CEO Tara Carcillo shares her insights on what 2024 has in store for federal leaders.

This interactive learning experience provides a deep dive into the critical topics of leadership that are essential to building a successful organization. 

The Clearing thrives on helping leaders solve the most challenging issues facing our world today. With shifting workforce desires, changing technology demands, and a need to balance both, The Clearing CEO Tara Carcillo offers her thoughts on what 2023 holds for federal leaders – and what they can do to increase their odds of success.

Looking Back at The Clearing’s 2022 Federal Engagements, What Surprised You?

Two big surprises come to mind. First, when I think back on our federal engagements in 2022, one surprise was the amount of relearning and innovation we’re requiring of federal leaders as we emerge from the worst of the pandemic. What I mean by that is leaders were tasked with holding a lot in 2022 – without the space or time to really think through the challenges facing the government in our new normal.

Specifically, that lack of space (clearings, as we call them) results in leaders not being able to stop and name all the things they’re being required to rethink and relearn – for themselves, and then to redesign their organizations so they can operate effectively in today’s environment.

And while not a surprise, this is complicated by the federal government’s competing priorities in its approaches to sharing information across agencies and leaders in a fashion that even comes close to the speed of information sharing in the private sector. For example, a private sector leader would find the pace at which one agency can share information with another positively glacial. This means leaders often can’t expediently share best practices that would help their peers navigate the sea of changes occurring. We see this acutely in agencies charged with ensuring safety and regulatory compliance amidst the rapidly expanding number of entrants into our air space.

For example, we sat with federal clients in 2022 who don’t have the mechanism or ability to share essential information across their agencies to tackle issues like the redesign or repurpose of real property to meet many agencies simultaneously. Solutioning this challenge requires intra and inter-agency collaboration to create an effective resolution. So, leaders are not only challenged in their ability to share information rapidly across their organizations, but also to innovate, collaborate, and execute on their original mission in that same environment. As we said, it’s a lot for any leader to hold.

Now for reality number two. At The Clearing, we focus on people-first solutions to problems. Along with that, we stress the importance of human-to-human connection in establishing the trust required to solve complex issues. So, a pleasant surprise was that despite years of Zoom meetings and ever-improving digital communication tools, many of the leaders we work with still see the value in human connection.

In speaking with clients, I’m finding many leaders believe simply stopping and talking to each other or employees is irreplaceable.

Anecdotally, we are observing that even with the best technology platforms people don’t always feel like they are developing the trust they need with one another to successfully meet mission objectives and manage risk in the fast pace operating environments they face every day. As we continue to help organizations navigate the new normal in their workplaces, our consultants will assist leaders in finding this socio-technical balance. While this balance will differ between organizations, the output is similar: maximizing tools and technologies while determining the right level of human interaction to drive genuine dialogue and connection.

How is The Clearing Leveraging These Learnings in Client Support in 2023?

With the emerging duality between technology and human connection, leaders will require a more equitable balance between connection and efficiency in executing within their agencies and organizations. The way through that is the right access and use of both quantitative and qualitative data. Data provides groups the opportunity to react to information and make sense of it, and then make decisions or conclusions as a result – including workplace decisions.

For The Clearing, that means our data team and organizational consultants will continue to work in close partnership in service of our clients. There are new opportunities in what data and human centricity offer those responding to or driving change in the public sector, and as noted above, there are tools like social network mapping and the organizational dynamics it can reveal, as key component change strategies. We know how to both reveal and drive innovation across diverse stakeholders – this is a condition all senior public sector leaders face.

In such an instance, we don’t just look at the efficiency of the government process as the most relevant metric. We would also look at the data associated with a program’s risk landscape, employee experience, and customer experience to derive a holistic view of where the balance between technology-driven efficiency and human-to-human interaction sits for a particular organization.

What Do You Anticipate Being the Most In-Demand Service for Federal Leaders in 2023?

