Organizational Change Plan

As much as some hard nosed managers would like to believe that corporate culture is irrelevant to the bottom line, they would be wrong. When there is a major organizational change, the transition of the culture becomes even more relevant. Sure there are many other aspects of change that directly affect the bottom line, but if a smooth transition of culture does not happen then the change can be very bumpy and costly.

Doing this is difficult, but it can and must be done if a competitive advantage is to be obtained as a result of the change. This can be done by focusing on the following points:

1. Involve employees in the success and progress of the company. When people feel like their job matters, then they tend to work harder to succeed. If they feel like they don't matter, then they will work to that level, but if they feel like they are important and valued, they will work as if they are.

2. Regular meetings with employees. Including employees in meetings in which they feel free to express their real concerns without being scorned or punished is essential to employee satisfaction and success. They should also be taken seriously in their suggestions, not simply listened to, but ultimately ignored. Oftentimes the best ideas come from the bottom, not the top.

3. Clear direction to middle managers. These are the connection between the bottom and the top and during a reorganization, they must be totally in the loop. Nonetheless, they must be allowed a degree of freedom in which to operate within these directions and allow the same freedom to their subordinates.

4. Positive culture. A culture in which employees are respected and treated as such is one that sees high employee retention and a big bottom line. Is it any wonder that the companies with the highest employee satisfaction ratings are usually the most successful?

5. Rewards. Especially during reorganization, awards like trips, bonuses, etc. cannot be eliminated. Equivalent ones may replace them, but if any incentives are removed, employee spirits will be crushed and employee productivity will suffer.

6. Set up a complaint mechanism. You can never satisfy everyone, and sometimes you may satisfy no one. So employees need a place that they can complain and their input will be taken seriously and a fair resolution reached.

Without these steps being taken, organizational change can be crippling. Often change occurs as the result of a need for improved efficiency and productivity, but can do just the opposite if it does not include employees like it should.

How to Organize Conferences Within a Budget?

Companies organize conferences and meetings to interact with new customers, discuss plans and proposals, and resolve critical issues. Companies also host a number of seminars and corporate events to talk about their products and services and strengthen relationships with existing clients. Conferences are important for the growth of a company. However, looking at the present rough economical scenario, many organizations are finding it difficult to arrange these large-scale events within limited budgets.

The budget usually seems to surpass expenditure due to the various administrative tasks involved in event planning and execution phases. You have to decide everything from choosing the venue, inviting guests to the kind of food to be served during the conference. Then you have to allocate funds to implement such works. Now, the question is how you can reduce your spending on organizing a conference and similar such events.

With the passage of time, event management software's have being introduced in the market to make the management process smooth and hassle free. Such software's help in reducing manual tasks and makes conference planning much easier.

Starting with the registration process, event planners can use the integrated registration solution to create registration forms online. It takes only a few minutes to publish the forms via this software as well as edit the forms. Add your company logo or graphics as needed to meet your business goals. The major benefit of online registration software is generating forms to be quickly filled up and submitted online. So, there is really no need to spend money on office accessories such as: paper, pen, pencil, files, and folders, etc.

The payment collection process can also be made transparent and easier by using an online payment system. It allows you to accept payments via secured online payment gateway platforms besides allowing individuals to pay directly via their credit cards and PayPal. Conference organizers may additionally have the option to use their professional merchant accounts to let the registrants deposit funds there.

Planning an event also includes inviting guests. Emails have become very popular these days because of their convenient usage procedure and quick delivery. You can create multiple new emails simultaneously and send a single email to many people marking a copy to you. Emails can reach a person faster (in seconds) than a hardcopy letter via postal service or courier that takes hours and days to get delivered successfully. Event planners can save on a considerable portion of the allocated capital otherwise required to be invested in buying paper and pay for postage stamps.

Event promotion can also be smoothened and made cost-effective via online event promotion applications. They allow you to market products, services or events on a variety of social networking web platforms - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It just takes a few minutes to create a profile page in any of these sites and post your events-related content, photos, and videos to let millions of users view it and develop an interest to attend your program. No installation or downloading charges are required to use any of these social media sites.

Monitoring Your Strategic Plan

Once you have completed your strategic planning for the upcoming year, how often should you go back and look at it to determine that the plan is still valid; heading you in the right direction and staying on the course you have chosen?

