India’s leading pest control company entered into a joint venture with the world’s leading pest management and hygiene business in 2017. Unlike how technology-intensive the western world was, Indian pest control business was largely local and diverse in the way it was managed across regions. In order to bring the benefits of technology into the Indian pest control market, new technology had to be introduced acclimatizing to the Indian ways of doing things. However, the technology transition was a must in order to draw better efficiencies and market acquisition.

The scale of this pan India change initiative encompassed 200+ locations and 5000+ employees, with the core objective to provide richer experience to customers. Despite the technology being highly successful in more than 70 countries, feasibility studies first and initial implementation drives, indicated low success rates in India, owing to its so many diversities; and these diversities existed not just in the consumer markets but also in the organization structure.

Change was very much needed and quickly at that with substantial investments at stake. A holistic change management approach was deployed, aimed at maximizing the value delivered by the new technology, which eventually included the roll out of a device as well. Partnering and collaborating with teams across borders i.e. India, Asia and UK, helped unlock the potential of this new technology to Indian terrain, which would gradually serve as the key differentiator for this brand. A team consisting of cross-functional expertise, along with SMEs from other countries was set up to identify the nuances and challenges across different structures and markets.

The change management approach deployed, comprised of the following phases:

• Behavioral science techniques along with tweaking their ways of working, thereby transforming how business was done. A user-based approach contributed to a flexible change management journey. Identifying practices that would get redundant, capability building to make the change effective, led to identification of behaviours that either had to be changed or amplified.
• Change implementation was initiated with various workshops designed for different levels, to make change relative and provide the right context and transparency of the new model.

A feather in the cap to our human-centric approach, where there was a redesigning of roles that were getting redundant due to the changed processes. These roles got redeployed to fit the larger scheme of the new operating model.

What seemed almost impossible initially took time to arrive at, however, the focus on the “human” element served as key drivers for empowering user teams to own future change initiatives. Data transparency enables strategic decision making in dealing with volatile environment.