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Show notes
- Change management is essential for organizations to keep up with the constantly evolving talent industry, with 79.7% of organizations needing to adapt their business every 2-5 years.
- Factors that can trigger change within a talent business include market changes, technological advancements, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory changes, organizational growth, and an increase in remote work.
- Implementing change management can help teams navigate these challenges and remain successful in the long-term.
- Change can be hard for individuals, teams, and organizations. The host shares their own struggles with implementing change and how change management processes can fail.
- Kortney discusses strategies for successful change management and how technology can support new and changing processes.
- Ask Me Anything (AMA) session
Transcription
Kortney Harmon, Host:
This is the most important thing for you as a leader, because this is your line of sight to your business. This is how you are forecasting next month’s predictions. Remember, technology enables strategy. Honestly, you can’t afford not to have a process and train this from day one. This is quite easy if you have an ATS or CRM set up correctly. There are programs out there that you can record how to submit a candidate or a job process just by following your tech stack, and it’ll track your cursor in clicks. So for the sake of your business, do this well.
Hi, I’m Kortney Harmon, Staffing & Recruiting Industry Principal at Crelate. Over the past decade I’ve trained thousands of frontline recruiters and I’ve worked with hundreds of business owners and executives to help their firms and agencies grow. This is the Full Desk Experience, where we will be talking about growth blockers across your people, processes and technologies. On today’s episode we’re going to talk about navigating change management in the talent industry and some of the winning strategies your organization can implement for long-term success. Let’s face it, change is a part of every business, and there are organizations out there that just get it wrong. Sometimes it’s a lack of resources, lack of communication, no doubt in my mind, a lack of training plays a part.
But honestly, it truly comes down to aligning your processes with your technology in this one. Now, if change management isn’t approached correctly, you’re going to create burnout within your teams because of that lack of process, missing communication and broken systems that don’t really allow your teams to collaborate effectively in their ATS. And in turn, it’s not going to give you as a leader the holistic view of your business to make future decisions and adaptations to the shifting markets. Now, it is about having a strategy determined, understanding where changes are going to be made, and then ensuring that process is spelled out and replicated in your system of record.
So you can use those workflows, those automations and other technologies to work smarter beside your teams and give you as that leader the forecast of your business. So technology enables strategy. Today’s discussion we’re going to focus on strategies for effectively managing change within your organizations and ways to enhance that success rate for your teams. So as a leader in your company, it’s important to consider how to evaluate the efficiencies of the methods that we’re going to discuss today and establish a standard for your current team as well as using it for a future model for future members of your organization.
So if you’re unable to perform the necessary measurement or establish a custom workflow for successful change, it’s going to be challenging to maintain any changes discussed in this session or other sessions that you’re going to attend with us. There is no doubt in my mind, with all the people in this room that you’ve encountered change within your teams, because according to a stat that I saw, 79.7% of organizations, nearly 80% of organizations need to adapt their business every two to five years, two to five. So think about how much change you have been through in the last five years. Now, there are several reasons why teams and talent businesses might have to implement change. So I’m going to talk through a few of those before we get into our strategies. You might have seen or experienced some of these as of recently.
Number one, you may have seen market changes. The talent industry is consistently evolving and teams may have to adapt to new market trends and demands to truly stay competitive. And shifts in the market. I’m going to be talking about this one shortly, and we’ve probably talked about some other ones on our podcast in the past. Number two is technology advancements. New technology can disrupt traditional talent business models and teams may have to implement new systems and processes to stay ahead of that curve. So think about adapting to AI and what that will be like for many of your businesses in the months and years to come.
If you had a chance to listen to our podcast with Maurice Fuller, we talked about what the future of tech in our industry is going to look like. You might have a good outlook for what that might be like from that show. So hopefully you get a chance to think about that. Mergers and acquisition is another reason for change. Companies in the talent industry may merge or acquire other businesses leading to change in organizational structure and processes. Regulatory changes, that may depend on your industry, but new laws and regulations can have a significant impact on your business, requiring your teams to make adjustments to comply with new rules in your industry or in general, whether it’s new laws like GDPR, vaccine mandates, depending on your industries, those laws may change more frequently.
The last two are probably something that you have seen more frequently. Number one is the organizational growth, and I should say it’s not number one, it’s number four on my list. But organizational growth. As talent businesses grow and expand, teams have to adapt their processes and systems to accommodate that increase in demand or the change in leadership that they may have due to the organizational growth. And last but not least is increase in remote work. Guaranteed in the last five years you guys have experienced that, probably in two years. With the pandemic and the shift to remote work, companies may have already adapted their systems to manage your remote workforce. You’re probably seeing that now not only in your ATS, your systems you’re reporting, you’ve probably had to pivot in some way, shape or form.
