Evaluating Change Strategy Metrics for Success at Multiple Levels

Let's start talking about evaluating change strategy effectiveness. So we just talked about the different types of strategies that you can utilize, but it's important to assess whether the strategies that you use are effective or not. And we are going to discuss assessing the effectiveness of your change strategy at three different levels.

But before we do that, I want to just review some of the common evaluation methods that are used. The first one is surveys. So surveys are great because we can send surveys out to a lot of different people and gather a lot of information.

So if we have a change event in a large organization, we could survey all of our employees and get their feedback on the change event. We can also conduct interviews. So maybe interview the people who were the most affected or impacted by the change, interview the leadership team, something like that.

We could also interview customers to understand from the customer's perspective. We can also utilize performance dashboards that are going to tell us how the change project performed, how the organization performed before, during, and after the change. We can use after-action reviews.

So, gathering lessons learned to understand what happened during the change? What did we learn? What should we not do again in the future? And then we can also use process audits. So, really, auditing the processes that we use during the change. So now we're going to talk about those three levels at which we can really look at the effectiveness of our change strategy.

And the first level is at the process level. What are those process metrics that can help us measure the quality of the actual implementation? So I wanted to give you some examples of process metrics. The first is the percent of planned change activities executed on schedule.

So, how many of the activities that we plan to do to be able to execute this change did we do on time when we planned to do them? Another process metric is the reach and frequency of communication. So, how many people were we able to get our communications out to about this change? And how often, how many times did we communicate? We know we've talked in this class that communication is really critical and that we need to repetitively communicate. We don't just communicate something once when it comes to change; we have to do it over and over again.

We also, as a process metric, can measure the participation rates in things like training. How many people participated in the training? How many people completed the training? How many people passed the training test? Feedback sessions. How many people participated in feedback sessions? How many people participated in pilot programs? These are all examples of really good process metrics that can help us measure the quality of the implementation we conducted.

The second type of change strategy effectiveness measure is adoption and readiness metrics. And these can be very closely tied to our ADCARB based indicators. So for instance, an example of an awareness indicator is the percent of employees who can articulate the why of the change, that can actually say to you, this is why we needed this change.

Under desire, we can look at things like engagement scores. How engaged are our employees? How willing were they to volunteer for and to champion the change? Under knowledge, we can consider training completion rates, skill assessments, knowledge checks, just really being able to understand if at a knowledge level, people have gained the knowledge needed for the change. The next is ability.

So we can actually go and watch people, observe them to see if their behavior has actually changed. Are they using the new way of doing work? We can also look at performance metrics post-training. So everyone's been trained in the new system.

They're supposedly using the new system. How has that impacted the performance? And then we can also look at reduced error rates. Are we seeing reduced error rates? And then finally for reinforcement, we can actually gather metrics about ongoing compliance.

Are people using whatever the change is, a new system or a new process, for instance? Are we integrating that change into the performance reviews, the utilization of the new system, for instance, or their willingness to be open to change? And we can also use employee advocacy as a reinforcement metric. The final type of metric that we can measure for change strategy effectiveness is outcome and impact metrics. And these are organizational results.

So examples of these include really being able to figure out whether we have achieved the strategic KPIs tied to the change. So those KPIs are key performance indicators. And so some strategic key performance indicators could be the level of productivity, the amount of costs that have been reduced, the quality levels achieved, and the customer service. So we wanna look at whether we achieved those strategic KPIs that are actually tied to the change that we made? We can also look at employee and customer satisfaction.

So we would consider employee satisfaction more of an internal satisfaction level, and customer satisfaction as an external satisfaction level. And we also want to consider when we talk about outcome, in particular, the long-term adoption of the change. So, not just looking at it, maybe right after implementation has been completed, but even six to 12 months after, are people still doing work in the new way?