a large service organization

Our client needs to change its working practices to become more efficient in response to a rapidly changing market.

Frontline employees are heavily unionized and view management with suspicion. So one of the challenges our client faces is to find ways of getting the two sides to have conversations that help move things forward. That has been the focus of our work over the past 18 months.

In Their Shoes

We began by developing a product called In Their Shoes – a half-day workshop that encourages managers to rethink how they are going to talk to their teams about the forthcoming changes to working practices.

It comprises a number of modules which, among other things, involve participants:

  • envisaging a day in the life of an individual affected by the changes
  • thinking about the situation from that person’s point of view
  • experimenting with different ways of engaging with them.

    • FIT Kit

    Following the success of In Their Shoes, our client asked us to develop a series of tools and techniques that managers could use to run meetings. The thinking was that each of the tools would be relatively straightforward but that together they would offer a new approach that could change the way meetings work.

    From ‘In Their Shoes’ came some action research into a Frontline Involvement Toolkit (‘FIT kit’) that might be used to make meetings with frontline employees more satisfying and productive.

    The workbook we produced describes:

    • five mood changers, also known as Icebreakers, that can be done quite quickly with the aim of moving people from their usual thinking to a more positive mindset in which new conversations can flourish
    • five exercises that last about 20–30 minutes; these offer new ways of having conversations around current issues
    • a democratic way of choosing topics for each meeting.

      • in demand

      Managers who participated in In Their Shoes began to use bits of it with their own teams and both initiatives have begun to spread virally. Early in 2010 we ran In Their Shoes and FIT kit coaching sessions for a whole region to equip regional service managers to work with their reports to engage frontline staff differently and to support each other as a learning peer network. FIT Kit is becoming part of our client's induction process.

      Our work demonstrates how sometimes relatively small interventions can develop a momentum of their own and become just as powerful as much grander projects.