Key Points

• Change management initiatives can be measured through some selected metrics to gauge their efficacy.
• Working in conjunction with project managers, change managers, and stakeholders is a fine way of seeing the impact.
• Any change should be beneficial to an organization, yielding a net positive impact on the organization.

How do you track change management initiatives? The modern business relies on data to guide many of its actions. However, when enacting something as wide or broad as change management this can be difficult. That said, you aren’t without recourse when looking at your change management initiatives. There are some ways to track progress as you navigate your daily operations.

A modern business needs a means of quantifying the qualitative properties of something like a change management initiative. With that in mind, that’s what we’re tackling here today. We’re taking a closer look at what it means to measure and quantify the efficacy of your change management policies. With any luck, you’ll come away with the right set of tools needed to supercharge your organization.

Understanding Change Management

So, before we get down to brass tacks, let’s discuss change management. In a nutshell, change management is how a company enacts change. This can be internal or external. However, the basic gist is that you’re looking at the framework that allows a company to enact lasting change.

Change is a divisive subject, no matter the focus. Employees or leadership can be resistant to the nature of change. As such, this is where structured frameworks like change management come in handy. It isn’t enough to enact a change, but rather it’s an involved process with its distinct stages.

Change comes in two different forms, incremental or organizational. Incremental is a gradual change, like updating a product, changing strategies, and so forth. An organizational change is a massive shift, like a change in the overall goal of a business.

The Need for Metrics

How can you guarantee something has made an impact? Metrics and key performance indicators are part of the project lifecycle, and a natural occurrence. You want to measure what you’re doing. Quantifiable data is actionable data, after all. As such, the same methodology and approach can apply to the likes of change management initiatives.

At the end of the day, change management initiatives are essentially a project. You’ve brainstormed and mapped out the components necessary, prepped your team and leadership, and have gone through the stages necessary.

This is where metrics are key, as they are a means of establishing the progress of any initiatives. You aren’t conducting change in a vacuum. As such, establishing good metrics will go a long way toward giving you something to present when the time comes.

How to Track the Success of Your Change Management Initiatives

Now that we’ve discussed a bit of the why and the how, it’s important to establish the right sort of metrics. Depending on the change management methodology in use, your mileage will certainly vary. However, the point of the metrics provided is to give a framework for any organization to gauge the progress of their change management initiatives.

Change is a tricky subject, especially if you consider some of the older organizations out there. Further, the larger an organization is, the more resistant it will be to the notion of change. Consider change management initiatives at a tech start-up, the shift of goals or product designs is relatively simple. There aren’t enough people on board to even resist the concept of change.

Contrast that with somewhere like General Electric or IBM, where they’ve been around for decades and employ thousands. Massive change is going to be a gradual and difficult process. However, with the right incentives and structure in place, gathering these metrics should be relatively easy.

Employee Satisfaction

One of the best ways to see if your change management initiative has stuck is through the use of employee satisfaction. Gathering data for this metric can be done in a few ways, like gathering net promoter scores. However, you’ll likely gather the best results through the use of anonymous user surveys.

These serve two vital purposes. First, you’re gathering actionable data, as you can readily collate points from the results of the survey. Second, and most important, is you’re gathering honest information. An employee who fears the chance for repercussions is less likely to give an honest answer.

However, by making the process anonymous, you can get valuable feedback about your initiatives while keeping the employee-management pipeline copacetic. At the end of the day, you want accurate data, and this one way you can get your hands on verified and honest output.

Adoption Rate

This one is perhaps suited for larger changes. Typically, you can see who is partaking in new change management initiatives. Perhaps you’ve done something like institute a new piece of software for handling customer service relations. When cross referenced with the likes of your employee database, you’ve got a solid metric on the adoption rate.

Adoption rate also signifies the overall success of an initiative. If you’re making larger changes, it might not be readily apparent. However, if you’re logging things, and you should for the sake of security, it gives a bird’s eye view to the effectiveness of your initiatives.

Higher adoption rates are going to signify the change is a success. Lower adoption rates, conversely, are going to show a negative impact elsewhere. We gamble on change management initiatives, and this one area where you can see it start to affect your bottom line.

Training Effectiveness

The effectiveness of your employees’ with new technologies or standards can be indicative of the performance of any change management initiatives. New software or tools means training, and the quality of those materials is going to show quite a bit.

