It was announced this week that to ensure that the company hits its diversity and inclusion targets BT (British Telecom) was to reduce staff and move many jobs from rural districts to city centres. But will these changes have a positive or negative effect on customers and how will BT know?
This follows a pattern of a number of large companies and organisations virtue signalling their alignment with fashionable ideas of diversity and inclusion undergoing organisational changes that neither improve efficiency or profitability but which often have a negative effect on the customer who ultimately provides the financial income.
“Change” is the only constant. Whether considering the states of the universe, weather patterns, or ecological systems, all are in a state of continuous change and development where even the rate of change changes, creating very dynamic systems.
Business and commerce generally are similarly dynamic in their evolution and change. New market opportunities arise as others decline, resulting from the continual alteration and development of customer’s needs and desires, driven by fashion, economics and technology.
The objective of every business is to continually produce and maximize profits for the long-term benefit of owners, staff and customers. For the manager of commercial operations, the objective is to maximize profitable income sustainability for the long term while minimizing costs and the use of assets. But in order to achieve this, businesses may need to adapt their organization and operations in order to maintain and increase their profitable income.
More often than not, organizational change in businesses is driven by a perceived need to cut costs, often resulting from reduced profit. But profits come from income, so reorganising to cut costs may not be the answer when failures in customer satisfaction, a decline in demand or increased competitor activity may be the underlying cause.
While recognising that business organizations need to change and develop, to meet the changing circumstances and conditions of their markets, it is important to understand that the way such changes are made may have far-reaching and unforeseen consequences.
Before embarking on change it is therefore important to establish why it should be necessary, what it is intended to achieve, and how it will benefit the organization. Is the requirement for radical process or evolutionary development? Experience shows that evolutionary development is generally more effective than the radical answer, which should rarely be used and almost as a last resort, as it frequently produces confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
