Change practitioners are expected to measure the contributions of all their change management activities in order to achieve the desired success on their projects. Change is something that every organization needs to go through to progress.
By adopting the right measurement techniques, organizations can take advantage of change, and identify the impact it will have on them, identify areas that need improvement, and drive continuous growth. Statistics show that 70% of change initiatives fail, so it’s important to take the right steps before you implement your change initiatives.
Let’s not wait any further because in this article, we’ll dive deeper in learning more about how you can measure your success through change management.
Calculate your change rejection rate
Change rejection rates measure the number of proposed changes that are either never implemented or rejected. This helps you track internal resistance levels, obstacles, and challenges that your organization faces during the change process.
When your change rejection rate is high, this indicates the following issues:
- Lack of communication for change: Team members might not be aware of how change will benefit them and the organization.
- Insufficient support and training: The lack of resources for implementing change. This includes the organization failing to either upskill their team members or provide them with the appropriate change management training.
- Poor proposed changes: The changes that were proposed weren’t designed well enough to address the problem they were meant to solve.
Paying close attention to your change rejection rate allows you to identify what are the barriers that are stopping you from successfully implementing your strategy. By addressing these issues, your organization can improve the management process and achieve its goals much more effectively.
Use change management software
Living in such a competitive online world, organizations will use different types of technology to implement changes. To make the process much easier, you can use change management software that will help you organize and optimize the process, eliminating unnecessary disruptions and making sure that important tasks are completed.
The benefits of using this type of software include:
- Minimizing risks
- Reducing downtimes
- Simplifying the change management process
- Increasing IT efficiency
- Improving team communication
If you are having a hard time choosing the right software, here’s a list of some of the best platforms for change management that you can use:
- Freshservice: Freshservice is an ITSM system that works instantly, without requiring any technical skills from its users. Key features include intelligent automation, a user-friendly dashboard, automated notifications, risk analysis tools, and an automatic customer satisfaction survey (CSAT).
- ManageEngine ServiceDesk: Offers integrated change management capabilities that help team members deliver quality services and reduce costs at the same time. Key features include implementation checklists, change calendar, automated notifications, and the ability to prioritize and schedule changes.
- Issuetrak: Is a helpdesk platform that you can use for incident and change management. The platform is effective if you are quickly looking to quickly resolve issues. Key features include templates for RFCs, alerts and notifications, and compliance control reporting.
Change is required if you want to grow and the only way it can be done is when you are implementing the right measures and choosing the right software for doing so.
Calculate the effectiveness of employee training
When implementing new changes, organizations might face reskilling challenges. Overcoming this can help you invest in change management training programs for your team. However, the real question is how do you measure the effectiveness of employee training?
Training metrics track your change management success, where this might be a modification to your onboarding process, reskilling, team structure, or workflow. Here are a few metrics you can use to calculate your training effectiveness:
- The total number of employees who complete training
- How many employee training programs are organized by the company
- The skills acquired through the training
These metrics allow you to see if your team members are taking advantage of the proposed changes.
Measure Individual performance
How much did change management impact individuals? Individuals are the units of change, measuring their progress is a leading indicator that shows how they adopt to it. The three key elements to measuring individual performance in change adoption are:
- The speed at which individuals adapt to change (How fast?): This includes the time required for your team members to learn and apply a new skill after the training session.
- How well individuals adapt to change (how well?): Includes the number of team members that adopt a new system to the number of members that are impacted by change.
- The amount of individuals that are adapting to change (how many?): Tracks the number of problems reported to help desks, and shows the level of proficiency employees have in adapting to changes.
All of these metrics show how effectively individuals are adapting to change. It’s always important to see the pace of each individual and how much they are interested in it.
Change costs
Every time there’s change, you need to follow up on the financial impact it has on your organization. Change costs are the total expenses associated with change implementation. This includes different types of expenses such as employee training costs, technology costs, the cost of allocating resources, costs associated with the time taken to implement change, and more.
Return on investment (ROI) and organizational impact
Your last goal, after you’ve measured all the necessary KPIs for change will come to the overall impact it had on your organization’s financial status and performance. The final step now is to measure your ROI from the change implementation process.
Firstly, calculate the financial benefits you received from your change initiatives. This is either the reduced costs you managed to achieve, an increase in revenue, reduced expenses, or an increase in customer satisfaction.
Secondly, Add the monetary values you received and subtract them from the total change costs and from the total financial benefits. After, you’ll need to calculate the net financial benefits and divide them by the total investment costs and multiply them by 100 (Net financial benefits/total investment costs x 100) in order to get your ROI. Once you calculate this number, you’ll receive your ROI percentage and see what kind of impact change had on your organization.
Finally, in order to see how much progress you’ve made, check results in your pre-change and post-change measurements.
The key to developing change management KPIs
Each organization has different KPIs that are ideal for them to choose for their project. In order to define the proper KPIs for your change management project, here are a few simple steps to follow:
- Define your change objectives: What are you trying to achieve through your change incentive? Is it to improve your customer experience? To increase employee engagement? Or something else?
- Determine your milestones: Clarify achievable milestones in order to make it easier for you to track your success progress.
- Establish your data collection methods: How do you gather data that will help you with your change management KPIs? You will always need a strategy for collecting your data to make sure you gather the proper insights.
- Monitor and evaluate your data collection: Create your own data collection system such as regular surveys, feedback mechanisms, and real-time dashboards for collecting information.
- Take action based on the data you gather: Once you’ve collected the right amount of data from your KPIs dedicated to your change management campaigns, use it for taking action. Gathering the right insights is helpful for you to use in your action plans. Evaluate your budget, time, and team members. Use all of them strategically and see what kind of adjustments need to be made.
KPI progress should be communicated to all team members. Regular updates keep team members motivated and everyone involved in the process.
Change management is crucial for the long-term success of the organization
If there’s no change, there’s no progress. It’s what keeps us going individually and what makes an organization successful in the long-term.
Repetitiveness is what staggers an organization’s growth and what makes it fall behind competitors. Therefore, in order to stay ahead of your competitors, it’s always important to take measures to implement the proper change incentives.