So implementing change can help teams in our business navigate and adapt to these various challenges and opportunities. It truly allows them to remain successful in the long term. So let’s talk through a few strategies for successful change management, which in turn is going to uncover where most change management processes fail, and how you can ensure your tech stack can come alongside in supporting new and changing processes. I’m going to tell you about some of the struggles that I’ve seen with organizations and that I’ve experienced on my own when implementing change for companies. Let’s first dive in with the obvious statement for the episode. Change is hard, for individuals, let alone teams and organizations.
I want you to think about you for a minute. You’re officially 24 days into the new year. You may have had New Year’s resolutions. The great part about New Year’s resolutions is they’re usually only involving you, getting in better shape, eating better, more active, whatever it might be. Think about it, it’s hard to change your own actions and make yourself accountable and to motivate you to make a change, let alone in a group, a team, or a company. How many people have failed their own New Year’s resolutions 24 days in? I don’t know about you, good news for me, I don’t set resolutions. I set goals for the year. It’s my way of validating in my brain. It really determines outcomes for me.
But if we’re only 24 days in and people have already fallen off the wagon, think about that in terms of your team, that consists of multiple people, multiple teams, all with different visions, different lenses, different whys and motivation behind each and every employee. That is no doubt the part of the reason that only 34% of change initiatives succeed. Listen to that again, only 34% of change initiatives succeed. That means nearly 70% of change fails within organizations. Think about that for your organization. Have you ever tried to implement change and has it succeeded? This statistic states that you’re not alone. So Katie, I’m going to throw that poll up to you first. So we’re going to start with a quick poll.
How successful is change management within your business? Have an honest look outside standing in. Is it the processes are adopted well? Some of our team adapts, but not all. We have low adoption rates for change or you know what? We don’t actually measure that or we’re here for help. Some of your team’s adapt, but not all. Okay, that’s good to know. We have low adoption rate or we have no clue. It’s actually not measured. That’s pretty interesting. That’s something that we probably should understand in our industry. Because, again, we’re going to continually evolve. This digital transformation that we’re in now is going to continue to change. Thank you for your honesty in our poll. I love that. Majority of our answers are some adapt well, but not all, and we really don’t know because we don’t measure.
If we break change management down into strategies, I’m going to stick with three strategies, keeping it simple and not a really long list of things to do. So first, whenever we talk about making change, the first thing that you have to do is determine the outcome of change. This is going to be my soapbox for a minute, because this is where I see most things go wrong with transformations. Before I start down this rabbit hole, Katie, can you assist me with one more poll for me please? When you implement operational change, I want you to think about the playbook that you’re running. Katie’s going to throw our second poll up. How do you implement operational changes?
So whenever you think about that, you’re going to roll something out and your team’s not adapting or you’re not quite sure because you’re not measuring. Maybe you see the need, you tell the corresponding managers to change and it happens. Maybe you get department lead, buy-in and then implement quick. Maybe you get buy-in, you create a plan, involve the teams and then scale. Or maybe you have something else. I’d love for you to tell me in the comments if you have something completely different. Good news, most of you are doing some things to get buy-in, create a plan, involve teams and scale. We’re going to talk about that a lot today, because honestly that’s where a lot of the places that I see this going wrong.
All right, thank you so much for your insights. Majority of you, good news, hey, we get a plan, we get buy-in, we create a plan and we involve teams and then scale. So when you go down this avenue, you realize change is necessary to drive a different result. You need a different outcome. You’re not obviously changing just for change’s sake. This is where you take a good look under the hood to see where your foundational process are possibly broken. I know that’s hard to hear whenever you say something might be broken, whether it could be a part of the sales process, the recruiting process, reporting, your social presence, the marketing of your organization. It may not even be a process at all. It may be more something to expose gaps in your technology, your management, your employee engagement, your data, or maybe overall strategy.
Oftentimes I’ve seen leaders want to change a process, but they truly don’t always know the ingredients that goes into the sausage, so to speak. They know it needs flavor. They know they need to have a different end result, but they’re not quite sure. This is one of the biggest things that can frustrate teams. You need to truly understand the current processes and how it’s portrayed in your ATS or technologies that your teams are using daily. Guaranteed you got to this point to realize you needed change because you’re seeing a metric or report. You’re seeing something that you need to have a different outcome.
Now, did you know that the most common barrier to transformation failures is that 37% of executives tend to underestimate the importance of operating model changes within an organization and the impact through that transformation phase. They don’t really know all the pieces that it takes to make this successful, or maybe they want to try to rush something to get it done quickly. So let’s take a very applicable reason for change that you might be experiencing today. Market changes. Ironically I had that same exact situation when I was working for a network of companies as well. Maybe now like you have, you might be having talent beating down your door for the last two years with so many jobs that you couldn’t fill.
