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72 incredibly influential in the field of change management. A New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School and the founder of management consulting firm Kotter International. His work has earned him the reputation of an authority on change in the arenas of business and leadership. In Leading Change, Dr. Kotter outlines a practical eight-step process for change management: » Establish a sense of urgency. » Create the guiding coalition. » Develop a vision and strategy. » Communicate the change vision. » Empower employees for broad-based action. » Generate short-term wins. » Consolidate gains and produce more change. » Anchor new approaches in the culture. Utilizing both the academic research and practical implementations of this discipline, mortgage field services companies can apply its principles as processes and guidelines to continuously evolve in the ever-changing mortgage servicing industry. MANAGING CHANGE Working with regulators, federal agencies, state and local governments, code officials, clients, and other parties requires continued vigilance and understanding of specific, unique requirements. When a change is made at any of those entities, it manifests itself into the specific actions of field services companies' inspector and contractor networks. A simple change requiring language modification of a posting at a property requires the coordination of hundreds and at times, thousands of specific actors. us, any time field services companies have to implement a change, they must carefully consider the impact and how they manage the evolving expectations. Field services companies roll out many changes to their inspector and contractor networks and internal users. ese changes are either to optimize quality, timeliness, and/or cost or to react to changes in client or investor expectations. Following Dr. Kotter's established process for change management, field services companies need to be prepared for changes by developing a full set of activities, some of which are not always required but are available to the team as needed. ese activities are common examples: » Work order requirements reflect the new expectation. » Policy documents and job aids are updated. » Create a video to promote and explain the change. » Send a memo to the applicable inspector and/or contractor network documenting the change that serves as both an explanation of why and a user guide (or a link to a user guide). » Training sessions are scheduled for internal and external users. » Lesson is created and required on learning management systems for employees, inspectors, and contractors. » Utilize social media to broadcast the change. » Hold a conference call with internal and external participants. » Frequently asked questions generated from the call and promotion are sent out as an addendum to the memo. » One month after the initial launch, find champions or subject matter experts for the change and write a case study showing impact. Host another call. » Hard audit stop in operations for the change. » Have a backend top-down-audit-style review and enforcement of change. » ree to five months after the initial change, have an after-action review. One of the biggest property issues field services companies and mortgage servicers face that is difficult to mitigate—mold—can benefit the most from this specific change-management approach. MOLD POLICY Mold, and the source of moisture feeding mold, is a major challenge to field services companies and property preservation. With properties often sitting vacant for many months or years, properly identifying the source and taking effective action is critical. When the new Mortgagee Letter came out for the Federal Housing Administration in February 2016, field services companies had to rethink their historical approach to identifying mold. Establishing a new mold policy following the change-management procedures should begin with field services companies like Safeguard Properties determining how to describe the new requirements in the work order. e work order will become specific instructions to set the stage for contractors to assess the condition of the property and the resulting actions based on investor or client allowables. e mold policy needs to be specific in detail, but there are base steps: » Identify the sources of mold and moisture feeding the growth. » Utilize investor/client allowables to address the source. » Validate, using a detailed checklist, the potential causes that are not feeding the mold. » Do the work to address or bid. Prior to the new policy, contractors were simply asked to identify mold and the source of the moisture. Far too often, "humidity/lack of circulation" was identified incorrectly as the main cause. A policy change can correct that behavior. Utilizing software like Sharepoint can aid in storing and establishing a method of version control for documents. After developing the policy and work-order requirements, field services companies should update all policy documents to establish a single source of truth for internal and external users. CASE STUDY e following was identified when Safeguard developed its new mold policy utilizing the change-management process as described above: Work-order requirements must reflect the new expectation: After establishing the policy, Safeguard updated all work orders "Field services companies roll out many changes to their inspector and contractor networks and internal users. These changes are either to optimize quality, timeliness, and/or cost or to react to changes in client or investor expectations."

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