Tell me about a time you had to drive a process improvement with limited buy-in from the team.

Situation

As a consultant at a Philippine shared services center for a European insurance company, I was tasked with improving the policy renewal processing time. The 12-member team had an average turnaround of 5.2 days against a client benchmark of 3 days, but most were comfortable with the existing manual checks because they feared automation would affect accuracy.

Task

I needed to design and implement a process change that would reduce turnaround to under 3 days while gaining buy-in from the team, who were skeptical that any change would just add more work.

Action

I started by spending two days shadowing the three most vocal skeptics and noting exactly where they had to re-key data across systems. I then presented findings in a team huddle, acknowledging their frustrations first: 'I saw that you manually copy the same client name four times; that must be annoying, and I agree it's waste.' I proposed a macro that auto-populated those fields and asked them to test it on 10 real cases. When errors dropped from 12% to 2% on their test batch, they began volunteering suggestions for other automation points. I incorporated three of their ideas into the final workflow, which made them feel ownership.

Result

Full implementation reduced average turnaround from 5.2 days to 2.1 days, exceeding the target. The team’s overtime hours dropped by 40%, and they adopted a continuous improvement board themselves, flagging two more manual tasks they wanted to automate next quarter.