For the second podcast related to The 3 C’s for Microsoft Teams Success, VP of Professional Services Linda Baldwin shares Access Sciences’ journey to Teams, reveals her favorite “C” for Teams success, and provides tips for how to handle change management across generations.

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TRANSCRIPT

Episode 3: The Executive Perspective with Linda Baldwin

Julia:

Welcome to Access Answers. If you tuned into our last two podcasts you know that I’m Julia Vergara and I’m your host, along with Angela O’Pry. Our guest today is Linda Baldwin, our VP of Professional Services, and we’ll be following up on her webinar with a conversation on change management for Microsoft Teams from the executive perspective.

Angela:

Welcome, Linda. We’re so honored to have you. You’re a very busy woman, so we appreciate your time with us today. We really wanted to get a deep dive from your perspective on the Teams migration internally, and the change efforts that went along with that. So, you manage a team of about 85 people, is that right?

Linda:

Yes. And let me just say thank you for inviting me, because it’s a pleasure to be here. Yes, 85 people. And that number goes up and down depending on how many clients projects we have going on at a given time.

Angela:

Yeah. That’s a lot of people to manage. I can’t imagine all of the different needs and everything that you have to consider. How has the Teams migration been, I guess, helpful to everybody since we’re all remote right now?

Linda:

Yeah. I think we mentioned in the webinar itself last week, we’re scattered across eight different states. And right now, everybody’s remote. Before you could say you had a home office in Houston, but now the home office, we’re really all in different places. It’s really helped us be connected more quickly. We don’t have to think about what tool we’re going to use or how we’re going to connect with even our other project team members located elsewhere, like in Oregon, or Louisiana, or New Mexico. We just call them through the Teams app or set up meetings, and we’re able to video and audio meet and also chat. So, it’s been very helpful.

Angela:

Are there different things that you had to take into consideration, like home WiFi, or different technology, different headphones? What was that like?

Linda:

Yeah. We knew that this was going to be a challenge because we knew that at every client project engagement, we had client issued technology. And at every… The home office issues, standard equipment also. But none of them are the same brands. None of them are the same models. And they use different operating systems across all the different client engagements in different versions of an operating system. As well as now that everybody’s remote, everybody has either a webcam, or a built-in camera, or headphones, which are corded, cordless, all manner of variety. The combinations or the potential variables in all of that made it extremely difficult for us to have standardized sort of guidance and instructions in our training plan. So, we had to settle on a standard set of what we could roll out with. And we’re still working through some of those challenges right now. Our user adoption is higher with the group of people that have like conditions, but we’re still working through some of the other technology issues to get everybody on board.

Angela:

Among the 85 people on your team, how many different generations does the workforce span?

Linda:

Well, I think the last time that we looked at our workforce in total, it’s four. It’s really interesting when you look at the ability to make some initiatives, or move forward with some initiatives, or impact the change to systems, processes, or even build awareness about something that’s coming in the future. And when we talk about our vision, or our mission, or our operating systems. I shared this story with somebody the other day. It might’ve been you, Angela, matter of fact. But it’s like the challenges of getting across the generations, getting them to do something different or change behaviors. If you think about your grandfather’s journey in his career, when he got out of college, or maybe he didn’t go to college, but he got a job. Probably worked there for 35 years, got a gold watch, retired.

But during his tenure at that company, the same one all the way through his career, he had supervisors who said, “Sam, you need to jump.” And Sam said, “How high?” Well, it isn’t like that anymore. When we have across our baby boomers, through millennials, to gen X and all of that variation we have now, “Sam, you need to jump and get on board with what we’re moving forward with this new change.” And Sam says, “What? What do you mean? I don’t want to jump.” Or, “Why? Why should I?” So, you have to think about all your different generations across the span of your organizations in order to even put together the plan for changing something. You know that it’s true, Angela.

Angela:

Well, I definitely do. And I was just about to say, you know that you have a gen Z and a millennial on the call today.

Linda:

Yeah. Exactly.

Angela:

Definitely, we are not in that category that don’t want to jump, right?

Linda:

Right.

Angela:

We would say, “How high, Linda?”

Linda:

Yeah, exactly. Jump where?

Angela:

I’d be like, “But it’s hot outside. Why do I have to jump?”

Linda:

Exactly.

Angela:

I’m not wearing the right shoes today.