Defining the workplace of the future that is right for a given organization. People come to The Clearing because we tailor our proven methods to the circumstances our clients face. Following on from above, I see one of the greatest needs as the ability to apply insights gained from customer or employee experience data and translating it into habits and practices that are scaleable across lines of business. The Clearing’s Solution Areas are set up to provide the cross-functional support required to meet these types of challenges, and when combined with our data team, uniquely positions us to offer clients a level of service and insight others can’t.

What are the Biggest Challenges Facing Federal Leaders in 2023? 

First, the nexus of information sharing and workplace tenure. For a long time, the federal government has gotten around the difficulties of agency-to-agency information sharing (noted above) thanks to relationships between long-serving employees. However, that lack of technical underpinning will become an even bigger problem in the coming years. Here’s why.

We’re now facing a transition of the workforce. People are retiring, which means you now can’t share information across your digital platforms and you don’t have that individual to call whom you’ve worked across agencies with over years of service. That’s why I keep focusing on this duality between technology and human interaction. I don’t know how much longer the federal government can do what it needs to do and solve the problems it needs to solve without a better solution.

Another challenge I foresee is resetting norms around the movement of human capital. Historically, folks joined the government and stayed in government. The value proposition was steadiness, dependability, and reliability. However, the longer we hold on to that norm, the more we get disconnected from the expectations of emerging workforce cohorts, including younger workers who don’t see the same value in staying somewhere forever.

If our government’s systems are set up to reinforce the “staying,” I think it will just keep battling itself. But if instead, we changed the mindset about what is the right duration (for staying at a particular agency) or how quickly we might want someone to move from position to position, I wonder what possibility that affords the government? There is a lot there if looked at as an opportunity – seeing the value in broad experiences, making it easier to shift in and out of government work, or bringing private sector knowledge to public service.

If You Could Offer One Piece of Advice to Leaders in 2023, What Would it Be?

You are not alone. The dynamics today’s leaders are experiencing within their teams and organizations are much bigger than just their teams and organizations – it is pervasive across industries and sectors. I think that taking the time to implement consistent new behaviors that allow people to rebuild trust with one another will be critical as we emerge into new ways of working while still executing our missions.

If you have found your organization struggling to make sense of a confusing landscape, The Clearing can help. I would love to hear what is happening and help you formulate a plan to thrive in the future. I can be reached anytime at tara.carcillo@theclearing.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

This thought leadership post is focused on the importance of leadership alignment, so you may be surprised by my next statement. Leadership alignment is a highly unnatural act – and it’s almost always a temporary state. Achieving it – even temporarily – is a huge challenge; however, it’s critical if leaders intend to effect meaningful organizational change.

How Do I Know if We’re Aligned – or Aren’t?

It’s easy to assume the signs of an out-of-sync leadership team are obvious. Some are; while others may be more difficult to spot.

For example, poor financial performance may be reflective of more than a down market or changing customer priorities. An out-of-sync leadership team may result in competing priorities that strain resources, leading to underperformance on the balance sheet.

For many of the same reasons, employee sentiment and customer experience scores can serve as leading indicators of leadership discord; so too can client and employee retention rates. Those same competing priorities may lead to unclear employee expectations that manifest in sub-par customer experience, leading both team members and employees to consider other options.

In short, any time your organizational system feels off-kilter, take a temperature check before ruling out leadership alignment as the culprit.

However, leadership alignment doesn’t equal a steady state – that’s stasis. When leaders are aligned, I expect to see evidence of growth along multiple trajectories: financial growth; intellectual growth; and community growth. Those are the indicators that alignment exists clearly enough to push an organization into its next phase. But as I mentioned, alignment can be fleeting – what’s working this year may not in the next, making the pursuit of alignment ongoing.

Leadership Alignment, Clearings, and the Power PRIME

At The Clearing, we define leadership alignment as shared clarity on the end state or desired future state of where the organization desires to go or achieve. To pressure test that clarity, we undertake the following critical exercises.

