As you would have noticed from most of my writings, I often find that ‘change’ programs and Employee Engagement initiatives fail as a result of poor follow-up on research findings. Organizations, with or without the help of consultants, are able to design great diagnostic tools to measure the right issues. Using analytics, they are able to identify problem areas, priorities for action and set goals for workplace quality. However, they find it difficult to move on to the next logical step of “actions”. There is too much of chaos and confusion about “who is going to own what”. Whether a specific issue needs interventions from the HR, leadership, department heads or people-managers.

I admit that this is a tough situation and requires to be handled carefully to prevent the derailment of the entire change process. The situation is further complicated by the fact that a survey process might yield a large number of areas for improvement. An approach that I would use in such situation is to think of an organization (and it’s problems) as a composite of several sub-systems. What we could do is to discuss in-depth each of the issue for follow-up and identify which sub-system it would fall under. By parking follow-up areas into meaningful buckets, it might be a little easier to set accountabilities. Needless to say, this discussion should ideally be facilitated by an external consultant to ensure that “logic” prevails over bias and personal preferences. Also, all key stakeholders (leadership, HR, dept. heads and representative group of front-line managers) should be encouraged to participate and contribute to this categorization exercise.

One possible set of sub-systems could be:

While this may or may not be comprehensive or even may require customization for your organization’s requirements, it lays down an approach or a basic framework for fine-tuning the change implementation process.