So your teams really haven’t had to focus on tracking new job orders, new logos, initial site visits because you couldn’t fill the ones you already had in place. So let’s insert this current market shift that we’re probably starting to experience now. The leadership of the organization I was at knew that they needed to see new logos to see growth in the business. But in order to see those new logos, their process was they needed to see an increase in initial site visits. Okay? So that was like the domino that needed to fall to create new business. So the push was for the managers to get their teams to increase initial site visits. So getting in front of more people in turn would create more clients. Makes sense, right?
But what leadership didn’t know was how to make the sausage, how those numbers were calculating in their reports, what if anything their teams were being taught throughout the process to track and show their progress and the ATA, which in turn was what the executive team was monitoring to make their initial decisions. The change of putting an emphasis on the initial site visit actually changed the workflow of the organization sales process long term. It wasn’t just a change for now, it was the way that it needed to be done from this point on. Have you come across those kind of situations where you’re like, light bulb went on, I need to change it from this point on. That means every new user or every new person coming into my organization needs to do it this way from this point on.
So what does that mean? That means you just can’t send an email about changing your focus. It needs to be a thought out, deliberate focus with different lenses. Whenever I say different lenses, is different people seeing things from a different perspective. That means the workflow and the ATS needed to change. The recorded activity and automation associated to the activity needed to change because it was a different part of the process and the emails that were being kicked out post that initial site visit were no longer applicable. The reporting ended up needing to change with ratio reports, because site visits were never something that was measured in the beginning. It was something that we were assuming.
It now needed to change from understand it took X number of calls to get a site visit, X number of site visits to get a new logo, X number of new clients to get a new job order, so on and so forth. And it was just something that we needed to implement change. But that means that you have to dig into this with your team and know the right way of doing things from this point on. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It was. It wasn’t something that could just be done overnight or quickly if we wanted our teams to have the efficient way of doing things going forward. When you asked leaders or when you as leaders think about making operational changes, frankly it could have been things that we’ve overlooked during COVID, AKA, the wild, wild west.
The last two years that we’ve done just to stay afloat. I don’t blame you, but now you’re focusing on foundational processes because you have time or there’s bigger initiatives that we need to shift our focus maybe more to sales than it was recruiting. There’s been a change in your attention to say the least. Be sure that your process aligns with the technology that your teams live in day in and day out. Now, shameless plug, if you haven’t gotten a chance to listen to the Industry Spotlight with Jen Meyer from Govig & Associates on our podcast, you should. She actually talked about how she completely changed her focus in the recession of 2002, I believe, and build $340,000 without ever having a job order.
It’s great stuff. It might help you think differently on your processes that you have implemented in your business today and maybe how to go into this market shift. So know that it might not be a simple task to ask to change, focus, a different recorded activity or an updated workflow, but make sure you have documented processes in your ATS, what good looks like and how your work should flow. It’ll not only benefit your teams today through ease of use and habit, but it’s going to help your future team members get up to speed quicker. Katie, thank you so much. Katie already dropped a podcast for Jen Meyer in the chat. For those of you who are listening for the podcast, it’ll also be in the show notes.
Now, I could go on and on about this topic and truly talk about the trials of the overall change management and how I navigated this during my days, but I don’t want to use this whole time to talk about this one portion of the topic. So feel free to ask questions at the end, but if you have to define an outcome of change through the hard work, it has to be done behind the scenes. So that was number one strategy. Number one, figure out what you need to change to begin with. Number two is to build a solid and committed team that you communicate with effectively. Katie, I think we’re already up to poll number three and we’re only a few minutes in.
But the next poll is really around communication. How do you communicate change with your teams? Do you do that through emails and meetings? Do you do it through emails, meetings, SOPs, standard operating procedures, maybe a pilot user group, job aids? Do you do it other ways or do you just do it through email? A lot of times we oftentimes get so busy that we want to make sure it’s just an email. We get it out to our teams as quick as possible. So majority of you email and meetings. It is important to have a clear consistent message when communicating changes to employees. This includes explaining the reason for the change so your team can see the holistic view of the business just like you do. What changes will look like, how they will be impacted.
When I was the director of L&D and communications at a network of 10 operating companies, we dove into the details when we hit changes in our organization. And when I say dove into the details, we were in places we probably shouldn’t have been. We didn’t just send out an email about the changes, but after that leadership buy-in, we created a timeline and we worked backwards. We worked with our internal teams like IT and our leaders that were really driving the business, and then we launched a pilot program. I know not everybody has this opportunity and a pilot program doesn’t have to be an extensive amount of people, but I’m going to talk about that in a little bit of how that can make you successful.
And that user group was really to help, the pilot program was really to help get early wins. When I say we sat with it to walk through our process, it was how it impacted the software. Okay? It seems pretty basic, but we knew what fields were changing, what activities were changing. Did it change the definition of the action that was in the system to begin with? How it impacted reporting and so much more. I’ll be honest, we actually, I was lucky enough, we had an ATS expert functioning as our operations lead. All she did was train on our ATS day in and day out for new people and existing people. And then there was the IT tech that knew the software like the back of their hand on all calls. But we still didn’t realize the impact the automations had recording the everyday activities that our teams were experiencing.