First, we determine the value of that end state to our customers. For example, how bad do they want or need to get there; how will it allow them to better serve their stakeholders; etc.
Second, we seek a thorough and shared understanding of the current state to serve as our measurement baseline.
Third, we codify alignment on what the organization is measuring as a result of their desired shift. This may ladder back to the indicators I shared above: financial performance, retention rates, employee satisfaction, etc.

We use the Power PRIME to guide us through this exercise.

Individuals cannot solve the problems we face today regardless of their power in a vacuum. It takes many people coming together powerfully to cause sustainable solutions to our problems. The power they have the potential energy to generate is a function of:

The degree to which they operate from a shared perspective,
The intensity of their shared intent, and
Their commitment to taking synchronized and coordinated action.

This PRIME is a good indicator of where leadership alignment must exist at the highest level to reach the desired end state. If you have alignment in those three areas, shared understanding of the current state, and shared understanding of the intent, setting priorities and responsibilities is made easier.

As our co-founder, John Miller, recently wrote, this stage is where “clearings” become beneficial. Between the rigors of day-to-day life and a stream of distractions, we know how hard it is for leaders find the space to have these conversations. It’s especially hard for leaders with accountability over different functions and stakeholders to spontaneously manifest the same notion of how they both need to move forward in service of shifting their organization toward the desired future state.

Creating an environment where leaders can have the best version of that conversation is critical to facilitating leadership alignment. Driving change means changing the day-to-day; getting out of the day-to-day often helps make it clear what needs to change.

The Bottom Line

As a leader, you are in a position to both reap the benefits of alignment with your peers and serve as a first warning for when things get out of sync. This applies whether you are trying to effect specific change or simply meet ongoing operational objectives.

Here are three tenets to keep in mind as you observe your organization:

Stay Aware: Monitor the indicators I shared above. Those undercurrents of unalignment may be what point to the need for change. And remember, it’s not always negatives that lead to issues. An amazing new leader may join your organization. It may be a long-term positive; however, it is still a source of disruption.
Leverage the Power PRIME: If you observe unalignment, or find it difficult to achieve common ground when working toward objectives, consider employing the Power PRIME to align and prioritize.
Be Consistent: Leadership alignment is temporary. It’s not set-it-and-forget-it – it’s something that requires consistent work.

We’ll be covering more on leadership here in the near future. In the meantime, you can learn more about The Clearing’s approach to leadership in a post authored by Sonya Patel, who heads our Leadership Solution Area. And of course, I’d love to chat more about your specific leadership or organizational goals – you can reach me at Tara.Carcillo@theclearing.com.

Two years ago, we made a shift at The Clearing. We realized trying to fit our service offerings into defined boxes was becoming increasingly difficult. To no one’s surprise, that’s because the problems we were helping our clients solve didn’t fit neatly into boxes.

That’s when we knew it was time to evolve our services – and with that – our Solution Areas were established.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be introducing each of our Solution Areas, including the methodologies that make them unique. Today, I’ll walk you through why we made the shift and how it’s impacting our clients for the better.

“Rather than a prescriptive set of services, Solution Areas provide us the ability to orient into the arenas of change that are most relevant at any given time.”

Why We Adjusted Our Model

Senior leaders seek out The Clearing for a variety of reasons. For example, we might hear from clients when they’re receiving feedback from their customers that is less than ideal. Or when they need to engage their customers in a new way but aren’t sure where to begin. The catch is that there are likely many ways to work through these challenges, but they often boil down to a few key areas: Culture, Customer Experience (CX), Leadership, or Strategy. To support those areas, we’ve built frameworks around each that serve as a starting point for almost any type of challenge a client might encounter.

For example, you may be clear on the experience you want to deliver to your clients, but do you have the right organizational culture in place to deliver and sustain it? Once you have addressed customer experience and the culture of the people executing your mission, how might you train leaders to continue to grow your organization and meet ever-changing market needs? What training or coaching might be needed to empower your workforce?

