Saskia Moolhuijzen - DHV Consultancy and Engineering
Saskia Moolhuijzen, Consultant, DHV Consultancy and Engineering (formerly NPC)
"NPC – a consultancy and project-management firm concerned with the optimal development and design of public locations – had been a subsidiary of NS Poort. In 2007, NS Poort's board of directors decided that NPC's activities did not qualify as 'core business'. NPC was taken over by DHV in early 2009. The change took a long time and it had been decided that that process should be managed top down. That resulted in increasing concern and agitation among the NPC employees.
Using the Change Monitor seemed like a good way of involving employees in the change process after all. While they were unable to influence the 'what' of the change, they could at least do something about the 'how'. The goal was very clearly to keep people motivated to work at NPC. We were interested in motivating as many as possible to continue their employment at NPC following the takeover.
The Change Monitor resulted in a high level of commitment to the change process within NPC. As I was also working there, I had a double role: both as an employee and as a consultant in the change process. The most important benefit of using the Change Monitor was that we managed to focus the discussions at meetings. We would no longer get stuck on the topic of employment conditions. Instead, we looked far more at where we could exert our influence, both as individuals and as teams.
I was very pleased with the great response we had to the questionnaire (83%), and that was without our even having to do any pushing. People were simply eager to influence the process, and with the Change Monitor we could offer them that possibility. Their enthusiasm was evident in the first place from the high response rate and in the second place by the high attendance rate and active involvement during meetings.
For me, the Change Monitor is a way of actively involving a great number of people in a change process. You start looking for areas where you can actually exert some influence. And even if the what is already set, you'll find you can also do a lot in terms of the how."