Julia:

Speaking of the four generations that our company spans, can you talk a little bit about how our company culture mix affected and impacted the Teams training?

Linda:

Sure. It really was it affected everything as we built our plan. Even for the awareness part, the initial stage. In the beginning of any initiative or project that you’re going to change for anything, you need to do that assessment of your culture and look at history of past changes and what made them successful or fail. And then really examine how to avoid that in the future. Part of that is just by a lot of asking. But we also do, through our work with clients and also on ourselves, we also do an assessment of how big is the impact of whatever you’re doing or whatever you’re trying to change. And we’re measuring several aspects. How big is the change?

Meaning, how differently am I going to need to work tomorrow than I do today? Does it impact all of the work processes across all of the organization? Maybe it’s a new timekeeping system that you’re putting in, so that really would impact everybody. But it wouldn’t impact their own day-to-day work processes. So, enterprise-wide or department-wide. And work processes in whole, like maybe you’re doing a new accounting system rolling out. And it’s going to change accounts receivable, accounts payable, the way we report taxes and compliance reporting to government and agencies. So, it all depends. You need to do those assessments in order to right size your initiatives to move forward with. Also, I want to add that part of that is to size what efforts you put into all of your planning. But also, it’s to really realize what pockets of resistance you’re going to run into. You want to anticipate those as best you can, and plan to react to them before they happen, rather than being reactive as they do this.

Angela:

This seems to relate well to you and Sondra’s webinar on the Three C’s for Microsoft Team Success. Could you go a little bit over, like remind our audience what the three C’s were and maybe talk about what your most important C is? I know from your different perspectives with Sondra on the corporate services side and you on the professional services side, you might have a different take on what the most important C is.

Linda:

Yeah. As we were building our webinar, we had about six Cs that we talked through as we were building it. And then we came up with what we all believe to be the three most important ones. I think we landed those pretty well. But they were communications, and champions and culture. And at the end of our webinar, we talked about they’re all being really woven throughout the whole journey of the change, before we started on the actual technical project execution, and all the way through to the end of that. And now we’re in the reinforcement phase.

The most important one to me, I would have to say culture. Just because of my own practitioner background of change management. I think that looking at your culture up front helps you understand what champions you’re going to need, how deep the expertise needs to be in your change team and your project team. And also, what sort of communications, how many, how often, to what audience. What do they need to be focused on and the senders of those as well. So, to enable your leadership to actually support those folks that are experiencing the change journey.

Angela:

Yeah. I think that is something that’s really important as we started our journey too. And you have a long history with Prosci and the ADKAR model. And you mentioned in the webinar presentation that… Was it 8 or 10 years ago you really decided to make that the approach for access sciences with our clients. Tell us about the training, why you chose Prosci, and what it is about ADKAR that you really appreciate.

Linda:

I appreciate all of the data behind the methodology that Prosci as an industry leader in change, I appreciate all the data that’s behind it. And they started out, the founders of Prosci, started out as a research group, a think tank. And they still continue that research journey today, which really supports all of the methodology and any changes to it that that happen along the way, just because of the way we changed the way we work. We were looking at a standardized methodology for our own client delivery projects, and there are many out there. Different ones. When it came to evaluating that Prosci methodology and the data behind it, then it just made sense. It was logical that change happens one person at a time, because everybody’s on their own individual journey. In order to achieve organizational change, you just can’t flip the light switch and it happens magically. Really, it’s up to each person on their own as they walk through their own steps to get on board or not.

Angela:

That can be really painful.

Linda:

Yeah. And it is. But if you understand it, then it’s really easier to put pieces in place to reinforce where somebody may not have advanced to, I’m not ready to be trained. I’m not ready to accept the knowledge that you’re going to give me because I really don’t have a desire to do anything different. It made sense to us. And then the data also, which we talked about in the webinar, a standard and structured methodology is the number two biggest factor to success on a project. That was telling as well. If you have a standardized structural approach, you have a higher chance of success. Why not? It just makes good business sense. Now, that doesn’t say that Prosci is the best for everybody. You can pick your own. But for us, that’s what we decided to go forward with as we move into client engagements. Because it’s easy, it’s scalable and it’s logical. But I guess the point is there, if you have a structured approach, that’s the most important thing.

Angela:

Linda, the part about the personal ADKAR journey, or it happens one person at a time. I think you have a personal ADKAR journey that you mentioned in the webinar. You gave us some pictures as a little preview. It looks pretty interesting. I can’t wait for your blog to come out soon.