You might get fantastic numbers out of the gate when looking at how employees retain information. However, the rubber meets the road when it comes time to use these tools. If you’ve got workers struggling to make their quotas or get work done, something has gone wrong.

As such, keeping a keen eye on employee performance in the wake of a new change management initiative is going to signify if this was a sound idea or not. If the materials aren’t up to par, then performance afterwards certainly isn’t going to be.

Stakeholder Satisfaction

One of the core responsibilities of any business project is making sure the stakeholders and customers are happy. As such, this provides us with yet another solid metric to measure the efficacy of change management initiatives.

Much like the employee satisfaction metric, this can be gathered in a few different ways. One of the most effective ways is conducting one-on-one interviews. Here, you can get frank responses in regard to the success of your change management initiatives.

However, if you’re strapped for time, the likes of a survey works equally well. You want actionable data, and there is no better way than to quantify the responses you receive. Structure surveys or interviews to provoke succinct, but brutally honest answers.

Change Cost

One of the fastest ways to see how effective something can be in the business world is to total out the cost. Change cost has quite a few elements to it. You’ve got to factor in the likes of employee training, technology, disruption and far more.

Expenses can mount fairly quickly, but it is important to stay abreast of these. At the end of the day, a change management initiative is ultimately intended to benefit your business. Keeping track of the expenses can help further analysis into the effectiveness of whatever changes have been made.

Further, it ties directly into our next metric. Costs are just a natural byproduct of doing business. However, when costs get out of control, that can impact the overall efficacy of your change initiatives.

Individual Performance

This does tie in with the likes of employee satisfaction and adoption rate among other metrics. However, you can gauge individual performance rather easily. You should have historical data on hand for each employee’s overall performance before the change. After a given period, you can gather those performance numbers once again.

When comparing the two, individuals should be performing higher. However, that might not be the case. This can indicate issues with training, technology, and so forth. That said, one of the fastest ways to see the true measure of your change management initiative is going to be on how the rank-and-file workers are coping with its introduction.

This can be summarized with three major questions:

• How quickly is the employee adapting to the change?
• How many employees are utilizing the change?
• How well are they performing with the change?

Organizational Performance

Did your change management initiative do what it was supposed to do? This is a blunt question, but a pertinent one for users looking to gauge the effectiveness of their initiative. Ultimately, this is a question that is answered by the primary stakeholder or sponsor of the project itself. However, that is something the change management team lead needs to derive.

Any initiative is a matter of teamwork. You’ll have people on the ground dealing with the project management aspects, others on the change management process, and the leadership at the helm. When all three of these elements meet at the center, you’ve got a clear answer to your success.

Further, this can help your initiative derive further metrics that are defined by those involved in the process. While the guidelines I’ve set forth are a great starting point, you might have a need for further internal metrics to finish things. A great way of looking at this is the PCT model.

Business Impact and ROI

The true goal of gathering any of the aforementioned metrics and performance indicators is that you want to see the impact on your business. Ultimately, a solid change management initiative should have a beneficial impact and a benefit to your organization’s return on investment.

You can take all of the aforementioned metrics and collate them into a larger database if necessary. Every single one of these metrics is going to have a cost associated with them. Employee satisfaction, training effectiveness, stakeholder satisfaction, the implementation of new technology, and so forth.

If you’re looking to return a percentage for the ROI, you’ll need to add up all these data points, subtract them from the benefits garnered. This should give you your net positive. From there, you can divide that by the total investment costs. Once done, just multiply that by 100 and you should have your ROI as a percentage.

Ideally, your net benefit should be higher than things were before the change. If not, then your change management initiative hasn’t been a rousing success.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for some additional tips and tricks to get things rolling? You might want to take a closer look at the common challenges of remote work. Remote work can be paradigm shift of sorts, and knowing how to recognize and overcome these challenges is a means of guaranteeing continued success in your organization.

Further, you might want to take a closer look at how to build a high-performing remote team. Anyone can do remote work, but building an effective team is a going to make sure your final results are worth bragging about.

Conclusion

With any luck, you’ve come away with the right sort of metrics needed to see the fruits of your change management initiative. Data is an important component of any project undertaken by an organization Working closely with your stakeholders, project managers, and change managers should let you see exactly how your change management initiative is faring.

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