So we did. We implemented that group of champions or early adopters or pilot group, however you want to call it, that worked with us through all of our initial rollouts. You might be thinking to me, Kortney, I don’t have that many people on my team, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be a high number. Maybe it’s just one sales associate or one recruiter. Oftentimes leaders like yourselves may not be in the system day in and day out. They truly understand how the technology has worked, how they’re getting reporting. So by involving employees in the change process, they’ll feel a sense of ownership and more likely to support the future changes of your organization. And they’re going to tell you where the gaps may be with the transitions that you’re looking to implement.
They will be your win to help eliminate any employee resistance in your organization. Maybe not all, but they’re going to be there to help be the force, to say, yes, this works. Yes, I understand why. Yes, I understand this is good for us. Cooperation from the workforce is a key element in organizational changes. Without it, the change process is unlikely to succeed. Unfortunately, employee resistance and lack of management support often led to failure up to 70% of the change initiatives. However, in some cases, even a commitment as little as 30% of employees can really ensure a successful transformation. Remember, you could have stopped your commitment 24 days in January. Let’s make sure we’re here to help support our teams.
Now post that user group or pilot program, we understood the details, updated our training, we created a communication with job aids, how a lunch and learn for all employees to see changes live. Now if they didn’t have the ability to join, you guys all had talked about meetings, if they didn’t have a chance, they could listen to the recording, but it was pertinent that employees have a chance to ask questions. It’s key for them to be able to engage. This was the way for members of your team to understand the why behind the change versus an email to convey a change as a way to pick apart KPIs, so your employees figure out how to skew the numbers going forward. If you don’t think your employees are doing that, you’re crazy.
Hopefully we don’t have that ability to do that or we’re really laying out a process that’s not too convoluted that our employees will follow. They feel like maybe the employees feel like they’re being micromanaged with the details and they think that you’re not happy with their performance. That meeting and those emails really make a difference. Effective change management makes a difference. It’s been recorded that there are around 143% ROI when change management is implemented. 143% where if it’s not done correctly, 35% ROI. I really saw this specifically when launching consistency of training in my past roles. We saw an overall increase of gross margin in sales with new hires that were enrolled in training for those who are not.
There was around 142% increase of gross margin within the first three months of production of new hires if they went through our training. So teams that were hearing a consistent message with training that included the technology that they worked with daily, if they were having quicker ramp up times, higher production for the company earlier on, and you honestly don’t have time to do this wrong. You’re spending cycles and wasting time and money if you don’t do it right. Which leads me to number three. Last but not least, but provide ongoing training and support. For those of you who have been on this podcast before, you know that this is the weight of my heart. Katie, if you could help me throw up our last poll. I think last but not least. Do you train on methodology and technology?
So hear me out, I’m going to talk about this a little bit. Methodology is the concept of doing your job, how to do sales, how to do recruiting, but technology is the pieces that correlate with them. Oftentimes we have the ability to train on how to do your job and we’ll throw in pieces of technology. Or we do a little bit of both, but we need improvement on both. I’m curious where you guys stand today with our audience members. There’s some that train both. Some that don’t train either and some that need a little bit of both and need improvement. And that might be the case. Sometimes we have the ability to hire senior people within our organization, and I know that’s a wonderful thing for you to do, but also knowing that those senior people do things the way you want them to do them or the way that you know that’s effective in your industry is very beneficial.
So good news, most of you say a little bit of both needs improvement. So that’s what these workshops are for. So we’re here to do that. Providing employees with the tools and resources they need to succeed is critical for ensuring that they’re equipped to adapt to the changes and are more likely to support them. 93% of employees said that well-planned employee training programs positively affect their level of engagement. And what are we seeing now? Are we seeing employees engaged? I was on a call yesterday with an ASA focus group for Staffing World and people were writing in the chat what they wanted to hear more about, but people wanted to hear how to get more employees engaged and retain them.
Well, here’s your start, without ever having to go outside of the four walls that you’re in right now, take an honest look at where your teams are today and you’re training them on what they need to know and the change management that you will have in the future. Now, I know a lot of talent businesses start from one really kick butt associate deciding not to work for the man anymore, and they choose to go out on their own, and I love that for you if this is your story. However, I’ve been working with and training new owners like that for years, and that comes at a cost. And that cost is you are the sales manager, you are the recruiter, you are the HR department, the janitor, payroll and timekeeping. And then when you add to your staff, you’re the trainer and the keeper of those records. That’s a lot.