Linda:

That was a teaser, intended to be a teaser, as far as the pictures. I’m not supposed to tell you anything about it on this podcast, I don’t think. But I will say that it was part of my own… As I became a certified change practitioner and trainer, it’s part of that building your own awareness of that change happens one person at a time. And also, it applies to your own personal life, as well as that of your workplace. The blog will be about one of my own personal stories that, and there are many, and I’m sure everybody has many once you think about that.

Angela:

Yeah.

Linda:

But it’s one of my own personal stories of all the steps that I went through in order to pay attention to something that needed to be changed in my life.

Angela:

I think we all have some sort of story that’s been transformational.

Linda:

Right.

Angela:

Thank you for sharing that. I think the blog will be coming out next week. Is that right, Julia?

Julia:

Yes. Next Wednesday it should be out.

Angela:

Awesome. Make sure to check our website for that. Going back a minute to our own Teams migration. Renu came to you to try to be like, “Hey, here’s a new tool that we need to use. We need to roll it out company-wide.” I don’t know if I’m understanding that right. What happened? What was that pivotal moment when the IT team came to you and said, “Hey, we have this new cool object.”

Linda:

Well, your understanding of it is kind of right. But because all of the technologists always want us and everybody else to be on the bleeding edge of moving onto some new platform that’s going to be of course better for us. It wasn’t new to me that they all desired for us to get onto the Teams platform as well, because we’ve been helping clients do that. So, why not ourselves? I had pushed back for a long time, simply because of those cultural things that we talked about earlier. And then all of a sudden, the timing became the perfect storm with the COVID mandate work from home and all of the dangers associated with being in the workplace together. So, we’re all separated and we need to have this common platform. I think Sondra even mentioned about our office moves. We were headed in that direction anyway.

And Renu told me though, she said, “It’s going to happen whether or not we are pushing it forward ourselves, or it organically takes hold. It would be better if we do this in a way that is structured and meets the needs of our organization, rather than letting the spontaneity, if you will, occur.” And so, I said, “Yep, okay. I agree with you. The timing is right. But we have to do all of the steps that are needed in order to take that structured approach.” First, you need to put together a plan with a realistic level of effort, and a timeline, and all of the expectations that are needed of our own people, including the executives. And then what do we do to make sure that it gets traction, and it moves forward, people are engaged, and actually adopted a new way of working and collaborating with one another.

I want to see the whole plan and I want to make sure that we have the executive team bless it. Because let’s face it, if they don’t use it, then that would not be a good look for the rest of the company. So, that has to happen. And also, it’s going to take effort in resources, people time and energy. So, that’s an investment. And we wanted to be sure as much as possible that it was a success. We did put a plan together and were able to move things forward, obviously. Or I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you these stories.

Angela:

How do you decide to do that project internally versus hire a third-party firm, for our clients that might be listening to this?

Linda:

Wow. Okay. Well, for us, it’s kind of a no brainer that we could do it with internal resources, if they are available. Meaning, if they’re not assigned and dedicated to project work. And again, this was the perfect storm because we did have several folks with the expertise that came open at the same time. Which rarely, rarely happens. But again, you don’t want to tie them up for too long because project engagements and commitments do come along. We had to have that realistic timeline, knowing that some of them would have to roll off probably before we were into the reinforcement stage of the project itself. It is something that we were able to do internally, but for other companies who don’t have the expertise in-house, it might be a more difficult task, simply because without… If you’re trying to learn as you go and also put something into place quickly that requires everybody to do something different. It’s really, really hard to pull off. Did that answer your question, Angela?

Angela:

Yeah, I think it did. And just thinking about the ADKAR model with… A company might have resources that have the ability, and the knowledge, and those components, but maybe they just don’t have the bandwidth, time, money, the resources it really takes to put a program together or a system implementation. So, I think that might be a pivotal moment in deciding. Just because you can do it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. I don’t know if you agree with that.

Linda:

Right. I do agree. And conversely, if you have the technical expertise, but you don’t have the other things that go along with it, like the change knowledge that needs to happen and the executive sponsorship, all of the things that support that, it might not be the time to move forward either. You have to make sure you check boxes to the best of your ability before you do anything, because you don’t want to fail. You don’t want to have sunk costs in something that’s that important.

