Choosing change management metrics

Who knew that helping people deal with change involved so much data? Choosing the right metrics in change management assignments is crucial for assessing progress, identifying areas for improvement, and ensuring successful implementation.

Depending on the change methodology you follow, you may emphasise information capture at different points. For example, with ADKAR, you might have a metric that helps you assess the level of awareness in your target group before moving on to more detailed and specific metrics.

Why Use Metrics in Change Management?

Capturing change management metrics serves several essential purposes. Metrics allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your change initiatives. They provide insights into whether the desired outcomes are being achieved. This in turn informs decision-making by highlighting areas that need attention. Metrics not only help leaders allocate resources wisely and adjust strategies as needed, but they also help leaders justify the resources allocated to change activities.

Taking a step back, metrics facilitate communication with stakeholders. Clear, data-backed metrics enhance transparency and build trust. Metrics that tell the story of a less desirable 'before-state' and a more desirable 'future-state' help to cement the case for change.

By tracking metrics, you can continuously improve your change management processes; as well as the operational processes being targeted by your change assignment.

How to Choose Appropriate Change Management Metrics

To select the metrics you'll use, you want them to be relevant, relatively easy to gather, consistently available over time, and able to be influenced by the activities you're conducting.

To select appropriate change management metrics, some of these steps may help.

Understand the Type of Change and define Program Goals: Different changes—such as process improvements, technology implementations, or organisational restructuring—require different metrics, and will have different metrics available. Consider the context and nature of the change to determine which KPIs align best, and clearly articulate the goals of your change initiative to guide your choice of metrics.

Benchmark Standards: Look at industry benchmarks, previous approaches in your organisation or historical data to understand what success has looked like in similar change efforts.

Assess Constraints and Enablers: Think about the factors that will either enable or hinder the change. Having metrics in place that address these constraints and enablers will give you a balanced view of how well or how poorly the change is progressing.

Purpose of Measurement and Assessment Level: Define the purpose of each metric. What do you hope to get out of it specifically - is it to track adoption, employee satisfaction, or process efficiency? Which stage of your change management process is associated with that particular driver? In other words, how will you know what action to take as a result of seeing the metric shift?

Decide whether you’ll measure at the individual, team, or organisational level and

tailor metrics accordingly. Some aggregated metrics simply don't exist and might only be possible by measuring at an individual level and rolling up.

Stakeholder Perspective: Consider the viewpoint of different stakeholders such as employees, leaders or customers. If you're providing metrics for their education or consumption, they should resonate with their interests. If you're tracking metrics to understand the influence of your change activities on behaviour, you need to set the metric to measure changes in the correct group of people.

Time Frame: Determine the frequency of measurement - weekly, monthly, quarterly and so on. Note that some metrics are more meaningful over longer periods; and some change activities will only be influential for very brief periods.

For example, running a training course may last for a two-week window, allowing you to measure attendance and possibly participation. However, can you also measure the retention of learning and effective application on the job following the course?

Change Management Metrics to Consider

Change Rejection Rate: If you're fortunate enough to have data on the number of proposed changes that get rejected or not implemented, you may have in your grasp an indicator of internal resistance, communication gaps, or inadequate training. You may be able to examine the data to find common causes or isolated pockets of strong dissatisfaction, giving you the opportunity to address these rejection barriers. Over time, this will greatly improve your change implementation capability.

Employee Satisfaction or Engagement: This is a common tool used in many organisations to assess employees’ perception of many things, including the pace of change, and engagement with specific initiatives. Higher engagement scores may correlate with more successful adoption. And, over time, the initiatives an organisation puts into place will generate higher engagement scores if employees judge managers are communicating well. This measure may not provide much information about your specific change program unless the program is large enough to influence engagement scores across the entire employee cohort.

Training Completion Rate: Tracks the percentage of employees who complete change-related training. This measure helps you ensure adequate upskilling is in place for a successful implementation. In the case of systems implementation, you can couple training completion with login events and engagement with specific system functions to determine whether skills handover has been successful. For other types of change, like process-based or cultural change, you may be able to couple training completion with error rates or help calls to gain a rounded picture of skills uptake.

Communication Effectiveness: Evaluates how well communication channels convey the change message. Naturally, clear communication fosters understanding and buy-in, so it's important to measure. There are intranet tools, email opening tools, and data on views, likes, and impressions that can help measure engagement with communications. The effectiveness of communications can also be measured by how well employees respond to the call to action embedded in the message. Thinking through measurability before crafting messages may impact the channel you use. For example, if you send physical mail-outs, you may not be able to measure a communique's effectiveness as easily as with electronic mail-outs.

Incidents Caused by Change: Monitors the number of incidents or issues arising from the change. To gain this data, you can tap into help desk data and automated query support systems. Understanding the incidents caused by change may help identify areas needing improvement; and may provide insights that make sense of other data points. For example, if your new system has very low login rates and the query bot is reporting a spike in demand for the FAQ 'How do I find my User Name?' you may be able to quickly address the problem and get change adoption back on track.

Peter Drucker said,

“What gets measured gets managed”

This is great news for change managers because if you're able to measure something then the probability of leaders acting on the information is a lot higher.

The right metrics will depend on your specific context and goals. Start by identifying what you're trying to achieve in each phase, and work through your goals and the specific nature of the project to come up with a strong set of metrics that will help you understand the effectiveness of the change activities you're building.

For all your change management questions and change projects, we're here to help. Book a free introduction to find out more.

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