Lost In Transformation

The Importance of Prioritization: Shaping Cultural Change Effectively With Empathy

• MING Labs • Season 2 • Episode 33

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This episode features Wilma Gerber, Chief Operating Officer, Project & Development Services APAC at JLL, as she shares how to effectively drive cultural change, how to get leadership teams on board of change processes, and how to manage businesses with data and an agile approach.

Wilma: (00:02)

I think with digital transformation, the real challenge is behavioral change and cultural change. If you think about every initiative, you may have one technology platform that you're deploying, but there are many versions of humans and they are responding to change in a different way. So I think that is what requires more time, and certainly, it requires empathy and creativity.

Christine: (00:32)

Welcome to the Lost In Transformation podcast series, dedicated to the complex world of digital transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, startups, consultancies, and more to shed light on the success factors around innovation, transformation, and adjacent topics. We share firsthand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about digital transformation.

Christine: (01:01)

Wilma Gerber is the COO for project and development services in the Asia Pacific at JLL, one of the largest real estate service companies with a lot of transformational experience in the telco technology and real estate industries. She talks to us about the importance and the challenge of cultural and behavioral change and how to fix why transformation so often still doesn't work out. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Christine: (01:29)

Hi Wilma. I'm very happy to have you as a guest here with me on Lost In Transformation, and thanks so much for joining. So you are the Chief Operating Officer for project and development services at JLL in the Asia Pacific, where you've also been part of, you know, leading the transformation journey. And today we want to know more about the learnings you experienced being part of big transformations in big corporates worldwide, also with JLL, and to learn what's working and perhaps why it might not be working. So to start off, could you tell us a bit more about yourself and your background in the field of transformation in general, basically that led you to where you are today?

Wilma: (02:09)

Thanks, Christine. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's great to be here and also just want to say thank you for the work that you're doing, getting people from around, from different industries, and different countries to share experiences on digital transformation. I think this is a great way for us, to learn from each other. Just before I jump into my background, I just want to share a few words about what is JLL, what is the company, and where it fits in, particularly for those who are not familiar with the real estate industry. So JLL is one of the world's largest real estate services companies. And we do everything from capital investments to construction, to workplace strategy, to building management, got over 90,000 people and we operate in 80 countries around the world. And then the company has actually been around for more than 200 years. And so you could say that we have, the company has navigated its fair amount of change over all of those years.

Wilma: (03:11)

And at the moment, just like many other companies around the world, we are focusing on digital transformation. And so I joined JLL four years ago. And as you said in the role of COO work for the project and development services, parts of the business cover APAC, and that includes everything from construction to project management and interior design. And before that, I worked in telecoms and technology. So 20 years ago I was working in telecoms and I was based in London. And that was just around the time that the mobile industry was starting its transformation journey. Mobile data started taking off and that resulted in a dramatic change in the telecoms industry. And so I lived through that and experienced many of the mistakes that were made in that industry, through the transformation journey. And that has me being a very useful experience to draw on, you know, now being in this role and leading a digital transformation in real estate.

Wilma: (04:17)

And then in 2009, I joined Cisco, Cisco Systems and I moved to Asia and this gave me a lot of experience across a wide range of different technologies and across the APAC region. But what I had learned from that Christine is that even with the best technology is hard to deliver a successful digital transformation without cultural and behavioral change. And so this is when I became really interested in behavioral economics and the role that psychology plays in behavioral change. And so when JLL approached me to join them, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to apply all these learnings and hopefully to make a few of [...] on the transformation journey.

Christine: (05:06)

Wow, super interesting. Also for me to learn that that was actually the way for you to become more and more interested in how behavioral change influences the transformation journey. And now you're leading project and development services at JLL. How does that tie in what you do in your role nowadays?

Wilma: (05:26)

Yes. Well, Christine is not a secret that the real estate and construction industry is behind many other industries when it comes to digital maturity. And so when I joined JLL, my first task was really to get a snapshot of the current business. So what were the key business processes, what technology was in place to enable these processes and functions, and was there any digitized data, and more importantly, what was the quality of the data? And then even more importantly, what about the people? So are the people open to change? Are they digitally savvy or not? And so that was really the first task and the outcome of all of that analysis was within JLL, Sydney, and APAC and the project and construction business. The good news is that most of the people were and still are very, very open to change, but being from a construction background, you know, some of the concepts like agile for example, were completely unfamiliar.

