Mike Grayson, Telereal Trillium's change programme director, talks about the importance of employee engagement in the mobilisation of new contracts.
Large, fragmented estates with multiple properties present unique challenges when management and contractual responsibility for them changes hands. Addressing the mobilisation issues this raises, demands expertise and experience on many levels. But in pursuit of a smooth transition, one critical success factor can get overlooked more frequently than it should: the people element.
Mobilising new contracts is always complex. It’s all about planning, understanding the detail, ensuring nothing is left to chance and aligning all the commercial, technical, legal and financial issues. However, the real art behind successful mobilisation doesn’t in fact lie with all these familiar issues, pivotal though they are, of course.
The true measure of success is often found in how good you are at engaging with the most important element of all, the people – those who may be moving into your organisation as part of the mobilisation, the new teams you are going to work with and, of course, the people back in your own business. Get this wrong and it doesn’t matter how smart your technical team is or how comprehensive the due diligence, the whole process can be undermined by a lack of care and consideration towards the people who matter and who are going to make it work on the ground. Winning their support – and importantly, their respect – is crucial.