A leader might notice a strategy problem, or a culture problem first. We found that by simply using these Solution Areas instead of a laundry list of services, we could more adequately provide our clients with a clear line of sight into how we can help them improve their organizations.

How Solution Areas Have Improved Delivery

Our Solution Areas often work in concert with one another – and our Solution Area Directors meet on a weekly basis to identify those opportunities. This is critical for two reasons:

First, cross-solution partnerships demonstrate our commitment to what our clients actually need instead of fitting their problem into a predetermined box. Our clients and their people’s needs come first and oftentimes cross-solution partnerships are how best we can serve them.
Second, the nature of change efforts means new needs emerge over time. It doesn’t pay to be overly fixated on a specific problem at the start, as the root of the issue is often discovered in the learning process. Starting with a framework allows our consultants to pivot into the right solution instead when those discoveries are made.

What’s Next

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork on why we switched our service model to Solution Areas, be on the lookout for introductions to each of them from our Solution Designers.

         .           

            Sonya Patel                                        Jason Miller                                  Yasmeen Burns
Strategy & Leadership                                  Culture                                  Customer Experience

We’re growing – our team, our capabilities, and our aspirations.

Among these exciting changes, one foundational element of The Clearing remains the same: the people-first approach found at the core of everything we do. We continue to hear from our clients and partners that’s what makes The Clearing special – and it’s a big reason we’re able to deliver organizational change and transformation that works in the real world, not only on paper.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

Just like our work and processes, our story continues to evolve – and we needed a new platform from which to tell it. To that end, we’re proud to launch a new website and brand identity that brings our ethos to life online and clearly illustrates what we at The Clearing have to offer.

One of my favorite features of the new website is the section where you can experience a day in the life of a Clearing rockstar member. These are the folks who are most committed to bringing our client’s dreams to life.

Every day, we take our founding principles and apply them to serve today’s leaders – similar to how we customize our solutions to ensure we deliver the most effective and value-driven approaches to our clients. We’ve highlighted how we do that on the new site, with case stories that make it easy to imagine what it’s like to work with our team, a look at what makes our team members unique, and insight into the processes and thought models we use to bring it all to life.

It’s all packaged into the three brand pillars that shape our internal culture and form the basis of everything we deliver to our clients – including the foundation of our new website. While our brand pillars aren’t normally public-facing, we are giving a sneak peek into how and what we deliver to the world in our consulting engagements.

Human
We believe people-centered solutions are the result of a people-centered culture
We use cutting-edge theory with a focus on practice to create solutions that work in the real world
We approach every opportunity with curiosity, endeavor to see people as individuals first, and adopt their causes as our own
Adaptable
We adapt to our customers – not the other way around – and know there isn’t a single path to successful outcomes
We are always evolving to add value, discover unmet customer needs, and drive meaningful change to causes that matter
Inclusive
We create safe spaces – internally and externally – for team members and customers alike to bring their true and best selves
We foster an inclusive recruitment process that prioritizes diverse experience and perspectives
Diversity, equality, inclusion, and access are part of our DNA, creating a sense of belonging for our team members and clients

We believe staying centered on these pillars is why our approach to problem-solving remains unique, and we hope they shine through no matter how you engage with us. We’re excited for our friends, clients, and partners to continue along this journey with us – and to show even more of the world why The Clearing is the ideal partner when you’ve got complex problems to solve.

Imagine a community-wide discussion focused on ways to address an active shooter. A federal agency convenes federal and local law enforcement, emergency services, and representatives from the agency’s command, including human resources, information technology, a continuity of operations component, and their insider threat program. Imagine the different perspectives, agendas, and cultural norms which might emerge from this group.