Wilma: (06:35)

So if you think about the construction industry, it really is the opposite of agile, right? So you design and then you build in that order. Well, with technology, you know, we prefer an agile approach. We design a bit, we develop a bit, and then we use the products and then we gather feedback and then we iterate, and repeat. We continuously improve. So this required some cultural change. And then the other aspects, I guess, looking at the technology is just looking at the technology in that initial assessment is that there were some systems in place, but where there were systems in place that were generally not being used, pretty low adoption. And there were just many, many, many, many spreadsheets being used to run the business. So you might ask, well, why is that a problem? And the answer is, that I think when a business scales and becomes more complex, it really is impossible to get a single source of truth on your business, meaning your sales, your contracts, your procurement, your projects, when you're trying to bring together a single source of truth across multiple countries and cities. And it's really impossible to do that if your data is not digitized. And from a management perspective, you're only as good as the decisions that you make, right? Decisions on your data and if your data isn't accurate, or it simply isn't available in real-time, then your business decisions going to be slow and possibly wrong. So I think, you know, what's technology, there are things, your productivity gains, but the other part of the story is really the value of the data and how you can use it to manage your business more effectively, right?

Christine: (08:32)

Wow. There was a huge task that was awaiting you when you started at JLL. Then when you basically came in and got a snapshot, first of how it looks now and then think of where you want to go. So JLL has undergone a transformation process itself. And what advantage would you say did the change bring the company, especially during this pandemic time?

Wilma: (08:53)

If you think about it, especially in this day and age right now with the pandemic and all of the uncertainty, you know, that's important about, but by the pandemic, I really don't know how companies are able to function and to make decisions without having digitized real-time data at their fingertips. You know, it's very much like flying a plane without a dashboard, waiting for your crew to send you a spreadsheet about the altitude that you're at. And that really puts you at a considerable disadvantage if you don't have all of your business processes digitized.

Christine: (09:32)

I really liked the analogy of the plane that you just mentioned and how important it is to digitize the business. Can you maybe share some examples of how you approach that?

Wilma: (09:41)

Yes. So in our business, we manage construction projects. So the old way of project management would be to have a spreadsheet with the budgets and documents on your hard drive. You'd have your communication by email, would be reporting in PowerPoints and sending it in Word documents. So over the last two years, we've deployed a global project management platform. And so what this means is that we now have over 20,000 projects being managed in a single place. And that means all your budget data, all of your schedule data, and then your risk data are all in a single global platform. And so this gives us many things that aside from the productivity gains and automating reporting, also allows us to compare and benchmark project costs, schedules, and risks across all of these projects across multiple countries. And an example of the sorts of things you can do with the data would be analyzing the data to see, well, what types of risks are most prevalent on each type of project?

Wilma: (10:48)

And then how do we use that to assess the probability of overrunning and what do we need to do to be more proactive, to deliver successful projects? The other benefit is that all clients have real-time access to project status. And this is particularly valuable with kinds that have a portfolio of projects that are running all at the same time. So they previously would be waiting for their weekly sales report to know the latest stages of the project is. Whereas now they simply need to log in and they can get real-time access to everything that's going on on their projects. So the other benefit that we've seen particularly during the pandemic is, just thinking for a minute, that we're running thousands of projects for our clients in the APAC region. So as COVID started spreading from country to country, we had a real-time view of construction site closures and risks.

Wilma: (11:47)

We were all trying to make sense of what was happening and how to navigate the business I think through these uncertain waters. I'm not really sure how we would have done that if we hadn't already digitized our project management processes. I guess we would have been sending a lot of emails and asking people to fill in spreadsheets every day and then spending a lot of time aggregating those spreadsheets to find only that somebody changed the format of one spreadsheet. So I think the fact that we were ahead of the game has certainly been a benefit, during this time of the pandemic, right? Another example is procurement. So we manage billions of dollars of procurement on behalf of our clients. So in the last couple of years, what we've also done is we have digitized procurement processes. And so what this means is that we can now tell how vendor prices vary across different categories and which vendors are able to offer us sustainable products.

Wilma: (12:51)

In the past, all of that would have been managed in spreadsheets. So if you're a company, I think particularly now, many companies are looking to increase their focus on sustainability. And sustainability and supply chain represents a tremendous opportunity for that. If you want to create a responsible supply chain, the first step has to be to digitize your procurement processes. So we have, you know, similar examples like that really across other business processes and our business, whether it be sales, governance, contract management, full costing, resource planning, health and safety, and so on. But those are just two examples. 

Christine: (13:34)

Super interesting also to see how timely actually your approach was that you were well-prepared when COVID hit this year. How you managed to digitize all of those processes and that, you're basically a step ahead already. And it's also really inspiring to hear how these initiatives kind of change the company for the better and how it helps to manage the business better. I'm also curious to hear about maybe anything that perhaps didn't work out the way you imagined, any mistakes you did, or any approaches that didn't turn out the way you imagined that you can share.