We suggest you revisit your plan and the assumptions you made while developing the strategic plan at least once a quarter, as well as revisiting the entire plan annually. Why, you ask? Very simply, your strategic plan is based on your knowledge of your business, your business conditions, or environment, and the assumptions you and your team have made about what will happen in that operating environment. Actual business conditions are often different from what you assumed they would be, so it is important to regularly review and update your assumptions in order to keep your strategic plan on course.

Look at each of the areas in which you made assumptions. First, in each of your market segments you made specific assumptions about how attractive each segment would be in the upcoming years. You made assumptions about any threats, which could make the overall segment shrink. You also made assumptions about the opportunities, which could foster segment growth. Which of your assumptions is occurring and to what extent? Is the overall segment growing or shrinking, and is it doing so at about the rate you thought would happen? While this might be difficult to discern on a quarterly basis, if you are close in your assumptions to the actual rate of growth, then you likely will not need to make any changes to your strategies. If it varies widely, or the direction of the market is opposite to that which you predicted, then you need to step back and re-analyze the situation and possibly modify your strategies for the planning horizon and/or objectives for this year.

Are there any big impacts which have occurred which could have an impact on your future direction? For example: an aircraft components manufacturer might have been focusing on the commercial aircraft segments before September 11, 2001 but afterwards they changed their focus to military segments because commercial segments pulled out of their growth cycle.

In addition to changes to market segments quarterly reviews are where you evaluate any new opportunities that have bubbled up since your strategic planning meetings. For instance, an acquisition has become viable - you evaluate it against the objectives that you have chosen and, if it has higher priority, you add it and take off another, lower priority objective. If it does not have a higher priority, you save it to re-evaluate it in the next strategic planning annual cycle. During the quarterly reviews, you are reviewing the full strategy plan and this is where the items that were deemed "business as usual" or "normal course of business" are checked to make sure they haven't fallen off the radar screen and are still progressing. It is a chance to pull your team together to think strategically and pull back from the day-to-day.

You also made assumptions about what your significant competitors would be doing in each market segment. How is reality playing out relative to the assumptions you made here? Again, if your predictions are close, you may not need to change anything, but if they are not, this review is an opportunity to make a mid-course correction.

The team also made an assumption about the future average industry profitability in each market segment. How is that assumption holding up? Note that this does not mean your own company's level of profitability, but the general direction of the industry as a whole in this segment. Is this segment still an attractive place to be doing business? Should you emphasize it more, or less, than originally intended in your strategic plan?

Finally, is there something on the horizon which might displace the products or services you are providing in a particular segment? Are your products like the portable CD players at a time when new products like MP3 players are on the brink of introduction?

One of the outcomes of this monitoring and testing of assumptions could be the realization that you need to develop market information gathering approaches that allow you to better discern what is going on.

Having gone through your assumptions about your market segments, you need to decide what to do and when to do it. If your assumptions are close to reality, you likely won't want to change anything significantly. On the other hand, if your assumptions are at wide variance with reality, you and your team should go back to ground zero and re-analyze every market segment to adjust your predictions to the latest reality. Where you have made significant changes, you should review your strategic plan for each segment, possibly changing your strategy to reflect the changes that have occurred. If those changes in strategy will affect your Objectives, and thus your action plans, you should modify each changed Objective and action plan to reflect the latest reality, recasting each to take advantage of your new assumptions.

In Business, What You Can't See Can Hurt You

It's easy to get lost in the day-to-day details of running a business. There's always a pressing need for your attention. From dealing with customer concerns to making sure new products get out the door, what needs to be done "now" can easily derail your vision for the future.

If you live in the moment, it's not unusual to wake up at some point in time and ask, "What happened?" Where did the year (or quarter, or month) go? Moving from crisis to crisis may seem to keep your business afloat, but it certainly won't get you ahead.

Cloudy Vision

Becoming too focused on immediate operational concerns means setting aside strategic goals. The results can be disastrous to the health of your business. Think about the impact of more innovative companies on those that were standing still: Facebook vs. MySpace. The Apple iPod vs. the Sony Walkman.

You simply can't afford to lose sight of your long-term objectives if you want to be successful for the long haul. But how can you balance today and tomorrow, keeping an eye on where you want to be while delivering on your current promises?

The annual strategic planning retreat is one answer. However, we all know what happens the week after when the excitement wears off and the daily beast roars its head. The best-laid plans end up on the shelf and we go back to doing what we've always done.

Beyond the Smoke


You need a better way.

In medieval times, every castle had a lookout, someone responsible for watching the environment to see what was coming down the road. Your business needs a lookout, too.

