DRIVING CHANGE

Navigating a multi-country transition to open office and hybrid work

Project Overview

Client: Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), HQ. The IDB provides financing, technical assistance, and policy advice to its member countries, aiming to reduce poverty and inequality, foster sustainable economic growth, and improve living conditions for the region's population.

Timeframe: 2021 - 8 months

Role: Strategic Roadmapping and Visualization

Team: Project manager, Change management leader, Behavior science leader, and design researcher.

Phase I: Change and Communication Strategy development
Phase II: First implementation coaching and knowledge and tools transfer

Challenge: Propelled by the pandemic, the IDB's Real Estate team developed a global strategy to transform its spaces and work dynamics; a transversal initiative that would impact the working lives of all workers. Our mission was to craft a strategic change and communication plan that would enable this transition throughout al the countries involved in the coming years.

Methodologies:

Stakeholder mapping: Understanding the organizational structure, expected and tacit power dynamics, and identifying key stakeholders, detractors, and influencers.
ADKAR - Framework for Organizational Change Management: Applying a structured approach to drive individual and organizational change.
Roadmapping: Creating a visual guide to outline the strategic steps and milestones in the communication plan and change management process.

Project Journey

Engaging in a project of this magnitude within an unfamiliar domain for me, organizational change, proved to be both challenging and remarkably enriching. I attribute the success we attained to the trust cultivated within our multidisciplinary team.

This project was performed in two stages. In stage I, we engaged in research and co-created a change plan along with a comprehensive communication strategy. Transitioning into stage II, our focus shifted to supporting the implementation and instilling knowledge related to organizational change management within the IDB.

Phase I

Organization-wide research

It all started with the never-old desk. We dived into initiative reports and documents and engaged in numerous collaborative sessions to unravel the intricacies of the bank's organizational structure, overarching initiative plan, and the team involved in the transformation.

We then conducted focus groups with employees spanning various departments and countries aiming to discern past change initiatives' key success factors. These insightful interviews and group discussions not only helped us map the organization's dynamics and power structures but, imperative for a change strategy, allowed us to identify stakeholders that would wield significant influence during the implementation phase, whether as enthusiastic champions that would lead the way or as potential skeptics that required empathetic management.

Simultaneously, we deepen our knowledge regarding space transformations. This involved an extensive literature review and comprehensive case studies, allowing us to identify potential barriers and enablers, and distill valuable best practices. All of which provided valuable guidance throughout the subsequent design process.

Research Plan:

Initiative documentation review
Engagement sessions with the implementing team and key stakeholders
Focus groups (21 participants, 5 groups, 7 departments).
Survey within IDB Group to understand perceptions related to the space transformation initiative (143 out of 250 respondents).
Stakeholder mapping
Literature review aiming to identify frameworks, best practices, barriers, and enablers.

Designing the strategy:

We chose to ground the structure of the change strategy in a very simple yet proven and empathetic framework: ADKAR. Derived from Prosci's change management toolkit, ADKAR outlines the five stages individuals need to navigate organizational change successfully: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. This framework provided the structure for our strategy.

Collaborating closely with the Real Estate team and engaging other relevant actors that will later take an important role as implementors of change, we facilitated multiple ideation and sense-making sessions to iteratively co-create the Change and Communications Plan. Through these sessions, we came up with feasible activities that would achieve the phase goals. For example, to achieve a desire to change, based on our research and knowledge, we proposed a recognition campaign where previously identified change champions would be publicly and meaningfully recognized.

The outcome was a concise yet comprehensive roadmap. It included global versus local activities, specifying goals, and the involved stakeholder groups. Our aim was that this visualization served as a tool for all the different stakeholders.

Design Process:

Co-creative and iterative design sessions
Validation and feedback sessions with key stakeholders
Final artifacts development
Final strategy presentation for key stakeholders and future implementers

Phase II

Implementation coaching and knowledge transfer:

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