You need this portion of your business the most when it comes to scale. So if you have any intention of growing and scaling, don’t push this off to the side because you don’t have time. When it comes to changing processes, you need things like training sessions, job aids or SOPs. Make sure screenshots are there. Some of you, I’m curious right in the chat, do you guys have mentor programs within your organization? It’s easier to start with creating these processes from the beginning if you plan to grow, but if you haven’t, that’s okay. Know that you need to do things like assess the needs of your employees and develop a plan to address any gaps. Use a variety of training methods because not everyone learns like you or even the same.
So use those in-person workshops, online courses if you have L&D team on hand, on the job training, role plays, I’m not quite sure, that’s like a foreign taboo word. No one wants to do a role play anymore to save their life, but those are the things that are going to make you better. Provide ongoing support and resources to help your employees apply what they’ve learned and revisit and measure those changes and one-on-ones and performance reviews. Now, when you think of the teaching process, I talked about this a SPIG, but it’s not just the process of their job. There are two facets of teaching new and existing associates. I’ve been talking about this the whole episode, but I want to spell it out clearly.
There’s the methodology of our job. It’s how you do your job, what you say, how you sell, how you respond to resistance, what’s your opening pitch, how do you retain talent? The list could go on. But there is the technological part of our job and it’s rapidly growing each year in our industry, how you record their conversations, what their workflow process is, what automations happen when recording an activity, what forms to use when sending out a service agreement? How do I know if I’m meeting my metrics? Can I diagnose my own lack of submissions to clients on my own? How do I get people in from a job board? The list goes on, but this is the most important thing for you as a leader, because this is your line of sight to your business. This is how you are forecasting next month’s predictions. Remember, technology enables strategy.
Honestly, you can’t afford not to have a process and train this from day one. This is quite easy if you have an ATS or CRM set up correctly. There are programs out there that you can record how to submit a candidate or a job process just by following your tech stack and it’ll track your cursor and clicks. So for the sake of your business, do this well. And if you’re limited on resources, there are plenty out there. If you need more ideas, feel free to reach out, I’ll be happy to help you through those. But if you want to think of training and development for learners of today for ease of use, to ensure your teams don’t do anything outside of the system so you as leaders can have that holistic view of your business.
But to continuously assess and adapt is the second part of this strategy. Change management is an ongoing process. It’s essential to continuously assess and adapt strategies as needed. This includes monitoring progress towards goal, gathering feedback from employees, making adjustments as necessary. You have to understand and have the return on investment conversations even if you don’t want to. What’s the value? What does it take to manage it? What do I need to do to scale it? Have a clear plan for implementing changes in your organization and give adequate time to implement those operational changes, monitor their success, set goals and milestones and regularly review them.
Now, if I can say one thing, please don’t get distracted by the shiny tool you’re seeing out there today. That tool could scream AI. You’re being sold on a claim that it’s going to fix a pain point for you, maybe that you’ve experienced and maybe it’s been accelerated by COVID in the digital transformation. AI is not going to fix your in-house problems. It’s not going to fix your lack of process, lack of training, change to your reactive approach to our industry. No tool will fix that. Your teams need and deserve a leadership that has deliberate processes, change management strategy that’s spelled out through your technology and integrated with tools that your teams use daily. That’s what impacts them the most.
Now, with the rapid pace of technology advancements in the consistently shifting economic landscape, your talent organization must be able to adapt and evolve in order to stay competitive. And effective change management is there for critical success for the staffing and recruiting firms as it helps you navigate and implement those changes in a smooth and efficient manner. Now, Katie, I’ve jumped off my soapbox. I apologize. I could go on and on about this one.
Katie Jones, Producer:
I was having a conversation with Darrell in our audience about the way that they run some of this change management thing. And Darrell, if it’s okay with you, can I share what you’ve shared with me?
Darrell:
Sure thing. [inaudible 00:31:44].
Katie Jones, Producer:
Sure. Okay. What they do is they take a look at their data through Crelate, they use Crelate. They suggest trainings. They have coaches that review the numbers, suggest training sessions to him, and then they set up groups of training with specific content that’s aligned with what is needed for those groups of employees. So they group the employees by the areas for growth and then bullying training, technical training, ATS training, and then they pair them with the coach who isn’t their direct leader, if I’m understanding you correctly, Darrell. Then the team reports to their coaches who help them design and outline their goals every year in quarter, and then the coaches work with them to make it happen.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
I love that. That’s a mentorship program. I’ve seen those in many organizations and they work. Now, this can be something as long as that group, Darrell, maybe you can chime in on the chat. As long as that group is also your change advocate champions, that can work with change management too. It doesn’t have to be just bullying and training. I’m not going to lie, I don’t stay up and nor does anybody probably in your office stay up to learn bullying and searching late at night, but that’s wonderful that they’re teaching. They’re being able to teach on the job real life skills to say, let’s work a job order. That was my favorite thing to do in training, was to say, let’s open your job order, let’s pull up keywords. Let’s actively do this right now. So I love that.