In the modern world this translates to a system of observations, consistent methods for listening to the market, hearing customer needs, and sensing trends that will impact your business.

Technology provides a wealth of tools to make this possible, from social listening platforms that let you tune in to the online grapevine to CRM systems for monitoring customer interactions.

Data is everywhere.

If you're too busy to analyze it yourself, there are plenty of resources that can help. Industry analysts and associations will keep you abreast of market changes and competitive activities. Even your own sales team and customer service representatives can provide invaluable information about shifts in the business climate.

Use these resources to channel actionable information to your door so even when you're in the midst of fighting fires, you can see beyond the smoke.

Stay the Course

Strategic planning is not an annual event. It's a process of navigation: plotting a course, checking your progress and adjusting as needed to get you to your destination. Success is not a straight line. You need to actively account for changing conditions, like wind, weather and currents using all the data at your disposal.

Business is a lot like sailing and any good sailor will tell you that you can't leave the helm unattended. Even autopilot is a poor substitute for active eyes on the sea ahead. If you're too worried about fixing the broken latch on a cabinet, you'll miss the sandbar up ahead. As a leader, you must balance trouble-shooting with commitment to your long-term objectives.

At sea or in business, attention is critical.

Of course, the immediate issues will always need to be addressed, but this should be done in the service of your larger goals. To keep your focus on the long-term, translate your strategic plan into incremental milestones that will let you know you're on the right track, like mile markers on the highway or channel markers on the water.

Integrate your strategic objectives into daily operations and establish regular checkpoints to be sure you're staying true to the plan. Engage everyone in your organization to help keep your business on course, gathering useful information and sharing it in a way that can be acted on quickly when necessary.

Provide feedback to your lookouts so they can improve the quality of the information you receive, and continue to fine tune your course throughout the year.

Then when the annual planning retreat rolls around again, you'll be in a strong position to build on successes and keep your business moving forward.

How to Decide on Selecting an Office Space for Your Business

One of the arduous assignments of a business owner is finding the most suitable office space to establish a business. The mission becomes even harder when presented with so many options. If you are a business owner, or someone assigned to look for a place for a business, and found yourself in between convincing options, here is a guide to help you decide.

Spacious

Does the place have enough room for every staff, furniture and equipment you want your business have? Try to picture that everything is in place. Does it feel constricted? Or, does it feel sufficient? When it is an empty space, and it felt wide, don't be fooled and think it is enough, because when the office furniture pieces and equipments are in place, it might tell a different story. If you brought an office space planner with you, ask him to measure everything before it's too late.

Furnish-able

Of course, what is a workplace without the sturdy furniture, functional equipments and all the embellishments everywhere, which you need to fix on the floor and walls? Nothing! But, before you even think of implementing any jaw-dropping interior design and office arrangement, ask yourself, "Will I be allowed to paint the walls, make some holes for the fixtures and, maybe, add a permanent partition?" Learn about the restrictions, if there's any. And ask what is needed to be done in case you need to move to another location. If you agree to all that you will be told, then it probably is the space you need.

Noise Level

As someone working in an office, I hate those noises which I have no intention to hear, but is lingering in my ears like a buzzing bug that won't go away. Check the level of noise inside and outside the space has. If it is something you, and your staffs, can bear in a day to day attendance to work, then the place is suitable for everyone's comfort.

Fit

Some office spaces available have a definite layout already, which is attributed to the structure of the building they're in, most commonly irregular square and L-shaped. Moreover, some have built-in divisions, while most are undivided. Considering the space layout, your ideal business setup should fit well. If your preferred arrangement will appear distorted just because of an awkward fixed counter corner somewhere in between one of the sides, or due to asymmetrical sides and corners, then it is better to find another that perfectly fits your ideal business workplace arrangement.

Expansion

As the business owner, you always anticipate growth and expansion. It is more preferable to find the extension of an office in the same building, if not in the same floor. Thus, in your search for an office space for your business, you should choose the building where expansion is possible.

Imagination

The moment you arrive at the place, were you able to, positively, imagine your business dealing with its operation smoothly happening on the place? And, how does it feel? Our subconscious sometimes dictates to us the perfect place where we should be or put things. If a flash of everything on the place feels pleasurable for you, then there is a good chance that you are already inside the space where your business office should be.

Selecting the right office space for your business is just a matter of defining your predilections and center selection from there. However, if you don't have a list of preferences, and you are afraid to fall short in the selection process, the aforementioned guide should keep you in the right direction.