Intelligent data analysis systems need to be built to actually comprehend your future actions. Testing similar small-scale prototypes before going through a change can be a good idea. But we have to keep in mind that implementing ‘learn & feed’ mechanism is crucial as you get results from your prototype testing. This prevents bad decisions and help filter outliers every time it goes through a new change.
‘TECH TONICS’ just HELPS Direction (DIRECTECH): Technology is very important to make work easy, and the decision-making process – result based. But over dependence on technology can actually hinder productivity and employee morale. The ‘why’ component to the problem of lower productivity this month is more essential to consider rather than just comparing the month-over-month production data delivered to you in a spreadsheet by a sound technical software. So the place of a manager cannot be taken by technology, how harder you may try. Employee morale and judging the employee only on the basis of quantity of production are inversely proportional to each other. So connecting technology with the direction of a manager is the key to understand a situation and suggest an efficient restructuring. I would probably coin the term ‘Directech’ for this process.
So when we think about a possible restructure, try to analyze the ‘Why’ of a problem first, then ask the people ‘Who’ can propose a solution, ‘Back-it-up’ with data, and then ‘DIRECTECH’ to carry out a successful restructuring process.
Acknowledgement:
“Restructuring Work for Better Decision Making” by John Beshears and Francesca Gino. Harvard Business Review (July-August 2015)
Arnab Pandey 