This event took place in Washington, DC this year. Unlike their previous table-top exercises, this community practiced using a lens of Adaptive Space. A Forbes best business book of 2018, Adaptive Space outlines a framework for how leaders can successfully overcome any disruptive challenge.

Adaptive Space offers leaders a way to locate hidden areas of opportunity or strife that pose risks to an organization. For example, one way to mitigate insider threats involves looking at the lifecycle of employees’ experiences. Often this involves coordination between HR and security; while security policies are often black and white, HR policies have gray areas. Adaptive Space offers a way to broker these differences.

Instead of driving conflicting agendas or exaggerating adversarial relationships, we facilitated a series of exercises to demonstrate the essential need for this community to be connected before and after an event, not just during the event. Additional substantial steps emerged for how the community will address policies, procedures, and countermeasures.

The agency also realized the need to revise the mission and priorities of their insider threat program. This critical conversation gave them awareness about the need to develop a new discussion, agreement, engagement, action plan, and policy with other components within their organization.

With the utility of Adaptive Space, our customers are locating potential areas of conflict or contention. These leaders are gaining insight into trends such as revenue stagnation and decline in employee morale. For example, one leader recognized how a lack of the ability to innovate could lead to friction points.

In managing insider threats, best practice programs address the following areas and the risks associated with each:

First line supervisors are most likely to see the lead indicators of a potential threat, as they are closest to staff. Without standard meeting procedures and reports for data analysis, and discussion across each relevant function and governing body, these risks are most often missed.

The Clearing recommends using the Adaptive Space framework to enable leadership and senior management to have critical conversations with members on the front lines.

Today organizations face two major challenges: to produce more, faster, and with fewer resources, and to maintain continuity of operations for customers. Technical implementations can only go so far as to address insider threats within this ecosystem. Our clients in federal agencies, the energy sector, and financial institutions struggle with the implementation and adoption of their insider threat programs. The pace of change is simply too disruptive.

Given the above, there is yet one other thing that makes insider threat programs fail. In our research, we have found that not one insider threat program addresses employee and contractor adoption from a human perspective. These organizations are investing millions of dollars and expert resources on policies, training, and procedures that do not always account for diverse human viewpoints. These insider threat programs are failing to achieve their adoption targets.

Would it be beneficial to hear what employees, management, and leadership are saying about your organization, in order to examine potential areas of friction? In a related blog,  I talk about how our Cultural Assessments surface new insights about insider threat.

Ready to experience success through cultural adoption of your insider threat and risk program? Connect with me and let’s talk.

The evidence of the impacts and damage that insider threats could have to an organization is staggering. From data loss that derails services, to overwhelming financial burdens – not to mention the reputational cost — insider threat is a crucial issue for today’s executives.

According to a study by Kroll, a division of Duff & Phelps, insider threats are a significant  vulnerability to an organization:

Three in four businesses suffering a breach had their data leaked by employees and third-party vendors
Over half of all data breaches occur by accident
Seventy five percent of breaches resulted from using workplace hardware or data outside the office environment
External campaign groups are more feared than vendors even though vendors originated more breaches
A third of businesses contract without provisions for how to proceed in the event of a confidential data breach

When we meet with executives overcoming the losses from data breaches, they are often surprised that their technical controls, risk programs, and investigative frameworks are not enough to protect business assets. The growing consensus across risk and security officers is that insider threat is not primarily a technology issue, nor is it even an investment issue. Protecting organizations from insider threats is a social and cultural imperative.

The good news from the research, and what some leaders are finding, is that organizations can substantially mitigate insider threats with existing resources. The best strategy for insider threat management is the right application of leadership and communication skills, and the ability to prioritize a few important culture shifts within an organization.

As CEO of The Clearing, I work with leaders of businesses and federal agencies to develop intentional action plans to transform organizational culture. Intentional shifts in culture are an emerging strategy to manage insider threats. When you are intentional about the habits, beliefs, practices, and social norms of an organization, you can create positive, sustainable shifts in your culture to reduce the risk of insider threat.