Wilma: (14:11)

Well, I think as sort of a general point, if you like, I think one of the big learnings is the importance of prioritization. So I think what happened is, it's been four years of a journey so far and at some points, I think perhaps we've had too many things going on at the same time and that really is down to not prioritizing effectively. And so, you know, why is prioritization so important? And the main reason for that is if you took them [...], then you won't have time to do the hard work of changing the behavior and the culture. And I think what happens is, you know, there's a possibility at that point of becoming a bit focused on the technology and the task of deploying the technology. I think with digital transformation, the real challenge is behavioral change and cultural change.

Wilma: (15:11)

If you think about every, every initiative, you may have one technology platform that you are deploying, but there are many versions of humans and they are responding to change in a different way. And so I think that is what requires more time. And certainly, it requires a lot of empathy and creativity, and that requires a headspace and it requires time. So I think sometimes when we've gotten busy, we've lost sight of the behavioral change parts of the transformation. And the thing I think is really important because we need to be constantly listening and understanding of what's getting in the way of these new behaviors because without the behavior change, we don't get the value from our investment in the technology. And I think from a creativity perspective and being open to listening and what is the feedback telling us and therefore, how do we need to adjust our approach in order to drive these new behaviors? So when we're short on time, I think empathy and creativity are the first to go. And that's why I really can't stress enough, this prioritization is so important. So if you don't prioritize, you don't have time to do things properly and you end up delivering a lot of shiny technology with no real value.

Christine: (16:36)

I totally agree. I think it's great that you highlight this, especially that we need to adjust our approach and really focusing on that empathy and creativity part to basically get the people on board as well, and to make cultural and behavioral change work in the company and with the whole transformation journey. At JLL, was there from the beginning, actually like a bigger purpose that was set for the journey, or is there anything that kept or still keeps you going to do this?

Wilma: (17:07)

Well, I think we started with a vision, which was to bring all of our business data into a single management intelligence dashboard, a one-stop-shop for the management team. And that's not really a great bold vision, to be honest, Christine, but I think the reason why we stopped there is more because I think one thing we know about change is that it won't succeed unless you have your leaders on board. So change has to be needed, it can't be outsourced to a support function. And so it's important that the leader is visible and seem to be [...] and not reading from a script as that's why we're making these changes. And people want to get it from their direct manager, so it sounds credible. So the question for us was how do you get your management team excited about technology and data when they haven't really experienced it for themselves?

Wilma: (18:11)

How do you get your sales team to talk about our digital platforms, you know, with clients, if they haven't experienced it for themselves? And so that is why we started our journey really with this idea of, you know, what would it be like if we were able to bring all of our management data into a single place and you have real-time accurate data about every aspect of your business, about your sales finance, about the diversity of your teams, about all your projects, you know, the progress of the training that your people are attending, client feedback, resource utilization, and even the profitability of every single one of your projects. So if we were able to do that, you know, how valuable would that be in terms of your ability as a manager to make real-time high-value decisions? And so in order to build that really what it meant was we first had to digitize all of the processes because there's only one way to get the data.

Wilma: (19:23)

And that is, it needs to be digitized along with the digitization, of course, you know, then one also needs to have a program around enabling people. And part of all of that includes a data quality program because if you've got the technology in place and you're enabling your people and you're driving your behaviors, the other big part of the puzzle is your data quality. And how do you ensure that the data coming through into your BI platforms is high quality and accurate? So in the end, every manager got to experience the power of all of this data at their fingertips every day. And previously they would spend most of that time, just trying to gather information about the stages of the business, and then probably spent a lot of time arguing, is this accurate? What isn't accurate? So I think building this visualization if you like, all those management data was a way of allowing the management teams to experience the benefits that digital transformation provides. And once they were then bought in and had experienced that themselves, that enabled them to change. And that's when things start to truly accelerate I think because before that you're a small group trying to drive the change, but things don't really take off and accelerate until you have your whole management team truly bought in leading the change.

Christine: (20:53)

Exactly. I think that's a really good point that you basically try to get that barrier out of the way to, you know, not have the leadership team on board. So you were mentioning a lot of good tips and a lot of things that hopefully also our listeners can take away. And, we know that there's actually so much knowledge sharing out there on how to make transformation work, a lot of tips and best practices, and guidance on tools and methodologies. There is so much out there, but how come we still don't know how to do it? How come it's still something that so often's not working?

Wilma: (21:29)

I really think it comes down to the effect of being busy and having too many things on the plate. It's the knowing-doing gap. As you said, I think there's tremendous knowledge out there. If you want to know how to lead a digital transformation, you know, we could listen to your podcast and there are plenty of books and articles that are written on it. I think the issue is less of knowing how to change and more about, at the moment when everything's going on in that moment, remembering why you're changing, you know, what is the problem that you're trying to solve and remembering that ultimately it is about driving the cultural and behavioral change. I think what happens is, as I said earlier when we get overwhelmed with too many things going on at the same time, we get into a technology focus and we get into a deployment focus, that's deploying the technology and tick off the boxes. Does the technology work, does it have this feature? And then we forget about all the behavioral change that's needed to get the value from the platform. So that's why I think prioritization because it's the only way to defend time. 

