The Story of Change: Operationalizing Culture

Build Collaborative Execution in Operations with Shared Values

Consolidating operations poses unique challenges for a client and extensive prep provides opportunities to discuss anticipated disruption, acknowledge resistance, and encourage conversations around change. 

Introduction

The client founded their company to empower Fortune 500 companies to reduce their carbon footprint. The company specialized in sustainable practices maximizing recovery, reuse, and reclamation of electronic waste.

The client believed Ethos Consultancy understood the unique situation faced by merging distinct work site cultures, supporting change, and creating an implementation strategy to manage the change initiative.

The engagement with Humberto Garcia allowed the client to adapt their culture to capture best practices from both work environments and improve operational execution while reducing overall cost and headcount. 

An Inspired International Manufacturing Client

The company founder got his start in scrap recycling and became amazed in the discarded value that existed in obsolete and excess computing hardware. The ability to extract value from discarded assets became the focus of the services offered to the Reverse Logistics industry and Fortune 500 companies.

A proprietary process got developed to tackle challenges in hardware restoration, component repair, remarketing, and sustainable recycling practices. The specialized restoration solutions targeted Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) and provided an alternative nearshore supply chain solution.

The organization built a greener process for managing e-waste by re-envisioning reclamation and reuse. The innovative solutions offered by the client company lead to contracts with top IT companies in the United States.

The Challenges of Change

Merging Facilities

The client faced potential disruption to their operations after an internal review concluded with a recommendation to merge facilities. As an operation evolves, the established practices become more complex and leads to closely guarded territory resistant to change. The facility earmarked for consolation served as the first site the manufacturing client established in Mexico employing an older generation of workers.

Employees at the aging facility would transition into a newly constructed state-of-the-art building operating with a younger generation of leaders serving new client contracts. The potential culture clash and resistant to operational change concerned the client. 

Adapted Operations

Each site faced unique challenges for meeting client deliverables. Site A operated a linear assembly process with higher volume production with minimum product SKUs. While Site B, operated a linear process together with specialized work cells servicing lower volume, but higher product SKUs.
These two data points do not seem obvious to the culture each site established and nurtured. However, through extensive conversations with senior leadership and middle management, the observations and findings provided valuable insights to Humberto for establishing a common ground to facilitate the design of processes and systems for the consolidated operations.

Distinct Work Cultures

The facilities got established in the same city, yet the leadership and culture that existed at each site became noticeably different.


Site A’s project deliverables, daily client reporting, and weekly progress meetings nurtured a culture of close collaboration, metrics tracking, and distributed decision-making. The work environment functioned on open communication of daily issues, proactive measures, and transparency of information. Teams learned to stay accountable to results by creating ownership of tasks and trusting others’ abilities to resolve issues and conflicts. The management team saw the benefit of having multiple leaders distributed throughout the process. 


Site B’s project deliverables created an environment of reactionary decision-making due to the structure of communication with the US corporate headquarter. Site B’s decision maker split their time between the US corporate headquarter and the facility. The gap in communication left the facility operating with inconsistent production results and constantly shifting operational priorities. Facility management developed a culture of cautionary communication, process workarounds to meet goals, and working under pressure to manage the unpredictability of a structured production plan. 

Our Approach

Ethos Consultancy employed a series of strategies to address the change initiative, adapt operational workflows, and create a collaborative relationship with cross functional stakeholders responsible for implementing the change.

Acknowledging Change

Humberto believed in the importance of using a visual representation for process intervention and progression from disruptive change to new operational efficiencies. The use of Lewin’s 3-Step Change Framework identifies key stages to change. Each stage focuses on the transition steps towards establishing the new environmental norms.

Visualizing change helped to conduct conversations during the pre-planning phase. It provided an opportunity to establish the necessary buy-in and sponsorship required from the executive team to maximize the success of outcomes. We worked together to identify key stakeholders, establish necessary norms for success, create meaningful measurables of success, and understand the “why” and importance of the planned change.

Work with the executive team focused on discussions of what a unified work force meant to the client organization and the value created by capturing the best of both cultures. The executive team acknowledged their awareness that consolidating facilities required downsizing the workforce. The downsize would impact the lives of their workers and eliminate the source of income for affected families. This key awareness motivated the executive team to stay transparent during the process and communicate a comprehensive strategy before implementing the change initiative. 

Building New Dynamics

The conducted work with senior and middle management created the first steps for mixing both cultures. The initial interactions between both sets of management allowed for open discussions around shared work ethics, form common ground defined by shared values, and express appreciation of the innovations within each operation.

The positive energy created rapport between both groups and supported trust building opportunities during multiple planning sessions. Planning sessions focused on concise documentation of facility processes, IT systems, workforce capabilities, risk assessments and contingencies, a universal training plan, and adapted KPIs.

Humberto conducted a team building workshop to continue solidifying the foundation of sustained trust. The workshop focused on group norms vs team norms, stages of forming a team and associated dynamics, tactics for improving communication, conflict resolution, and empathy discussions.

The workshop allowed for structured conversations to acknowledge the challenges that come with change and re-establishing operational authority amongst current and new leaders. Also, the experience allowed Ethos to observe developing dynamics, openness to change, and evaluate resistance to the change initiative, which would influence the process.

Best of Both Worlds

The tactics used during the senior and middle management sessions allowed the developing and evolving team to identify operational overlap. The overlap served as the framework for creating a hybrid production process built on similar processes and systems. A hybrid production model provided predictability of foundational work processes reducing resistance with floor workers.

 

Recall the two data points from the “Adapted Operations” section above, the points identified how project deliverables got communicated at each site. Each site learned how to manage or restrict the flow of information reinforcing culture behaviors. One site saw the use of data as punishment for poor performance. The other site saw the use of data as opportunities for improvement. Building trust around the use of data required establishing new reward systems encouraging continuous improvement. The system integrated the adapted KPIs developed during planning sessions with senior and middle management.

 

A key theme became changing the narrative of data and demonstrating proper use of insights from metrics tracking, implementing incremental process improvements, debriefing the implementations, and tracking progress over time to create objective assessments. These behaviors got reinforced with cross leadership exercises.


Senior leaders from the older facility co-lead working sessions with teams at the newer facility. The exercises focused on the use of data to track client project objectives, participation in weekly collaborative work sessions recapping weekly milestones, and capacity planning based on weekly milestone outcomes. The sessions provided exposure to open communication at all levels, gathering actionable data, and team collaboration especially when metrics fell short of the mark.

The Results

The change initiative took 3-months to complete the transition, integration, and divestiture of the older facility. Conducted work with the executive team resulted in transparent communication for the consolidation of the facilities.

Ethos provided executives with a concise vision change, a detailed implementation plan allowing flexibility, and a support program for exiting employees. Identifying the impact of downsizing during executive sessions led to an executive sponsored support program.  The program got developed by the company’s HR department, who partnered with the Municipal Labor Department to hold a job fair for all downsized employees. The program resulted in 60% placement in other factories located within the city.

Senior and middle management developed a hybrid production process within 4-weeks and an additional 3-weeks adapting production lines. The piloting period took 2-weeks to conduct resulting in a modified training program to support universal workforce development. The implementation team attributed planning sessions and increased trust established during team building workshops as key drivers to the change initiatives.

Humberto provided additional support during the remainder of the engagement by continuing team building workshops with newly formed teams. Senior leaders within the organization participated in these sessions to demonstrate new norms of the adapted culture. The sessions became important symbols of adaptability, openness to change, collaboration, and multi-generational teams running facility operations.

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