First and foremost, ensuring that the team has a shared vision and goal is essential. This will help the change team stay focused and motivated throughout the process. Secondly, you must provide the team with adequate resources to effectively do their job. Lastly, you should establish clear communication lines, so everyone is on the same page.
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In 2012, a Property and Casualty company had a mission to refurbish and modernize over a million square feet of headquarters office space. The program and construction teams were orchestrating a change to reduce individual workstation and office sizes, lower workstation heights, and add open collaboration spaces. In addition, we needed to move the 14,000 employees out and around the three campuses. Their people had many concerns, including:
- “I’ve worked here for 20 years, rising through the ranks. I’m an Assistant Vice President, and I have an office with dignified wood furniture, the company supplied art, a credenza with my awards.”
- “I’m a program director, tier 6. My space reflects my seniority.”
- “I’ve been in this space for seven years. I have all my family’s pictures, knickknacks, and files in the bins on my cube walls.”
- “I can’t work in an open cube environment it’s too noisy. I prefer to have the privacy of high cube walls.”
I stressed to the company leadership that a robust change management plan was required to manage the people side of the change deliberately. I pulled a team of change managers, a sponsor coalition, communications/content managers, a change agent network, and change administrators. We needed to energize and engage representatives from every department in the company. I customized a Prosci ADKAR approach for this long-term, multiple-delivery initiative. We developed and executed a complex program of change gatherings and tactics to move the hearts and minds of people in the enterprise.
And for the core team, I also marshaled the core change team to work together to accomplish shared objectives and key results tied to the strategic objectives of the initiative.
“A shared objective and quantifiable metrics can help a team coordinate their activities, align with stakeholders, and act with more than just their immediate goals in mind.” Harvard Business Review.
Here are the examples of the change management team OKRs we employed for the multi-year program:
1. Minimize disruption of the business use of space during the refurbishment project.
- Each department will not move its population more than two times in any six-month period.
- Each department will not experience >5 continuous business days of space disruption
2. Enable each department to participate actively in directing the rebranding of their office space
- Each department can select more than three new branding elements for its final space.
3. Enable a high level of employee readiness to work within the new office space
- The average post-move survey >95% readiness for the new workplace
- Adjacent departments will have at least two opportunities to work together to coordinate moves and pre- and post-move gatherings and celebrations
Your company will have meaningful and motivating goals and objectives in every reporting period. Brainstorming with the change management team, sponsors, and participants to define success and measures is worthwhile. Agreeing on OKRs will enable high-performance, appropriate, consistent application of change management principles. Energizing and focusing on the team, providing regular checkpoints, adjusting KRs as needed, and celebrating successes as results are achieved will help the company achieve its business goals.
“Clear objectives are a powerful tool for change management teams. They provide focus, help to align stakeholders, and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal.” - Prosci Change Management Blog.
What are some other benefits of having clear objectives for your change management team? Let us know in the comments! And if you need help to define or achieve goals for your change management initiatives, contact me today. I can consult or help.