CRITICAL FIRST STEP: GET TO KNOW YOUR CULTURE FROM AN INSIDER RISK PERSPECTIVE

The distinctive approach we take with our clients acknowledges reality: employees are often too busy to develop a concern about unwittingly succumbing to a cyber attack, or performing a technical error that makes their organization vulnerable. Yet, in real time, a workforce collectively needs to adapt to changing markets and a new way of working.

Through a process we call enacting an intentional culture, leaders are setting conditions for organizational performance that have a drastic impact on the bottom line of insider threat management.

To enact an intentional culture, an organization should perform a cultural assessment. In this process, you will need to capture the specific parts of your organizational culture that influence insider threat risk. Consider interviewing key individuals across the enterprise using in-person interviews, focus groups, surveys, and leadership interactions.

The most effective cultural assessments do not start with a problem or a hypothesis, but with a topic. Do not ask directly about risk or threat; be curious about creating a picture of reality through indirect topics that directly affect the nature and tolerance of risk in your organization. The goal of the cultural assessment is to identify the root cause. Understanding the root causes within an organization is essential to building an insider threat program that works for the mission and culture.

A feature of effective insider threat programs is intentional conversations among senior leadership and the workforce. In these challenging conversations, leaders handle conflict and make sense of the risk level. Or, as we like to say, leaders create a clearing for critical conversations.

Understanding the culture and risk tolerance within their organizations, leaders then initiate conversations to begin designing the insider threat program. By challenging norms and outdated structures, these groups are designing effective, targeted insider threat and risk programs that allow the frontline to drive value for customers without breaking the organization.

When adopting an insider threat and risk programs, organizations need to understand what happens when you say ‘yes,’ especially if the program recommends a one-size-fits-all approach.

However, when you listen to the right feedback from the workforce prior to and during implementation, you can design an insider threat program that has a positive impact across the organization and increases trust with customers.

If you would like to join in the conversation with others who are on the edge of insider threat and risk program innovation, email me at Tara.Carcillo@theclearing.com. I look forward to sharing more details about the impacts our approach has on business value. Stay tuned!

The gift of leading from the top of an organization is perspective. As President of The Clearing, I am granted access to a material amount of information, which is often presented in conjunction with other leaders’ insight. This enables me, and other senior leaders like me, to combine information with insight and the context essential to drive certain behaviors up and other behaviors down, all depending on the gap between the current state and the collective organizational goals.

However, I have noticed that the inherent value of this perspective can begin to falter as a company or organization scales. As an organization grows, the degrees of familiarity with the senior leader decrease. Formality replaces casual exchanges and opportunities for authentic interaction can become nearly non-existent. The small moments available for casual information sharing become hard to find. Kitchen-table style conversations are replaced with formal niceties and meetings that feel like attendees are dining at an unusually long table set for an occasion rather than genuine engagement.

As meaning and communication are forced into a smaller and smaller pipe or field, emotion often gets left behind. It is at this point that I have found a leader’s ability to self-manage becomes an asset, and a true sign of professionalism and experience as an executive.

This is because employees watch their leaders. Observing the pace of a leader’s walk, hand gestures, facial expression and of course, the words that come out of their mouth is second nature. With this careful focus comes specific attention being drawn to emotion.

Embodying a steady and even disposition becomes more and more important to a leader’s communication strategy and power in sending the right signals at the right time into the organizational and very human system she or he leads. When the settings where I interact with my teammates are less frequent and more staged, the ability to do this well feels all the more important.

Still, there are moments when my emotion shows up. My frustration with the process of finding the right solution in a given moment can be confused with anger, and can sometimes leave my team members concerned about my overall well-being. I’m aware that there are gender implications around how women express anger, but that is a topic for another time. While we work through old and new rules around gender, I want to offer a small tool for widening the pipe and field through which leaders–especially female leaders–can engage.

