Change for Changes Sake?

I have been concentrating recently on reviewing a number of ideas from previous articles and this notion that of changing for changes sake came up in a recent training program with a group of Hoteliers and Liquor Retailers.

So, is change as good as a holiday?

It’s a great old saying, and like all good sayings, is a trifle overused, however it’s interesting to see how change is handled in modern small business!

Has change always affected us? You only have to look at every five-year period to see that there has been considerable variation in stock (type and number of units in a range), consumer demands, technology and hours of operation. Add competitive pressures and business cost increases and it’s a whole new ‘ball game’!

So, given that change has always been there, certainly in living memory, why does it tend to be something that we, in business, are continually battling?

Perhaps we should look at the barriers or impediments to change that typically affect us in order to better understand why we have such concerns.

Before we do, we should look at these concerns. They manifest themselves as you know in many and varied ways. Some managers hide their head in the sand and pretend that changes in fact haven’t actually occurred. Others rant and rave about change and justify why they were correct to do what they did in the first place! And still others, firmly rooted in history, refuse to accept change because ‘it ain’t broke…!’

What then are these barriers to change? On the surface it’s an easy answer because money, attitudes and lack of inertia all dictate much of what we do and how we react to change. On digging deeper however, there are other, more complex reasons and they require considerable thought.

We have always prided ourselves in applying a level of consistency to all that we do in business – open procedures, stock control, reporting, customer service and expectations of staff! Yet it is this push for consistency that may well be the brake that slows our ability to change.

Consistency, whilst an admirable notion in some areas can be seen to allow for complacency and the comfort of familiar surrounds and occurrences to take over. Let’s take customer service for example. Those of you who have heard me talk on this subject, one close to my heart, will know that I don’t use the term ‘customer service’, but would prefer ‘customer satisfaction’. The first is what we offer and the second is what they, the customers get!

From a consistency perspective, customer service would appear best – it’s safer to treat everyone the same, we don’t have to think too much and we don’t have to push the boundaries too far. Consistency in how we treat customers, certainly from a service perspective, is not good for business. Add complacency, cost of training and a ‘next week will do’ attitude and you just know that there’ll be no significant change!

However if you view this from a customer satisfaction perspective, we can start to see how it should work. If we aim for a consistency in customer satisfaction then we will actually vary the levels of service depending on whom we are serving. We have to know who wants their purchases carries to the car and who do not!

Now this is only one example of where we need change to enliven our working lives rather than suffer the stultifying mediocrity that we could face with no fresh ideas, no input from others and little or no outside perspective of our business. Embrace the changes, use them to improve and understand that if something has changed then you need to go with it.

In past articles I have suggested that going early with compliance training is well worthwhile as it is far more likely that gains will be made in contrast to the situation where we move slowly toward complying and grudgingly make changes.

A change mightn’t be quite as good as a holiday but it sure beats the boring, mundane and ‘same old, same old’, all wrapped up in a mantra of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’!

I’ve always said that there are three kinds of managers. Firstly those that make things happen, secondly, those that watch what happened and thirdly, those who go, “&$@#, what happened?”

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