Measuring Organizational Change

The sheer scale of a corporate change initiative requires that it’s value be measured.

Our goal, as Change Agents, is to guide our public along the Change Curve (or the Learning curve). Think about it: if you’re an expert in an obselte system, and the organizations goal is to skill you up to become an expert in a new and improved operating system, the distance between the two is your learning curve. How quickly you scale that curve, and how smooth the transition, is dependant on the Change Management role. Simply put, Change Management is the pipeline between your current  state and the future of your role.

How do we measure the rate at which our stakeholders travel along the curve? There are a number of traditional methods, including:

- Change Readiness Assessments, or organizational pulse checks, taken throughout the process and measured against a baseline

- Anecdotal feedback from stakeholder groups

- Surveys

- Performance measures

The savvy Change Management professional is also steadily relying on social media initiatives for metrics.

Internal blogs are a wonderful way to encourage collaboration and two-way communication in otherwise typically siloed organizations. What we’re seeing today, more than ever, is the open, honest feedback from stakeholder groups that has, historically, been very difficult to gauge. Through this medium, we’re able to interact and develop relationships with our target audience, and this transfers into a sharp incline in trust– and in a corporate environment, trust equals speed.

More importantly though, internal blogs also provide a back-end that gathers rich data, including link interaction, employee attendance and popularity of posts. By incorporating this data into the change strategy, we can uncover stakeholder pain points (Example: Post A received over 300 hits, while post B received 90; that’s because post A discussed a topic that is particularly close to our stakeholder’s hearts) and gear our communication direction appropriately. The internal blog, then, is a living environment, maturing and becoming more efficient as it’s used.

~ by Brandon Carlos on March 31, 2009.