Christine: (22:49)

That's a really good tip. And thanks for elaborating further on this and with the whole new structures and processes in place that you gained through the initiatives you introduced to JLL, how do you actually measure your success or how do you know whether you've been successful in your transformation? Are there any specific indicators that you use or metrics for measuring your success?

Wilma: (23:14)

Yes. So I think, again, what this is very much linked to is the, what is the problem we're trying to solve? So at a high level, we can certainly say that we are trying to create better client experiences or we're trying to increase revenue, or we're trying to become more efficient and save costs, but that's a very high level. And it's very hard to untangle the specific effect of digital transformation if we remain at that high level. So it's very important to be clear about what problem you're trying to solve with this specific initiative and to set success criteria for that initiative. So an example would be, as I was sharing earlier on, about the project management platform. If you're expecting to see a time-saving result of reporting automation, then it's not enough simply to measure, are people using the platform? Did I deploy the platform?

Wilma: (24:16)

Did I train people? Did people log in to the platform? Yes. But all of that does not equate to saving time. So what you need to do is to have a way of measuring, did we save time from the specific automation? And that's really difficult to measure in some cases. For that particular example, the way that we've measured those is really through surveys and getting specific feedback from our people on the amount of time they saved. And again, what I would say is not everybody is saying that they're saving time and that gives you the perfect opportunity to say, well, why is it that 70% of our people are saying that I saved you time, and 30% that not. And then to connect with that group that is not saving time. And so I understand what are the barriers, what's getting in the way of the change in behavior, or perhaps there's some further iteration that's required to the platform to make it more user-friendly to drive automation.

Christine: (25:17)

Yes. Definitely. I think these are very tangible examples of how to measure also with the qualitative approach that you just mentioned and to focus on the people. Looking at the current situation we're in right now with the ongoing pandemic, how is COVID impacting your processes and your industry in general?

Wilma: (25:35)

Goodness, I think we're still trying to make sense of what all the effects of this pandemic will be in the long run, but of course, for the real estate industry, we expect that the way people will use spaces in the future is going to change. So even after we have a vaccine, we're likely to see a rise in flexible working and the office will pivot to become more of collaboration space, a place where people come together to co-create and innovate, and also a place for much needed social interaction. As we have been reminded of this COVID period, that we're all social creatures after all. So perhaps individual work could be done in other places like working from home, but the office will pivot to become more of that collaboration space. But I think one of the things that I'm sure we've all experienced as we switched to working from home over the last few months, is that while we've been able to keep the wheels turning, what has been difficult is trying to innovate and to do the tasks that require creativity and collaboration.

Wilma: (26:54)

So that is what's really, really hard to do virtually. And so I think that you know, we're always going to need the office space for that, but as we see the remote work continuing to increase, the role of technology in enabling productive and engaging workspaces is going to be really important. The other thing I think that we're seeing as a result of COVID is just how difficult it is to plan the full cost for your business. There are just so many moving parts, so much more uncertainty, so much more complexity. And I think, again, for those companies that have been ahead on the digital transformation journey and now have a lot of data at their fingertips, this is turning into being a real advantage because it just means that the amount of robust leading indicators that you use to try and plan and forecast your business, you have access to that kind of data.

Wilma: (27:57)

I think Christine, overall the pandemic is accelerating digital transformation. It's forced rapid adoption of technology, really out of necessity. And I think, again, the challenge is going to be employee engagement and innovation. So the technology that we're using to work from home and work in different ways is keeping the wheels turning. But if we missed the part about how we need to change our behavior, I think that we're then going to start seeing some negative impact. So, you know, how are we changing our behavior in terms of how we manage our teams differently, how we engage with our clients differently? And if we don't change those behavioral aspects, I think what we're going to see is a steady decline in employee engagement and innovation. And that is ultimately going to have an effect on business performance. So, you know, as I was saying earlier, if we have too much focus on technology, then we miss half the value of the digital transformation. An 80% of the effort on tech, 20% on people is I think, you know, where we could end up with this Covid if we don't shift our focus. We want to have a successful digital transformation. Especially now during the pandemic, I think when it's critical for the survival of businesses, we really need to flip that ratio. And I think it needs to be 20% on tech and 80% on people.

Christine: (29:28)

I think that's very true. I think even when looking at COVID what you just mentioned, ties nicely as well with the change and behavioral aspects as well. Wilma, thank you so much for taking us along your journey and for sharing the transformation story of JLL. And it's really interesting what learnings, you also took away from your various experiences over the years, and also hope our listeners can take away some helpful tips as well. It's been really great chatting with you and thank you again. 

Wilma: (29:58)

Thank you, Christine.

Christine: (30:01)

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