The ardent pursuit of organizations to augment their business productivity and operational efficiency is often challenged by a plethora of internal and external factors. Be it obsolete technologies and systems, incompatible organizational culture, or unprecedented episodes of catastrophe, all of these can decelerate businesses’ drive for excellence. In order to encourage positive results and resilience in these metrics, businesses need to leverage a well-thought-out organizational development structure. But, how do they find the right solution to navigate the complex journey towards organizational success?

As an expert in the organizational development space since 2021, Motus Collaborative can help. The company positions itself as an emerging player in the industry with an innovative mindset to help organizations and their employees chart a path to greater resiliency. By providing the right tools and guidance to help organizations adapt and respond positively to changes in the market, it allows clients to choose the right path when it comes to organizational development and overall success.

In an interview with ManageHR magazine, Cindi Polychronis, a Principal at Motus Collaborative, explains how the company leverages its repository of knowledge and extensive experience to help clients along their path of organizational development.

Can you tell us the story behind Motus Collaborative?

Motus Collaborative was first established as part of its sister company, David Evans and Associates, Inc. (DEA), a leader in the architecture and engineering space. The idea behind the inception of Motus was sparked from an organizational development project Motus executed at DEA.

It was over a decade ago, when the leadership team at DEA started pondering over ways to build a better business strategy. This was followed by a cultural change in order to align the entire organization with the new strategy. Despite the challenge, DEA’s dedication paid off with extraordinary business results.

This success offered a well-earned moment to celebrate, and encouraged a group of enthusiastic professionals at DEA who had seen opportunity throughout the process to start something new. The team identified that several clients in the architecture and engineering space would also face similar challenges during their pursuit of organizational development and overall success. There was an unmet need in the market for an expert in both industry knowledge and organizational development, who could overcome bottlenecks and walk them through the process.

While the discussions to fill these gaps in the market were underway at DEA, a client approached them with a specific challenge. This resulted in the conception of Motus Collaborative—a company that today spearheads excellence in the organizational development space.

What are the persistent challenges that your clients face today?

One of the major challenges that most organizations face— irrespective of their industry verticals—is the shortage of talent. Hardships pertaining to their recruitment and retention are also snowballing into a headache for business leaders. This is primarily due to the pandemic-induced changes in the globalbusiness environment that have created a once-in-a-generation shift in the way people work. As a result, employers need to modify their approach towards their workforce in a way that aligns with the changing tides.

While these present some internal factors that plague our clients’ operations, they also have to struggle with several external elements such as supply chain issues, economic uncertainty, and business instabilities. In a nutshell, we’re witnessing a lot of disruptions in most industry verticals globally, and in employee demands.

Can you elaborate on Motus Collaborative’s unique service portfolio?

At Motus Collaborative, we specialize in helping clients mitigate all these challenges. Our goal is to empower organizations with greater resiliency, enabling them to create a culture where people respond wisely to change rather than just recover from a disruptive event. To this end, we always help organizations reframe their challenges, learn adaptive skills, and implement them for the good of the organization, employees, stakeholders, and community. We constantly strive to create cascading resiliency: strategic action, flowing through the organization, reaching every individual and enhancing a culture of trust, leadership, and effectiveness.
We achieve this through our all-inclusive service portfolio that includes organizational development, organizational alignment and design, culture creation and transformation, leadership development, and strategic planning.

What makes us unique in the marketplace is our highly consultative client engagement model. It’s an innovative approach closely attuned to organizational needs and co-created with clients. Adhering closely to this, we work in tandem with our clients to co-create a solution instead of just plopping something on their desk. We bring together our extensive experience and deep repository of knowledge with our clients’ expertise and need to build the right fit solution for them. By adopting the proven systems approach to mitigate their challenges, we always succeed in creating the ideal solution for them.

That’s not all; we also work with clients, providing tailored support to implement the solutions. Identifying that a lack ofeffective implementation undermines solutions’ efficiency and performance, we guide clients through their implementation process to achieve the desired outcome.

Can you share a customer success story that exemplifies Motus Collaborative’s value proposition?

As an agile customer-first company, we are successfully developing a broad customer base. But our work with DEA always stands ahead in our list of successes. In our collaboration with DEA, we began by working on intentional cultural creation and identifying collaborative ways to work with hundreds of employees and leaders. We identified six norms of behavior— referred to as cultural drivers—that played a vital role in DEA’s organizational development endeavors.

Then, I took an organizational tour with DEA’s CEO, where we were able to involve every employee in the refinement of those cultural drivers. This was followed by creating organizational alignment in a very collaborative process. Interestingly, it was a large scale change management effort that impacted almost 30 offices with more than 600 employees spanning across eight states. We then looked at their client experience metrics and started finding ways to improve them, followed by systemic reinforcement. Here, we took a holistic way to find various pieces that could be combined to support these efforts.

Post collaboration, DEA was able to see a significant growth in their business metrics, where they gained a tenfold increase in profit, 95 percent client satisfaction, and 300 percent increase in sales along with the highest ever employee engagement.

Having hands-on experience with such organizational development projects enables us to take theoretical concepts and turn them into operational outcomes in a way that it’s helpful to our clients.

How does the future look for Motus Collaborative?

As a relatively new organization in the market, we are now looking for opportunities to accelerate our growth. Additionally, we are hiring new professionals with significant industry experience so we can better serve our existing clients and attract new customers.