Yes, all of our coaches report to me, director of operations who is seeing overall data, yes, has direct feedback to VP and ownership. I love that. That is a great way and it’s honestly a great way. Darrell, I love that they don’t actually do that training with their actual managers. It’s someone else for accountability, because you take that stigma of I’m not performing correctly off, right? You’re here to actually upskill your team. You’re here to help them learn and develop because not only does it make them better, they can essentially walk away from your organization, Darrell, and say, hey, I’m good at what I do because Darrell’s company helped me get that way. You’re advocating for your team, you’re advocating for the people in your organization to do better, but bottom line, it’s more money in your pocket too long term.
So it definitely is career advocacy program in a way, and you can essentially, I’m not quite sure if you have it now, but you can have that spelled out into career development to say if you want to be. We have almost no turnover. I love that. Bravo to you. If you haven’t taken notes away from this to be able to do a mentorship program like that, I think that would be great. Those are great things to be able to implement. Mentorship programs are amazing and it’s truly something to take note of and to be able to develop because it’s not only going to help training today, but it’s going to help you advocate for the idea that we’re changing stuff in our system. Are they doing things correctly? Maybe we need to run a program or a lunch and learn on this one specific topic. John, I love that you took notes.
Katie Jones, Producer:
Yes, of course John took notes. That’s great. John said he’d have to wear [inaudible 00:34:43] so people didn’t realize their manager was doing their training.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
But that’s something, I love that. And John, honestly that’s something that even if it’s four people or three people, it’s the ability to say, have them go talk to somebody else or have, you know what I love John, is to have people within my organization as we talk about the change, they’re actually leading the training. This was something that we did when we had two smaller teams, is we discussed the changes, we discussed how that impacted, and then we did a lunch and learn for everybody, even if it was two to three people, but it was like, I need you to go teach this, because I don’t know about you, but in my time coaching and teaching, people learned better when they taught. It was just a different perspective.
Now that’s not something that everybody loves to do. Not too many people want to sit up here on a screen and talk all day long. I will sign up all day, but even whenever I was in my pitching career, I learned so much more going to teach an eight year old how to pitch than I did understanding from my own coach what to do, because you had to just say it in a different way. You had to explain how things moved, how things navigated, but that goes the same thing with your technology. I love that.
Katie Jones, Producer:
Kortney, I actually just got a question in from Wilson and he says that when you’re talking about figuring out where your teams need training, what’s the best way to assess where your teams are weak?
Kortney Harmon, Host:
I think that really comes down to your reports should probably tell you a good line of sight first off. So if you are having trouble understanding, and I’m just going to use this as an example, so bear with me as I go through this. It’s really the idea to say, you know what? It’s taking my team 25 candidates to be able to submit one person. Okay? Or it’s taking my team, if we do it in sales, it’s taking them 50 calls to be able to get a site visit. That’s going to be a red flag for me to say maybe it’s the conversation that they’re having, not the fact that they’re not putting in the work because absolutely the numbers are in the system that they’re putting in the work. But let’s go back to, what is their pitch? What are they saying? Are they just saying, hey, what do you need?
Because honestly, that’s not a door opener for most organizations to be able to get new business, you have to create value. So it’s maybe stating whether you’re pitching talent to an organization when they don’t have an opportunity, but it’s changing the conversation, practicing those, and then you can assess. Katie, then you go back to, all right, I know that this is where they’re struggling in their metrics. So then I need to go and say, all right, let’s do role plays. Today is a role play session. We’re going to go role play and I need you to hear other people. I’m going to bring even my top leaders. There are going to be people that, John, I don’t know about you, but there are most leaders and owners and organizations that absolutely hate role playing. They’re like, I don’t need to do that. But in reality, you role-playing is really the idea to say, this is how I want my people talking.
So that was something that we did at TalentLaunch. There was actually presidents whenever we came in the room and were like, they threw them up in the room back to back, and they said, all right, go. Here’s what you should be talking about. And it was interesting to see those people because they’re like, I’m not comfortable doing this anymore. I don’t do this every day. But in reality that’s telling your people to say, hey, this is how you should sound. This is how I want you to be. It almost makes you very vulnerable. So I love it. I hope that answered the question.
Katie Jones, Producer:
Next question. I think that you kind of answered it in that roll up. Oh no, sorry, Carly. Carly just clarified that she said that at the beginning when you say define the outcome of the change, how do you go about defining, obviously you have quantifiable metrics at the end, but how do you go about defining exactly, you say this a lot, Kortney, what good looks like in your office?
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Let’s use the market shift. The market shift is like, okay, I know my teams aren’t putting enough focus on sales right now. We’re not getting those new logos. So whenever I know I need to define the change is whatever we’re doing today is not working, or let’s use a technology. AI’s that buzzword, that shiny silver bullet that’s going to solve all your problems, but in reality, it’s going to change your processes. It’s going to change what your system is doing, your automations are kicking out. So therefore whenever we implement those new technologies or decide we need to put a new focus on something that we’re actually trying to put deliberate process against, whether you’re MPC and a candidate and saying, well, this is what I need to do 20 times out of the week or for five call blocks a week.
