The Importance of Change Management and Communications for GBS

After 2.5 years in the eye of the pandemic storm, GBS leaders across the world are now finding themselves heading firmly into a recession. In that environment, change management takes on a crucial role. Barbara Hodge, Global Online editor of SSON and Host of SSSONext, sat down with Emma Beaumont, GBS Change Management & Communications Lead at JTI, to chat about all things change management and communications.

Offering GBS change management “as a service” to the business

Within JTI, GBS change management is offered as a service to the business. Emma explains: “I’m focussed on change management at a holistic level across all of the change that's happening inside of the business. We're also starting to offer GBS change management as a service to the business, which is a completely new and exciting era for change management as a capability offering.”

Lessons in change management from the pandemic 

Across the board for GBS, the pandemic made things much more difficult. Many original plans had to be reassessed with some being accelerated to accommodate people who had previously never worked remotely. “JTI, interestingly, began its GBS journey a matter of weeks after COVID broke. And therefore, I think the biggest impact was that we needed to pivot on the original plan because none of that work could actually be delivered in person (with everyone suddenly working remotely). So we were very much a ‘Big Bang’ GBS operation, and the first generation,” Emma explained. “600 transitions across six different functions affecting over 100 markets around the world; all of that happening in parallel, and not one person was able to get on a plane and go and deliver that with boots on the ground! So the biggest impact for JTI GBS was very much how do we do all of this remotely? The good news is that two years on, it was delivered remotely on time, pretty much on budget, and we've ticked all of the boxes that we said we would.”

As use cases go, jumping in the deep end like JTI did because of the pandemic has given them a deep understanding of the pivotal role of change management and communication. Communicating the core goals, the thinking behind the transitions and pivots at play in a business, and making sure that teams have an understanding of the impacts of the decisions being made - at speed and scale - is not easy. This is where a clear and structured change management capability comes into play.

The framework for GBS leaders to set up a change management capability

As change management and communication quickly emerge as critical enablers for GBS, leaders must start thinking about how to build capability. “One of the investments that JTI made is to make sure that there is a ‘change agent’ and ‘local transmission network' set up in every market from a transmission perspective, so that it's really embedded inside the transmissions process with its own change methodology,” Emma said. “That's critical because a transmission playbook is often a very well-known tool within GBS, but a change management methodology, and playbook to coincide with that, is not always the case.”

Emma encourages us to remember that change is present everywhere. And further, there are different types of change happening inside a business at any given time. “My team, for example, has one arm that’s a ‘transmission change managers’ team. This is a team that was set up specifically to manage the wave after wave of transitions that GBS was implementing. That was a very critical part of our approach. And then we had the local transmission networks set up with ‘change agents’ in every market. These are people who are in the business. They liaise with a transmission change manager, who's part of the centralized team. This was absolutely critical to make sure that the markets knew not just what was happening and when, but why and how it benefited them.” 

When something goes wrong as part of daily operations in GBS and shared services, it's key how the market communicates that back to the hub. This means it’s important to have people who not only are excellent when it comes to channeling communication out, but they're also looping the feedback back in.

For businesses, well-managed change will become a priority as we head into a recession. It’s important to view change as an omnipresent, never-ending journey. So think long term. Communicating change is a huge part of it. And more GBS will need to build internal capability for this proactive communication.

Enjoy the audio medium? You’ll find a lot more detail in this full discussion between Emma Beaumont and Barbara Hodge here on Spotify or Apple Music.