Transforming the delivery of Professional Services Worldwide | Zain Ali
December 21, 2024
Founder and CEO of Fitch Consulting
Bob Fitch has an unusual ability to blend big picture thinking with attention to the finer details. He also knows it is the collective intelligence of a business that drives success. His approach is always to use his skills to help engage and facilitate others in building a vision and the roadmap to get there.
For a firm committed to helping create agile and inspiring workplaces, connecting the “how” to the “why” is critical. People need to understand both the reason for pursuing bold goals and how they can contribute to their achievement if they embrace change. Bob has built this philosophy into Fitch Consulting – driven by a shared commitment to helping organizations become people-centered, purpose-driven, and change-inspired; each team member is encouraged to use their diverse skills and experience to create products and services uniquely tailored to client needs. This helps keep all activities aligned, even during rapid growth.
Fitch Consulting has a distinct purpose, to help change organizations for good. At a minimum, organizations should strive to be great places to work – where all employees can be and become their best selves. Ideally, firms will seek to create positive experiences for all their stakeholders – employees, customers, investors, and the communities they work. And change is a constant, so they need to be agile if they are to achieve these aspirations.
“We think of this as organizations becoming people-centered, purpose-driven and change inspired. We recognize that these are bold aspirations that are not easy to achieve, so we have dedicated ourselves to creating products and services that help build the essential qualities,” says Bob.
According to Bob, while changing for good requires boldness, increasingly, it is also becoming an imperative. For some years, employees’ expectations, consumers, and other stakeholders have of business have been growing. He says, “COVID-19 intensified these trends – for example, because of expectations around flexible work practices. If businesses don’t respond, then they will find it increasingly difficult to compete. They need to actively manage change if they are to avoid being swept away by it.”
The Strong Link
There is plenty of evidence demonstrating a strong link between customer experience and employee experience; if one creates great places to work, the employees will keep the customers happy. Research shows that organizations whose employees are largely satisfied with their experience are 48% more likely to meet organizational customer satisfaction goals, 89% more likely to meet organizational innovation goals, and 56% more likely to meet organizational reputation goals.
So, Bob and his team start by focusing on employee experience. Their people-centered approach is designed to create the conditions where every employee feels they belong and can make outstanding contributions to the team by becoming their best selves. If firms are to compete successfully, they must attract, retain and inspire great people. This is especially so when the rate of change is as high as it is right now.
Fitch Consulting helps clients through a combination of root cause analysis and high-touch people engagement. “First, we need the objective analysis to pinpoint the root causes of positive – or negative – employee experience. It is important that we start with well-founded evidence,” explains Bob. “Then the critical need is to engage the whole organization in working out how to solve whatever challenges the analysis pinpoints. The best solutions come when those affected by the change have a real opportunity to influence it. People are resistant to change when it is foisted upon them, and they don’t understand the reasoning behind it. An approach that encourages participation builds buy-in – and often helps generate better and more creative solutions.” This philosophy is at the heart of helping organizations to become change-inspired. “Our support is not designed just to help you cope with a current challenge – we aim to help you become masters of change.”
Towards the Future
The company is currently involved in a couple of quite contrasting assignments in the health sector – the common feature is helping align people strategy to business strategy. In one project, for a US medical devices firm, they are working quite narrowly, helping to improve the systems that get the right people in the right jobs. This is about internal mobility as well as new recruitment. Alongside, for an international development institution, they are involved more expansively, helping to reconfigure the organization to enable higher levels of collaboration and innovation.
“Ultimately, both clients want the same thing – improved results. Both already have successful track records but recognize that they need to become more agile,” says Bob. “As with many organizations, success demands increasing levels of collaboration across functions and having people working in more teams than before. Our work will help these clients achieve more through high-performing teams.”
One achievement of which Bob is proud of is the consistently positive feedback from the employees being engaged in client projects. The “whole organization” approach is appreciated because people feel better able to positively influence change as well as better informed and more engaged – which contrasts with the anxiety and frustration that many change initiatives create. “We can’t promise that everybody will like the changes that follow, but we can ensure they have a voice. And we find that our clients usually look to build the more inclusive and agile working methods that we employ into their business models, continuing with these approaches after we finish a project,” he says.
Bob knows that many organizations are asking fundamental questions about their business models as they move through the great “Work from anywhere” experiment. “We do expect many organizations to move to more hybrid workplaces, mixing in-person and distributed ways of working,” he adds. “We have evolved our approach to help organizations rise to this specific challenge, to create the kind of flexible workplaces that many now seek, and which could deliver significant uplifts in productivity. This is an extraordinary opportunity to reimagine how your organization works. Armed with the right approach, the future is exciting.”
“This is an extraordinary opportunity to reimagine how your organization works. Armed with the right approach, the future is exciting.”
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