It’s About Time Cultural Change Program
Cath Stone, Executive Director of Donor Engagement & Experience at Lifeblood approached Donna McGeorge last year requesting help to improve the donor experience, specifically around time in centres. “How do we evolve the Donor’s experience to be more streamlined and frictionless, and ultimately faster?”
It would have been easy to do some time in motion studies and see where we could shave seconds or minutes off specific areas of the donor visit, but Lifeblood was after something more inspiring and sustainable. What was important to Cath and Lifeblood was to help their people understand that at a fundamental level, the donor's time is valuable and to also understand their own personal capacity and value.
Time is the crucial factor, but so is the approach to achieve long term impact. For this to happen both time and capacity are of equal importance. There will be many transformations throughout the program, but the big one comes from maintaining a great donor experience in less time. Which miraculously equates to more donors through the centres, more product through the labs, and consequently more lives saved.
Here’s part 1 of our journey
Here’s part 2 of our journey
Coming out of the global pandemic, there is an absolute epidemic of burnout.
After four decades of downsizing, we've now got workplaces that are still asking people to do more with less. We are seeing things like the “great resignation” and hearing of the phenomenon of “quiet quitting”.
What this is telling us is that people are at capacity, running out energy, and feeling overwhelmed and overworked.
The It’s About Time program starts with helping your people manage their time, energy and attention so that they can show up as their best and most healthy selves, get their work done without feeling exhausted all the time, and provide the right level of products and services to your customers.
The 12 Month Program
The Deliverables:
There are some fundamental pieces that are the same for almost everyone.
Then a “choose your own adventure” aspect that will depend on how, where and what your people are working on. We take into account things like:
Access to technology
Channels of communication (existing and new)
Are they a distributed team?
We, together, choose the right framework for your outcomes.
What you can expect
We lay a foundation that builds a growth mindset to help people be ready to make changes in their personal ways of working, and whatever is happening in the ever-changing world of organisations.
They will have the adaptive capacity to respond to and take advantage of change.
They will shift their activity horizons from behind them (playing catching ups) to in front of them (planning ahead).
They will be doing things that their future selves will thank them for.
A common language to understand how to plan for and manage work so as not to exceed capacity in damaging ways
Tools to plan and manage existing work
Meetings that are meaningful and purposeful and not wasting valuable time
A leadership team aligned on the physical and mental wellbeing of their people resulting in higher engagement, trust and value.
A platform on which to build future changes
Getting the BAU done effectively, whilst having space for forward thinking
A customer experience that values their time
Team members who are engaged in valuable products and services in a timely fashion.
A reason to keep coming back.
There are very few organisations that I work with that don't say, “Our people are overwhelmed, out of control, and at risk of failure at the important things.”
Urgency is the new normal and the risk of having overwhelmed and overworked people is burnout in the short term and customer impact in the long term.
What the work is, how it's impacting your customers and how it's impacting your bottom line varies across organisations and industries. This is why we have a ‘choose your own adventure’ framework so that we make sure we tailor the right intervention for your specific circumstances.
Take a look at your engagement survey results. What are your people telling you?
Look at your attrition levels, quality of leadership at the middle management level, quantity of meetings, accessibility to key people, deadlines being missed, customer feedback.
What is it like to do business with you?
This program is for you if your people are saying that systems, processes and workloads are preventing them from doing their best work.
Every interaction and every transaction has a time and capacity aspect to that. We want to make sure that we are using the time very wisely and supporting our people to do the same.
What participants are saying about the program
Are you looking for long term impact?
Quality change takes time. We go slow to go fast.
We're making an investment up front in touching a critical mass of your people, to have them change ready.
And they won't just be ready for this change to smarter ways of working. The work that we do will positively impact any change that you want to make in the future, because we are laying such a solid foundation of working smarter, thinking clearer and quality decision making.
If you want to make a systems, policy, organisational or culture change at some point in the future, we're laying a foundation of readiness here that you can leverage for years to come.
Reach out to Donna and her team to find out if the It’s About Time program is for you!