Totem
Balancing the People, Change, and Leadership Equations

The workforce paradigm shift that the COVID-19 pandemic has bought about is here to stay. HR departments across the globe continue to face the pressure of effectively aligning with the work-from-home and remote work trends. Even as the world steers away from the pandemic, working conditions and preferences would probably never be the same. As such, organizations must find ways to better adapt to the newly found hybrid working environments while maximizing productivity and engagement among the workforce. But all that is easier said than done. While enterprises are navigating through a rather uncharted territory in this regard, management consultants with expertise in working at the intersection of human capital, organizational development, and change management prove to be invaluable. Positioning itself as one such holistic player is Washington, DC-based Totem. An 8(a) certified management consulting firm, Totem is driven by the goal to build connections and interactions among people for effective change and organizational performance.

In an interview with Manage HR, TJ Londagin, Totem’s CEO and co-founder, and Jennifer Duff, the company’s president and co-founder, share their insights on how the company helps clients enhance workforce capacity and performance by implementing actionable solutions that produce measurable outcomes.

In light of your experience, how has organizational change management amplified in value for companies, especially on the HR front? And what role does Totem play in helping clients embrace this change?

TJ: The last 18 months have been a wild ride for everyone, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have been rather successful over the past year in engaging our clients’ workforce in a way that makes them feel more connected and committed to their employers. Being a subject matter expert on change management, we could assist our clients across the globe in managing their remote workforce, facilitating engaging conversations, and making sure people were productive. We helped them ensure that all the tools and solutions for remote working were fully utilized. Once people got familiar with the remote working tools, our clients were able to uncover new ways of managing people, and we could step in and help with that change in real-time. We were able to help our clients deliver engaging employee onboarding experiences remotely and render a sense of belongingness among the workforce.

We ensure that employees understand their organization and how they can fit into its culture. Ultimately, this enables companies to serve their clients better amidst the changing dynamics around human capital.

Jennifer: We help employees attain a good work-life balance. Totem can identify the value and means that people need to work from home successfully. After all, life at home is very much different from that in the office, and companies ought to embrace that fact to bring the best out of employees working from home. We let companies know what it means to put people first. For instance, we teach employees how to set some boundaries in a productive way such that operating remotely becomes more convenient. We help both managers and employees set realistic expectations regarding working in the new normal while enabling the conditions that foster the kind of sporadic connections that do not typically happen in remote work environments.

Could you throw more light on the approach or methodology that you follow to help your clients ride the new change management waves?

TJ: Our approach to change management remains the same. It is still about understanding the client and their culture. The methodology we implement begins with meeting with the leadership and understanding their goals and objectives—what they expect at the end of the project—to facilitate measurable actions and outcomes. Our approach is to meet clients where they are and collaboratively chart the course for the future to drive sustainable change and demonstrate clear results. This helps us create leadership buy-in and define our success and accomplishments. One aspect that did change over the past 18 months is that there has been a heightened need to focus on the human-centric aspect of change management.

Jennifer: We haven't changed what we do, but how we do it has changed significantly based on what people and organizations can handle. The method by which we interact with organizations has changed. In the wake of the pandemic, getting 100 people together in a room and designing a future state for an organization is different from taking four two-hour workshops every week. We had to break our services into manageable chunks such that people are not overwhelmed by new initiatives and can digest them without disrupting their work-life balance.

Who are your typical clients? Could you provide us with some of your customer success instances?
TJ: We work across industries, primarily with federal government entities, nonprofits, and companies in the commercial, hospitality, and retail spaces. We helped one of our federal clients assess, redesign, and implement their new onboarding experiences for new hires to better align with industry best practices. Through the implementation phase, we adopted an agile change management approach where we would implement a change and see how it goes with the process owners. We would redesign the process if required and continue doing so until the intended changes are fully implemented and adopted. As opposed to the big bang approach, this turned out to be more effective in remote work environments. We give people the opportunity to adapt to the change and see how changes impact the processes.

Jennifer: We don’t just build something for a client and hand it over to them and let them fend for themselves. We work closely with clients to help them build the capacity among the workforce to identify changes and drive enhancements for continuous improvement.

This year, we have also begun pairing our services offerings with IT tools, such as Office 365. We have partnered with a bunch of technology vendors in this regard to sell complementary services. While they undertake the implementation of the solution, we help clients with change leadership to enable them to realize the full potential of the solution.

TJ: While software implementation may seem like a very different workstream, at the end of the day, if you don't have a good change management strategy in place, the tools implemented may go severely underutilized. In other words, if you don't get the people to change and adapt to the newer ways of working enabled by these tools, you haven’t really made much of an impact.

A lot of people think that change management only entails communication and training. As much as those are key components, they are still small pieces of our whole change management package. We work in a much broader way. It is about the tools, their adoption, and, more importantly, making sure people understand not only how to use the tools but also why to use them. As such, we provide the full suite of change services around software adoption as well. Our clients can feel the difference in terms of experiencing how the adoption goes much smoother and quicker while lasting longer.

What does the roadmap look like for Totem?

TJ: Right now, fueled by high demand, we are on a rapid growth trajectory. We will continue to pair the right subject matter experts with our clients to deliver maximum value. It has always been a challenge in the consulting space. We have grown into the space of remote work and are perfectly positioned to cater to clients irrespective of their geographic location.

Jennifer: In parallel, we are gearing up to help our clients with returning to work in a post-pandemic world. While there is little chance that enterprises would return to the pre-pandemic normalcies, the new normal would foster the evolution of work environments for the greater good. Change management would still be an integral part of it, and that’s where we would come in.

TJ: It can be scary. No one has all the answers yet. But that makes it all the more exciting for us.