Then we need to make sure we really, that’s where we define change when we know we need to change our actions or we need to see a different result in our data, or we have a new process or we added a new technology. So it can vary, but I think where you’re going to see is the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, is expecting different results. And I know that is the most cliche quote ever, but it’s really the idea to say, how am I going to get better results if I’m not changing my own actions?
Katie Jones, Producer:
I think that’s probably the end of our questions today. John didn’t really have any questions. I’d love to pull you up, John. John does have a question. Okay.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Saving the best for last.
Katie Jones, Producer:
Just because I said it.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
You just had to put it in the universe.
Katie Jones, Producer:
All right. John, let me pull you on stage. Give me a second. As you know, it’s been a while.
John Nilon, audience member:
I’m kidding.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
You’re not in your pajamas. There’s no way.
John Nilon, audience member:
Sometimes I do fall asleep in this.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
I’m that boring. That’s what you just told me.
John Nilon, audience member:
So in thinking about Darrell’s situation, and it was great to hear that, but when we’re a small company where it’s hard to build that kind of process and structure where you can trade things off, and I love that model. When does it make sense to start instituting organizational change management tools versus what we’re doing now is just recognizing when people aren’t landing in our methodologies and introducing more individualized or driven change management. Our training and stuff is more individual driven, which I know is part of change management, but is there 10 to 15 people when I start not knowing everybody’s name? When do you start figuring out, all right, let’s build something? Because I think as young, smaller company entrepreneurs, it’s hard to know how to prioritize some of these things that you’re implementing in your company.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
I think it comes down to you and I have seen organizations that are like, I have five people, but my five people do things differently. And it comes down to where is your line in the sand? Because you were successful at running a desk and probably still are. Eventually are you going to be able to step away from that? But is your team going to be able to say, I know the John way, I’m going to be able to do this the John way, because frankly John, if I know you, you do things right. Right? So as you hire new people-
John Nilon, audience member:
We’re doing like you do, Kortney. So it’s questions, right? I think that’s the point, and that’s part of, my opinion is you’re labeling why we have such a fragmented industry, as companies grow or you have five people and they all do it a different way. And if you’re truly going to scale, you have to create a brand and that brand has to have an identity where your customer and candidate experience is consistent. That was the shift. When we started to grow, they can’t buy John Nilon anymore, they have to buy what we do as a company. And we’ve gotten past that point, but it’s all right. Now we want to keep growing and I need to make sure that the processes are consistent. It is change management. We’ve got to manage that change so as we grow we don’t lose those-
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Correct. Because what happens is when you get line of sight and there’s more cooks in the kitchen, everybody’s going to have their way of doing things. And honestly, hopefully you’re going to be able to continue to hire senior tenured people and they’re going to be able to help you say, well, John, I was successful doing this, so let’s navigate away, or let’s have this process if it comes to LinkedIn or whatever, I know this is successful, so I want to do this differently. But it really comes back to first off, how your system of record is created. Correct. We’re tracking. So when you have the ability to say, hey, you know what, this is what good looks like, my workflow walks you through exactly your process.
There’s no guessing, there’s no questioning, and then you can add the other pieces. But it’s really the idea when you have the ability to put the little bubble to say, this is what this means or this is what you should ask in your system, do that. I know that sounds silly, but that is a recipe for scaling for your organizations.
John Nilon, audience member:
Absolutely.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Because all of your people are in that day in and day out, and there’s no getting away from it, because that’s where you get your information.
John Nilon, audience member:
We know that consistency in the values, vision methodology leads to it. And so we really emphasize that people we work with should experience those values by working with us. So yeah, it helps. It helps.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
And then if you get to the point where you’re like Jen Meyer from Govig and you have 100 people in your office and you run operations, if it’s not in the system, I’m not paying for it. I know that’s so taboo, but it’s literally the idea that, hey, I am not paying you because this is it. This is how I forecast the business. This is how I see where we’re going. But if it’s not there, and she said she ruffled some feathers and I’ve seen it happen, but very seldom, but that will get your teams to change, and it only takes one person. It only takes one time. And that will for sure change the process on.
John Nilon, audience member:
Working in our system is a requirement. So if it’s not in our system, it’s got to be in the system. It’s not even an option.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Correct. And I think Darrell agrees with that.
John Nilon, audience member:
But there are recruiters-
Kortney Harmon, Host:
There are so many times, and I can even tell you John, at my last organization, 10 operating companies, there were still people that were like, hey, I’m going to still work out of my Excel spreadsheet. And I’m like, what are you doing? How can you scale? How can you have your insight of your business? But it still happens, because people go with comfort, and that’s going to change as you continue to add people to your organization too.
