Zealise

In 2023, we removed the zealise.com website, to concentrate on my publications, so redirected all visits to zealise.com to this page.

Zealise – the background

Zealise is the business Bay Jordan set up to offer the “Every Individual Matters” model.

Zealise helps organisations to transform operational effectiveness and improve adaptive capability, through the effective development of their people. This enhances bottom-line performance and the ability to survive and thrive in a fast-paced, massively changing world.

Bay’s career as a Chartered Accountant revolved around systems design, business process re-engineering and change management and provided him with a deep understanding of the contribution and value of people in organisations.

Bay thus recognised the management paradox of referring to people as assets but treating them exclusively as costs. He formed Zealise specifically to address this and developed the “Every Individual Matters” model to redress the counter-productive mixed message this paradox creates.

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Create the zeal to transform and sustain your organisational performance and outcomes

Adaptability is essential for sustained organisational success. It is the ability to identify the demands of situations and respond appropriately. This makes adaptability an exclusively people thing. Thus your ability to thrive as an organisation depends on how you manage and optimise your people.

Understanding this explains the claim that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” For, more than vision, mission, strategy and operational structure, organisational culture is the alignment of attitudes and behaviours that shape human interaction. To put it another way, culture is the manifestation of the degree of alignment around shared values and a common purpose. As such culture embodies adaptability – or exposes its lack.

Cement your adaptability and deliver the common purpose that ensures optimal human interaction, cooperation and collaboration with our ‘Every Individual Matters’ model. This:

  • Recognises the organisation as a community of inter-connected individuals, whose understanding of stakeholder needs ensures adaptability and secures the collaborative effort that shapes the results of the whole; and
  • Values each and every person, to create an organisational culture generating the synergy that sparks and sustains continuous improvement and transforms performance and results. 

Our Model

The New ‘Every Individual Matters’ Organisational Transformation Model

Zealise has developed a new business model that creates, maintains and sustains an organisation culture of optimal employee engagement, adaptability and collaboration. This model delivers all-round continuing performance improvement and better results through the commercial valuation of employees as human assets, together with linked equity-free employee ownership.

Our unique ‘Every Individual Matters’ model addresses a decades old quest and makes a literal truth of the claim “people are our greatest asset.” It brings a new dimension to human management and offers significant individual and organisational benefits. Amongst these are that it:

  • Enables you to effectively measure the value that your people bring to your business
  • Enhances strategy delivery through stronger stakeholder management, common purpose and shared vision
  • Engenders continuous organisational improvement through individual learning and development
  • Embeds the culture of ‘every individual matters’
  • Inspires a new organisation-wide energy for well-being and success
  • Eliminates most of, if not all, the shortcomings of traditional employee ownership schemes

Working Together

The ‘Every Individual Matters’ model is a powerful tool for cementing actions and behaviours to optimise co-operation and collaboration and sustain organisational outcomes. This is .because, uniquely, it bridges the divide between Finance and HR.

Like many others, the Finance profession, generally, is data driven and requires empirical evidence to support decisions and decision making. Finance people thus tend to get frustrated with the more socially-minded HR people, considering them and their practices to be more theoretical and “touchy-feely”. Now the ‘Every Individual Matters’ model gives them the means to effectively measure and monitor HR practices.

On the other hand, the ‘Every Individual Matters’ model overcomes the implicit HR mindset that “you cannot place a value on the person.” By using a consistent, practical, easy to understand algorithm and creating rigid rules to ensure that it cannot be abused, altered or manipulated it provides a new basis for guiding people management practice and providing measures that are more empirical, enhancing HR outcomes.

As a Chartered Accountant and a Prosci certified change manager, Bay is ideally qualified to further the development of a new relationship between the two functions.  Acknowledging the importance of both, and the historic differences of the two, he recognises that neither should be the primary sponsor of a project to implement the ‘Every Individual Matters’ model and will work with the CEO or COO as the primary sponsor.

Bay’s background perhaps makes it inevitable, but let’s use Prosci’s widely adopted ADKAR™ Change Management model to explore how you would introduce the ‘Every Individual Matters’ model.

