Agility is critical in disruptive economic times. Your team is counting on you to guide them through.
There’s been no shortage of commentary on the potential economic outcomes from the recent trade directives coming out of Washington. Whether you think it will help or harm the US industrial sector in the long run, everyone seems to agree that there will be a lot of uncertainty in the interim.
In 2018, new tariffs drove many to consider reshoring (or at least nearshoring) some production from China to North America. Others reacted to counter tariffs by moving operations to Europe and other territories.1 The pandemic in 2020 pushed companies to further diversify their supply chains and develop new assets domestically.
Now, with tariffs levied across the board, even the penguins aren’t immune,2 much less our neighbors to the north and south. Despite the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a new 25% tariff on Mexico makes nearshoring more complicated.3 Onshoring isn’t feasible for many either, as the capacity or capability doesn’t exist here anymore4 and could take decades to rebuild.
While new tariff policies and ensuing market conditions continue to shift, it’s important to assess your vulnerability and develop thoughtful contingency plans – including both the downsides and upsides of each potential action.
But don’t stop there. Your plans are only as good as your ability to implement them. Make sure you can communicate your strategy to employees and guide them through day-to-day challenges. Perhaps more importantly, ensure the change persists after your training exercises have run their course.
Uncertainty can lead to fear and employees will look to leadership for guidance to get the team through this period. Whatever plan you deploy, it almost certainly won’t be business as usual. Employees will need to quickly learn new policies and procedures, so getting vital information right away is essential — you won’t want to waste time trying to figure out who’s heard about the changes and whether they’ve adopted them yet.
Change management is largely a messaging exercise. Develop a communication strategy with distinct objectives and take care to ensure the message finds its target. Here’s how to educate employees about changes you want them to make:
Each of these messaging components plays a key role in change management. But combined, they are more effective than the sum of their parts.
Communicating your plan to employees is a good start. But what do you need in return from the people who make up your workforce? Depending on your business situation, you’ll be requesting teams and individual employees to change the way they work.
You can start by outlining new policies like changes to procurement guidelines, billing requirements, or production procedures and sending them to the appropriate employee group. Confirm that employees have read and understood the new policy by requiring them to acknowledge it .
For mission-critical aspects of your procedural changes, quiz employees on new information. It will help them remember and make your change stick.
As you get into the day-to-day execution of your updated strategy, you’ll need a way to guide employees, ensure they’re following new processes, and provide a means for making additional changes.
Deploying digital work instructions to your team will walk them step-by-step through a new procedure. It will also provide a view into their compliance with standard work, helping you target additional training where needed.
Assuming you don’t get everything perfect on the first pass, you’ll want a way to quickly pivot. Providing work instructions electronically makes it possible to get employee feedback while making improvements instantly available to your team.
The natural next step is a cycle of deploying standard work, capturing feedback, improving processes, and tracking progress against your goals. That’s when change becomes permanent and easier to implement with the next disruption.
Navigating disruptive change is even harder in the dark. Visibility into employee training, adoption, and compliance of new processes is critical. Training shoulder-to-shoulder, delivering work instructions on paper, and tracking employee capabilities in spreadsheets are all time-consuming activities. They limit your ability to quickly understand what’s going on in your business.
In Acadia, all the capabilities described above are seamlessly deployed and provide reporting that helps you navigate change nimbly. Reach out, we’ll make it easy for you to manage through the current turbulence.
Here are a few examples of change projects we’ve helped Acadia customers work through. The best part is, in every instance, the change stuck and continues to benefit the organization.
$500K savings in downtime improvements
600 employees reskilled in just a few months
72% reduction in failed duty assignment audits
Exceeding gross line yield targets within six months at each plant
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