Three Levers to Make Change Stick

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been on a multi-year project, and six months after go live, you find out that somebody is still using the old system or an Excel spreadsheet on their desktop, instead of completing their work in the new system. *Every Organizational Change Management Practitioner raises their hand.* Organizations spend countless dollars implementing new changes to be more effective and efficient but how can they make the change stick? Lesa Lozano, a seasoned Organizational Change Management professional, shares three tried-and-true levers to help institutionalize new ways of working: “This is how we do things now!” 

Even with top-notch Change Management, change is hard, and ‘resistors of change’ often prefer doing things the old way. There are three proven levers that can help make a change stick: structure, policies, and performance. 

Structure: revisit the organizational structure 

Does the current organizational structure align with the future state or does it need to be updated? When a significant scope of work is reduced, increased, eliminated, or introduced, organizations may need to rearrange staff, decrease staff, or hire from outside the company. Updating the organizational structure to align with and support the new ways of working is often not only necessary to indoctrinate a change, but also a visible, tangible way to publicize the change and help make the change “real.” 

Policies: gotta find them all! 

Will the project require company policy changes? If so, will the policy changes impact customers? Most organizations have a plethora of policies. Policy documentation proliferates throughout the organization: websites (internal and customer-facing), SharePoint sites, Teams channels, new customer welcome collateral, training materials, and new hire orientation materials—and sometimes in the form of old paper manuals in three-ring binders! When change projects affect policies, it can be a major undertaking to identify where policies are published and update them. However, updating policies is an imperative task if you want the change to stick. Wherever employees, customers, and external stakeholders can see and learn about your organization’s policies, old policy content must be replaced with the new policy content. Getting all copies updated—paper and electronic—ensures that employees and customers are referencing the latest information and fosters new ways of doing things. 

Performance: redefine “good” and “poor” performance 

Will the new ways of working have a positive or negative impact on an individual’s performance? While the goal of a new system is to make the organization more efficient, there are always a few processes that become inefficient but more often, a new system results in processes and procedures taking less time. Whether processes become more or less efficient, it’s crucial that the performance metrics are updated accordingly.   

As an example of creating efficiencies, a previous client’s sales team benefited from a major improvement. Before the system implementation, the salespeople needed two months to put together their sales plan; they had to compile data from 50 (yes, you read right—FIFTY!) legacy systems. After the implementation of the new software, the sales planning process was reduced to just two or three days which gave the sales team almost two months back to do what they do best: sell. It also meant that the salespeople would have an easier time meeting their sales quotas which meant the corresponding performance metrics had to be revised to reflect the additional time the salespeople had to sell versus complete administrative work. 

It’s especially important to revise performance metrics and compensation plans if the change affects performance standards negatively. For example, customer service reps are often evaluated on call handle time. At a past client, reps were recognized and received bonuses when their average call handle time was 11 minutes or less. With the new system, the call handle time was expected to increase to 16 minutes because reps would be expected to collect more data and suggest new options to callers. If performance metrics weren’t revised to reflect the new operational realities, reps would be unlikely to qualify for the bonus. As a result, reps would be more likely to resist change and some may even quit. To ensure that a change will stick, performance metrics must be updated before the changes take place so that employees are set up for success, rather than avoiding the new system.   

Organizational Change Management Consultants help people move people through the change curve from ‘the change is coming!’ to ‘the change is here!’ to ‘this is the NEW way we do it!’ and finally, ‘this is just how we do things now.’ Being mindful of the three levers to pull—structure, policies, and performance—can help make the change stick!   

Contact ChangeStaffing to learn how to successfully institutionalize new ways of working!  

A very special thank you to Lesa Lozano, a seasoned Organizational Change Management Professional, for her thought leadership and for collaborating with us on this blog.  

Written by Kylette Harrison