John Nilon, audience member:
And I’ve found when we’ve hired people who say they want to change and then when they try, they can’t or they don’t really try. They never really wanted to. And they discover that once it’s-
Kortney Harmon, Host:
It’s lip service and they know what they need to do. I know I talked about skewing metrics, but it really comes down to don’t let your metrics bite you in the ass long term, because you may have these expectations to say you need 100 calls per day, but you’re never checking the system to see if there was 100 calls, or maybe they’re just skewing the numbers and putting 100 in, and therefore you’re not seeing the growth that you need to see because you set a goal for them to be able to hit this, and that’s all they cared about. So they were hitting the goal and you’re not having a great line of sight to what your business really looks like.
John Nilon, audience member:
They can call 100 people to restaurants and still haven’t showed up. I’ve seen many instances of that type of stuff. So we try to build in quality metrics, but people will skirt stuff all the time.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
They’re going to. That’s why we also don’t want to put too many parameters on things to say, well, it should be this number and this number. But this is where it comes back to coaching. And as you add to your team to say, are we doing one-on-ones every week? Let’s talk about these four quality metrics. Where are we? How are we doing? What do we need to coach on? Do we need to coach on your verbiage? Do we need to have a discussion? And I play the client where you can say your pitch and we work through what that looks like, but there are a lot of teams, well, my one-on-ones are for if they need anything. Well that’s for you, but do they need truly coaching? When are you allowing that time?
So that’s the true growth pattern as I saw for new franchise owners to really come in. That five number was really the eyeopener for most organizations that they were like, I need to make this more scalable, or I need to make sure I’m doing my due diligence to get things into the system and the system set up correctly so I don’t have this problem going forward.
John Nilon, audience member:
It becomes tough when you have more people because you have to look at those metrics for a lot of people and look at it the right way. You mentioned this in one of your earlier full desk webinars, was we measure ratios. The ratios tell us more than the quantitative metrics. And so once we see a ratios off, then we can-
Kortney Harmon, Host:
And honestly that’s my favorite piece. I can know how many submissions I have for a week, but if I know that I’m wasting more time, people are going to get to the point that they don’t have to make 52 phone calls to get one submission, right? But how do we make that better? How do we work smarter, not harder? Because no one wants to put in that time. This is an email business, it’s digital. People really want to get to the point that they’re like, well, I’m going to send an email or send out a blast and the people are just going to flock to me. That’s everyone’s desired wish, the magic button, right? But it just doesn’t work like that. And we really need to get to the point of understanding ratios, and that’s not how everybody’s business functions today.
John Nilon, audience member:
Without question. It’s harder to measure ratios because you have to interpret them and understand them, whereas metrics you can beat on and say, hey, get that number up.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Absolutely.
Katie Jones, Producer:
Thanks for coming on, John. We missed you.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Thank you, John.
John Nilon, audience member:
Pleasure. Good to see you. Happy new Year.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Happy New Year.
Katie Jones, Producer:
Happy New Year. Thanks, John. All right, Kort, that was a great Q&A session. That is all I’ve got. I’m going to hop off and let you wrap up.
Kortney Harmon, Host:
Amazing. Look at her, she’s gone before she even finished her sentence. Okay. In closing, remember there are three main reasons change management fails. Underestimation of operation changes and what it truly entails. Employee resistance because they don’t understand the why. And then lack of communication, training, and clarity around your methodology and technology. Don’t create burnout within your teams because of lack of process, missing communication and broken systems that don’t allow your team to collaborate effectively in their system of record or give you the holistic view of your business to pivot in times of market shifts like that you’re seeing today.
Leaders, it starts with you. If you don’t have change management strategy process and measurement for those changes, then you need to take a step back, see how your business is operating in the age of today. And remember, change is inevitable in any business, especially in talent businesses where market cycles ebb and flow like we’re seeing. Now is a great time to revisit those sales processes to ensure your teams are getting the new clients, creating the value to those that they’re talking to, but making sure your ATS is built for scale and change, and this will accelerate their success and increased profits in your organization. Remember, technology enables strategy.
I’d love for you to join us on February 14th. There is no better place that you would want to be on Valentine’s Day than with myself and our own Sarah Gossen from our product team. She’s going to join me as we talk about redeployment for your organizations. I can’t wait for this topic. I love it. This is going to be a great unlock, so please join us and remember our new series Industry Spotlight, where we talk to the top leaders and industry influencers who are shaping our talent industry. We’ll be shining a light on popular trends, latest news, and the stories that laid the groundwork for their success, and those will be dropping once a month. And we will continue these workshops as well once a month.
I’m Kortney Harmon with Crelate. Thanks for joining the Full Desk Experience. Please feel free to submit any questions for next session to [email protected] or ask us live next session. If you enjoyed our show, be sure to subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen and sign up to attend future events that happen once a month.