Awareness

The first A in ADKAR™ represents Awareness and points to the need for an insight into why the change is being considered. This flows initially from your organisational needs and would be the reason you would initiate a dialogue with Zealise. We would therefore need to have (a) preliminary meeting/s to discuss your issues and explore the extent to which ‘Every Individual Matters’ model will help you address them. 

At this stage we would provide you a reasonably accurate forecast of the gross value of your employees and demonstrate how, if you were to incorporate it into a notional balance sheet, you could use this to create performance measures to monitor the effectiveness of your people management.

This is significant because it enables you to bridge the historical divide between HR and Finance.

Finally here, because employees would also need to be aware of the proposals and the rationale behind them, we would also need to discuss how the project will be communicated to your employees effectively and to start formulating ideas for doing this.

Desire

The next step is to invoke Desire (the D in ADKAR™) or the willingness to embark on the change. Here too we need to consider this from both the senior management (organisational) perspective and the “winning the employees’ support perspective.   

Here Finance and HR involvement is essential. As the two functions are likely to bear the greatest responsibility for delivering the ‘Every Individual Matters’ model, they need to understand their new roles and that: 

  • HR has the ability to define the rules around individual performance measurement and the variables that change human asset value
  • Finance has the ability to define the new organisational performance measures and to create, maintain and sustain the processes and systems to deliver consistent and reliable data to support individual and organisational performance according to the agreed rules.

Ensuring employee engagement and buy-in to the ‘Every Individual Matters’ model demands their understanding of how they benefit. To ensure this and instill desire at the individual employee level we recommend employee representation. Employees should be elected and involved in the definition, set-up and maintenance of the rules required by the model as appropriate for the organisation.

Knowledge

Securing the third element of the ADKAR™ model entails:

  • A full understanding of the principles, theory and practices required by the model
  • The full specification of the model and how it will be implemented within the organisation
  • The definition, discussion and finalisation of the parameters and variables of the processes and systems needed to implement the model within the organisation.
  • The definition agreement and publication of the rules and regulations governing the model to ensure their equability and universality and the manner in which disputes will be resolved and changes or updates will be addressed
  • The creation and sign-off of the final, complete project plan

This is the normal project and change management process. Zealise, with its unique blend of knowledge, is ideally positioned to support your project efforts.

Ability

The fourth element of the ADKAR™ model entails the execution and implementation of the project plan, including all sub-plans (e.g. communications, testing and training plans.) This incorporates:   

  • Regular and ongoing monitoring of progress
  • Full user and systems testing, as appropriate, along the way.
  • Identification, recording and resolution of problems encountered
  • Review and sign-off at each milestone
  • Recognition and celebration of each significant milestone

Although these four elements are implemented sequentially and chronologically, nothing here should be taken as meaning that work cannot be carried out on them simultaneously where possible and practical.  Here too the unique combination of Zealise skills, makes us ideal partners to help your maximise your results,

Reinforcement

The last element of the ADKAR™ model is reinforcement and refers to all efforts to ensure project delivery and the securing of all the deliverables and their expected returns. This is not sequential or chronological like the others but occurs throughout the project. This involves every effort to:  

  • Anticipate potential or looming problems
  • Identify and execute solutions
  • Provide additional encouragement and/or training where necessary
  • Identify, recognise, record and reward exceptional effort
  • Celebrate achievements

In any project you are likely to encounter unforeseen problems and difficulties. These cause energy to flag and enthusiasm to be lost. As a result people become disengaged and resistant to what they are being asked to do. This can happen in any of the above stages, and thus requires constant monitoring.

Although we would like to think otherwise, introducing the Every Individual Matters’ model is as susceptible to resistance as any other project. One particular issue that you need to monitor here is resistance by employees eligible for significant bonuses who fear their earnings may decrease. If this presents an issue you may need to consider a phasing in period to mitigate their “losses.” As we promote the model as “cost neutral” Zealise is well placed to work with you to resolve this issue and build reinforcement into your processes.

Next Steps

It goes without saying that Zealise will partner with you through all these steps. With our knowledge of the model, our project and change management experience there is no-one better to help guide and mentor you through the process and help you achieve the full returns – the return on investment (ROI) and other benefits – that you expect your project to deliver. Contact us now to start the ball rolling!