It’s as simple as this:

Curiosity.

When I am in a situation where I need to express myself and am mindful that even my whispers can land as shouts, I get curious. I direct that curiosity internally, as I wonder about what’s triggering me in the moment, and externally, as I inquire into my teammates’ intuition. Dr. Marilee Adams’ work was a source of inspiration for this practice.

Instead of getting frustrated or angry, I ask,

“What types of responses did you anticipate receiving based on the data you are presenting here today?”

“What might surprise or concern stakeholders about the conclusions you’ve drawn?”

Channel the frustration, create conditions for authentic exchange, and grow intuition–all by asking a simple question. The next time you feel yourself growing frustrated, give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

Last month, I participated on a workplace conference panel to discuss change management and workplace transformation. At The Clearing, we believe change management is a necessary component of successfully undergoing workplace initiatives, but at the conference, it became apparent that this is still a relatively new concept.

“Wait, this is a service?” and “How does that work?” were questions that needed to be discussed before my fellow panelists and I could get into the specifics. Reflecting on the experience, I realized that despite how essential I believe effective change management is to organizational culture during a workplace transformation, it’s a topic that still needs a fair amount of awareness brought to it.

So let’s back up a bit: it will come as no surprise that change, in general, is hard. Most human beings do not care for it; more often than not, we fear and resist it. Whether approaching a new strategy, implementing new technology resources, or undergoing an office move or renovation, many strategic approaches do not consider human behavior as the key element to a successful organizational transformation. A workplace change can encompass something as small as ordering new furniture, to something as significant as a complete relocation. And lately, a much-discussed topic is the increasing trend of moving from a closed office environment to one that is more open and collaborative.

Workplace change isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s shifting the behaviors that you tolerate and don’t tolerate; it impacts your entire culture – what your employees live and breathe every day. Project planners have timelines, architects have drawings, designers have fixtures, financiers have the budget, but who owns the social complexity of collectively bringing your employees with you along the way? This is where workplace change management comes into play.

My firm has a team of workplace experts. These folks work alongside the organization contemplating or in process of a workplace change, project planners, designers, and architects to set the organization up for success by enrolling the workforce into the effort through workplace expertise and project management efforts. “Why put such a focus in enrolling the staff?” you may ask. In our experience, without intentional communication and change management, there is high risk that the change might create an emotionally tense atmosphere for the workforce leading to a negative culture, resistance, unproductivity, and turnover. The most successful workplace transformations create highly adaptive environments suitable for an organization’s current functions, while being flexible for growth and allowing for learning and collaboration.

We approach change management for organizations by asking critical questions about the current state of their workplace, with a focus on four key categories: space, people, technology, and process. Simple questions like “What’s working?”, “What’s not working?”, and “What resources and tools could enable an even better workplace?” lay the foundation for each category. From there, we can begin working to develop the organization’s desired future state. Senior leadership has a key role to play in determining this vision for the transformation and creating a case for change to gain buy-in from their teams. Sometimes the hardest question isn’t “How are we going to achieve success?” but “What happens if we don’t make this change?” By engaging all levels of the workforce, the results are most effective as the organization as a whole yields significant returns with respect to morale, retention, and innovation.

Here’s the how: the actual implementation lies in the middle of those four key categories. Through change management, communications, and training, the project can move forward toward its vision. Change management drives the culture shift to adopt new behaviors while minimizing disruption through engagement efforts. Regular communication keeps everyone informed at an appropriate level throughout the lifecycle of the project. Training and outfitting efforts accustom employees to the new ways of working ahead of time, making the shift easier when it’s time to settle into the new space.

The approach we take acknowledges reality—your employees are extremely busy and have no extra time for concern about their physical space and any changes that may be made to how they do their work—while also recognizing that to maintain efficiency, the organization collectively needs to adapt to these new ways of working now. To learn more about how we can help enroll your workforce in workplace transformation, please reach out to me.