Transformation seems to be a buzzword these days. First, it was aimed at overcoming the recession, then it was focused towards agility. However, in most organizations, it is tantamount to reorganizing people irrespective of the outcome on people – what happens to their career or what value the process adds to them makes no business sense for the undertakers. The implications are manifold – tilting towards unfavourable business outcomes versus the constructive intent with which it was conceptualized and carried out. Irrespective of the outcome, the management would easily transition to another period of conceptualizing and executing yet another transformation.What can employees do?
a. Focus on value-addition: Not that employees should not otherwise focus on value addition. The process of transformation witnesses large scale skepticism resulting in de-motivation and thereby lack of productivity. It is important to remain focused on the task at hand and finding avenues for adding more value. For instance, can an offshore marketing support center hitherto focused on production activities aid the organization’s growth?
b. Operational efficiency and innovation: While this is a given in many organization, what is not is innovation. The employee unrest created during a transformation exercise could lead to operational inefficiency. This is especially true when organizations increase spending per employee in the name of motivation. Employees should focus on doing more with less at the same time factoring in innovation aspects. Example, IBM India is able to establish a code factory with domain specialists extending the company’s customers solution accelerators that would speed up application deployment.
c. Expand the network: No doubt, the transformational ability of the professionals is what would make a difference and not necessarily the brand equity of the company in which they work. This is a fact that is resonating across industries and geographies, across government agencies and academic institutes as the need for people to move up the innovation value chain increasingly becomes vital. Transformation is perhaps the best phase when employees can showcase their insights into the market beyond India. The social networks in fact gives an opportunity to unleash potential customer engagement programs. For instance, the application development team in India can initiate a crowdsourcing program so as to receive and incorporate customer’s feedback.
