Two months ago the Business Transformation Centre jointly with Ms Gulmira Mukanova, the professional instructor, launched the initiative to communicate the Business Transformation Programme and increase its appeal for the company’s employees. The idea was to arrange meetings with the people to provide them with maximum information about the Programme and show what the transformation is and how it works through a combination of theory and practice, which proved to be very effective. The meetings with employees were limited to just ninety minutes, but this time was enough to deliver a presentation and a business game demonstrating the importance of efficiency in everyday routines, human resources in the value chain, interaction at every stage of the value chain, and also involvement and motivation. The game performance was assessed through specific indicators showing the level of the end user satisfaction.
To the moment, over 15 meetings were conducted for various areas of the company’s business. Almost all experts from the Business Transformation Centre had tested their presentation skills under careful guidance of our instructor. Though many of the experts still have to polish their skills, there are some quite good results. There is certain progress in communicating the vision of the transformation; and the knowledge of experts has deepened.
With regard to the target audience, the company’s employees, the first meetings showed that their attitude towards the Programme varies significantly. Many of them were sceptical of the idea of transformation, and for a reason: most of the company’s employees believe that transformation means optimisation, which will inevitably entail staff reduction. However, the game for the most part changed their understanding of the transformation at least with respect to reduction of losses in business-process optimisation.
The project management department, documentation management and control office, capital construction department, national dispatch centre of system operator and operations department showed the best results of loss optimisation. And the project management department had the best results in transformation, achieving almost one hundred percent efficiency in the end!
Some criticism was also expressed. At the meetings with capital construction department and internal audit service there were lively discussions and disputes. For many employees it is still not clear how the balance could be achieved between the transformation objective to increase the company’s value and the company’s objective to improve the grid reliability. Programme officers and experts believe it is possible; moreover, they make every effort to develop a process map to achieve this balance with minimal losses.
Summarising, let us aim for even greater achievements and the realisation of more ambitious ideas and be able to conquer whatever new peaks lie ahead on the uncharted path towards transformation. We should understand only one important thing —it’s not the company that changes, it’s the employees who changes, their thinking and perception of changes in the company. So, let us change!