Make Your Change Management Digital and Data-driven for it to Work and to Know it’s Working

The digitization and datafication of change management has been momentous over the last couple of decades, positioning the field for an exciting evolution through quantitative measures of its effectiveness.

Consider this quote:

“The combination of predictive analytics, large data sets, and the processing power of today’s computers is starting to transform change management. Just as the discipline of marketing has transformed from soft to hard science in the past 20 years, so too will the practice of change.”

– Michael L. Tushman; Anna Kahn; Mary Elizabeth Porray; Andy Binns (HBR)

Recent digital trends in Change Management:

· Digital, automated tools with user-friendly, engaging UI’s

· Cloud based technologies making content accessible anywhere

· Mobile-friendly content

· Less sole reliance on manual measurement mediums (print-out’s, word doc’s) and more on engaging tools (digital surveys, gamification analytics, etc.)

Recent data-driven trends in Change Management:

· Real-time data

· Data visualization (dashboards) to more easily and quickly interpret data and make informed decisions

· Shift from reactive change strategies to proactive and predictive change strategies

· Strengthens longer term measurement

Use Digital Engagement Tools

The latest digital tools for employee engagement allow organizations to capture employee opinions in real-time with higher response rates than traditional employee opinion surveys. These tools are mobile-first with intuitive user (and back-end) interfaces making it easier and, dare I say, more fun to both engage with the tool to provide your opinion and to capture that opinion and save it as a data point that you can tie to a KPI. Real-time data capture is increasingly important and relevant, particularly as more companies adopt agile practices and strive for iterative and continuous improvement. Slalom’s Decision Lab, for example, allows organizations to prompt and capture feedback and opinions from a group during a live presentation. The presenter can pose a question or request feedback at any given time and the audience members can use their phones to pull up the question and provide their responses with a tap of the screen. What’s more, the collective results can be displayed for the group on the screen as the responses are entered in real-time.

This is just one example of many more digital tools that can be leveraged to drive engagement.

Another big one is gamification which transforms traditional, dry, employee compliance and skills training into a fun experience with higher rates of engagement that serves to drive adoption.

Data Volume

Volumes of captured data are growing exponentially as companies become more digital and data-driven. The more data companies capture, the more opportunities they create to tie data points to different measures of success across their business, including the success of change efforts.

Many organizational change management success metrics tend to be a mix of soft and hard units of measure (i.e. survey responses tracking employee sentiment, adoption rates, training test scores, etc.). However, companies that make habit of capturing project data enable them to identify correlations between “soft” change measures to hard project data. Forward-looking companies that prioritize volume data also best position themselves to create predictive models for change management. For example, over time, such companies can analyze historical data and begin to predict which modalities of communication, training, and engagement are most likely to drive highest rates of technology and/or behavioral skill adoption

The Time is Now

We are ways away from Change Management becoming a predominantly predictive data modeling discipline. However, this shift toward the use of digital tools and the capture and use of data to drive change, position companies to become predictive with their change management approaches. The crucial and immediate steps toward this ideal are to use digital tools for engagement and to capture data to build rich historical data with sophisticated methods of analysis. Companies that get it, will be at the forefront of the next transformation of Change Management that is already underway.