Driving Change from the Bottom up

As someone running a small business, do you ever find yourself asking: how can I implement this awesome new strategy while making it worth the investment? 

This past year has changed the way we live, work and interact with people. Whether big or small, companies not only need to re-evaluate but also re-organize their internal process and find new ways to position their business which will help them survive in an increasingly competitive & challenging post-COVID world. 

A bottom-up approach might be one of the best strategic options moving forward for small companies wanting to take a bolder step at rapidly and efficiently re-organizing their business internally.

So What Exactly is a Bottom-Up Approach?

There is no one definition, but to give you a simple idea, bottom-up is a strategy that seeks to develop and implement new ideas using the entire brain power of the workforce— your employees.

Companies often find that employees are more personally engaged on projects that use the bottom-up approach as opposed to the traditional top-down approach where high-level management personnel determine all key decisions and create a strategy for the rest to implement. In fact, Oliver Wyman describes this bottom-up method as the “zero-based organization redesign”  which is designed to put people at the center, build on their strengths while eliminating low-value work, and identifying routines and processes that add real value and are essential to successfully transform the company from within. 

Especially in a time of COVID, small businesses must be able to adapt and redefine their go-to market strategy to one that will help them with a sustainable practice to thrive in a changing business atmosphere— this is why re-organizing their internal structure using a bottom-up is one that can sustain not only the employees morale, but also build their sense of the company’s direction in such unprecedented times.

Where It Works 

As mentioned earlier, the bottom-up approach has no strict guidelines or set of rules on how you can implement this strategy— it is truly driven from within. Now that you know what this approach entails, let’s take a look at where you might be able to implement them by the few.

1. Sales & Marketing

A global leader in the work management and the B2B Saas Market, Asana, has seen tremendous growth ever since their start-up as they continue to drive adoption by bottom-up in companies which is allowing them to grow virally. As opposed to Google or Microsoft selling Saas to the whole companies in the horizontal space, Asana and similar companies like Zoom and Slack are selling directly to the “ground-floor users” instead of executive teams. 

This enables them to engage with users quickly and is a low-cost way for providing services and building this feedback loop with end users. Your employees can also identify end users who are inclined to buy your services in this process. Because of the speed of adoption and increased sales, the company can forecast how well they can do in a more straightforward and flexible manner.

With COVID-19 shifting the workplace trends into more work-from-home and remote work, the demand for these Saas applications surely will increase. So it might help for you to think twice if by adapting or reinventing your sales strategy towards one that drives bottom-up.

1. Management 

As a small business owner, you are still going to have to determine overall goals and set out expectations in the bottom-up approach but your employees from all levels will have the role of assisting you with developing the correct mechanisms in order to reach the company goals.

Involving your entire workforce though the bottom-up strategic management can build employee morale and actively engage them in their work.

For instance, Asana also have their very own bottom-up model where they emphasize adoption by teams which set out clear propositions for a small group of employees: from marketing team to design team to larger teams in the company.

 In this post-COVID world, you would think you can drive changes through a position of power and formal leadership but times and trends are changing...so don’t forget to think about your employees!

How do you do it?

Are you now convinced that you can try implementing a bottom-up approach? Here is some tips and you have to remember a few things:

1.  People are the very heart of this methodology: they are integral part of this process

2. Identity and resolve organizational pain points before implementing

3. Analyze all current routines and projects 

4. Eliminate low-value work and distinguish high-impact processes/routines 

5. Leverage your most important assets— your employees—in new redesigned roles where you allow them for their full talents to be used and refocus them to join high-value activities 

As a social impact initiative, Rem and Company also offers free consulting services and resources to small businesses and nonprofits impacted by COVID-19. Our pro-bono consulting teams provide small businesses with the opportunity to identify and prioritize issues facing their business, propose innovative strategies, and facilitate execution. If you are a small business or nonprofit in need of assistance, learn more about how we can help.