Angela:

For many cases, I think that’s millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be sunk costs.

Linda:

Right.

Angela:

If it’s a failed implementation or users aren’t adopting it. So, the change management piece is really important too. I know for myself, I’ve shared that I would like to have the Prosci training and certification in marketing, just being able to roll out our strategy and better communicate with the enterprise of what we’re trying to accomplish. I think no matter where you sit in the organization, the change management training is incredibly valuable.

Linda:

Totally agree. Many organizations now are going with the model that they have their own change management practice in-house so those experts can help them in their journeys. And they’re not looking to the outside if they build it in-house. But I’m happy a lot of our clients don’t have that yet. And so, we’re called to the table to help them move things forward.

Angela:

And one of our value propositions that we are really proud of is that we build change management into all of our project work or all of our long-term engagement. So, you’re really getting that benefit to all of the work that we do for our clients.

Linda:

Right. And we don’t call it out as separate kind of activities anymore. We have enough people in our organization who understand and know how important it is to get awareness built about a business change. Meaning, that people have to know why and what is happening before they can ever have the desire to do anything different. Our folks know all of those stages that everybody has to go through on their journey. So, all of our project execution activities and tasks are intertwined with change deliverables and activities as well. It’s not called out as a separate work stream that you can chop off if you need to. It really is embedded in what we do.

Angela:

I have a random question that just came to my mind.

Linda:

Yeah.

Angela:

With our consultant team not being able to travel right now due to COVID, and we found that productivity has been very successful remote, that they’ve been able to do just about everything, not having to travel. But what about change management? How does that impact when you can’t be in person, face-to-face, you can’t just go to lunch with a client or have a training session in person? What are you seeing there?

Linda:

Well, as a society we have been evolving more to working remotely anyway, in some circumstances. And we certainly have led engagements for our clients who are in many, many locations. Global companies that have multiple overseas locations, as well as scattered throughout the lower 48 and the U.S. You have to adapt your program to those situations as well, which we’ve been doing for a while. This just exacerbated things a little bit. And so, it’s important to acknowledge that some of these intentional things are just moved to the forefront now. I think the functionality that we have with Teams, and I know other platforms do as well, but the functionality of incorporating audio with video has been huge just because you still can get that eye-to-eye contact. That engagement. And you know that someone is listening on the other end.

They’re not fiddling with their phone or working on their laptop on another… Answering email. So, you’re able to have effective training delivery. You’re able to have effective leadership working sessions, where you get alignment amongst the team members and especially leaders on what does success look like at the end of the day. We’re able to have coaching of our executives and those midline managers that are supporting whatever change efforts they need to. It’s been a challenge sometimes, because sometimes those interactive sessions need to be tailored a little bit to make sure that they are engaged, but we’ve been able to do that.

Angela:

Certainly not a plug for Zoom, but I was doing Zoom trainings for customer service team six or seven years ago. And I think the platform has definitely come a long way. If you follow the stock market, it’s a pretty good time to have some shares in Zoom this week.

Linda:

Oh, yeah. Well, every one of these platforms for meeting and visual are all changing. Just our Microsoft Teams environment since we started this initiative in the spring, I think… I can’t remember how many people we were able to view on one meeting at the time we rolled it out. But now the, you see your little patchwork quilt of people on your meetings when you log in.

Angela:

The Brady Bunch or what was the other-

Linda:

… Yeah.

Angela:

People are putting out there. Not Sesame Street, something similar to that.

Linda:

Yeah. I’ve heard Brady Bunch a lot. Or Hollywood Squares.

Angela:

Yes.

Linda:

Yeah. Talk about the generational gap.

Angela:

Yeah. Well, thank you, Linda. We really do appreciate your time, and your input and perspective on change management today. I’m glad to hear that our Teams migration was successful. I think we got pretty high reviews from all the employees. So, good job. And what a win.

Linda:

Well, thanks. Happy to be here and chatting with you. Yeah, we still got work to do. But it’s moving in the right direction.

Julia:

If you’re interested in hearing more from Linda on her personal ADKAR story, that’ll be coming out next Wednesday. If you didn’t get a chance to tune into her last webinar on The Three C’s for Microsoft Team Success, be sure to check that out on our website at accesssciences.com. We’ll also have another webinar coming out at the end of the month with Wey Tan for Microsoft Teams Training at Scale.