Adoption and Optimisation

Successfully implementing a change initiative is about aligning the change to achieve strategic goals.  Change initiatives should not dramatically pressure a business, nor should they hinder its performance or its people. Instead, it’s about implementing change that would make the company more successful for tomorrow or in the future.

One of the challenges of customer-facing change is understanding and adopting the new tools, processes and systems.  Change dominated by technology achieves at best a 10% level of adoption.  However, programmes that achieve the right balance of investment across people, processes and technology frequently achieve near 100% adoption.

The opportunity of this article is to drive “adoption optimisation”.  This is to ensure that not only do the employees understand and are competent with the new stuff but that they are committed.  The new systems and processes with then become an integrated part of the new service model, ensuring that the benefits are realised and are sustainable.

No business would want to waste time or resources implementing something that people don’t end up using.  Below are some ideas that could improve the adoption rate for the new change.

Prerequisites;

The following should be used in conjunction with or before the adoption and optimisation stage:

• Complete the change readiness assessment
• Complete the force field analysis template
• Form business change governance team
• Complete the Communication Plan Document
• Manage the change

Set targets:

The change in itself comes from seeing a better way to go about things, ultimately making it easier for the people within a given business – to achieve the vision and goals of the initiative, a process should be followed. Here are some steps that could be taken to ensure that a resourced idea doesn’t go to waste as no one adopts the change:

1. Businesses can use the compose function of the X4MIS Change Management Methodology to define the scope of change. The Compose function provides the tools and processes to analyse and determine all contact points impacting a successful change initiative.
2. Creating a roadmap to identify every step, target, measurement and analysis helps understand the goals. It’s also essential to understand and identify the resources needed, the scope or objective and the initiative's cost.
3. Good communication is needed to help people understand the new change and how that would improve or benefit their role on a day-to-day basis. Businesses can ensure that everyone knows and understands their role, processes, skills and training by completing the communication plan. When introducing change to people, businesses should use ways to communicate the change to different people, as everyone learns differently. Whether reading, listening or visual, it becomes more inclusive for all.
4. Training is an integral part of the adoption process. Although it’s important to give time for training, a business may consider a phased-in approach to implementing change, providing time for people to embed the new way of doing things.
5. The training doesn’t stop here. Businesses should continuously adapt, review and train again to ensure that everyone is adapting appropriately to the new change to measure and achieve success. At the ‘train again’ step, businesses also quickly identify any resistance or barriers, which means they would be able to remove the barrier or even change their approach.
6. In the solidifying step, the newly added change must be adopted by your people seamlessly. The initiative should change people’s behaviours without much effort. When this is achieved, the initiative becomes sustainable and meets its goals. Often behaviours of the new change learnt by individuals must be continuously solidified and reinforced.

Change Curve

Often people within an organisation react in a way that resists the initiative. The change curve is a visual reference point that helps identify the initial resistors of the change. Four stages make up the change curve which are:

1^st Stage: Resistance

In the first stage, many people act in a way that resists the change entirely. Often the hesitation comes from people not liking or understanding the new method. This stage is when the change is introduced.

2^nd Stage: Annoyance

The second stage is where people see how this change affects them personally. Then, people act in a way that actively resists the change and often voice concerns. Usually, this means people state and identify the issues within their position.

If people remain in the second stage of the change curve, the change will be unsuccessful. Often it creates a lot of pressure on people impacted by the change.

At this stage, if there is a lot of annoyance and people voicing their concerns, businesses identify things they weren’t aware of prior to implementation.

3^rd Stage: Acceptance

The third stage is where people accept the change. People put the previous way of doing things behind them and adapt to the change.

4^th Stage: Engagement

At stage, four people see the benefits of the change. Not only do the people understand the benefits, but the business realises the rewards of the change. 

Utilising the change

In change management, it is always essential that the results of a change initiative are realised, implemented and aligned to what the initiative was intended for. Change at the surface level may seem simple to implement change. But the issue is that adoption on the human side is difficult to achieve without understanding the consequences and benefits of the change. Some factors of the ‘human factor’ that needs to be considered include:

1. Duration and effect of the adoption (engagement): How quickly can the business use the new change process or tool. Are the employees required to use the new tool immediately, or would there be a phase-in period?
2. Utilise the change (benefits): How many people use the new change process or tools. What’s the engagement with the new change? Are people using the new way to go about the process, or are they still using the old method?
3. Optimisation: Is the new method or change implemented increasing efficiency in the business? Do people see the benefit? Is the process overall better once the people adopt the new change?
4. Feedback: getting feedback from your people is crucial. Businesses should listen to their people, adapt and change the adoption steps. Ensuring the initiative meets its goals and targets.

To ensure that the adoption stage of a specific change initiative is successful solid governance is needed to guide the change in the transformation stages. The governance team or the change team should have realised the potential barriers to the adoption of the change being implemented. The force field analysis is an excellent tool to identify some likely drivers and restraining forces.

Communication in a pragmatic form is needed to drive the change to ensure that adoption is successful. The communication plan is used to ensure that people within the business understand the change initiative, the vision behind it, and the objectives.

Adoption:

More importantly, businesses can achieve adoption with some vital steps:

1. First, before the change initiative, to maximise its effectiveness, businesses should prepare their people by assisting them with developing any missing skills and knowledge gaps.
2. When the initiative is introduced to the business people, support is needed to ensure that their people can effectively adapt. In addition, the knowledge that is provided before the change is strengthened.
3. Once the initiative has been implemented in the service model, businesses must continuously encourage adoption and support. To ensure adoption and to promote engagement, techniques such as gamification can be used:

Gamification in a simple form is where businesses use conventional game elements to promote and encourage their people with engagement and adoption. It’s often referred to as a method where people are drawn in with the rewards and fun aspects. Some customary elements of gamification include:

• Leader boards
• Points via a piece of software
• Badges
• Stuff (cool items)
• Status

Importantly, gamification is only one method that could be used (while the strategy doesn’t always fit with every business, it still is a valuable tool). It’s important that the gamification strategy must align with business goals and values. In the initial stages of setting up your ‘gamification strategy’, here are some steps that could be followed:

1. Is there a need for a gamification strategy?

• It’s important to understand that there must be a need to use the gamification approach. Potentially there could be resistors not adopting the change initiative, KPIs are overall reducing, and overall adoption rates are meeting the proposed metrics needed.

  2. Refine business goals

• What is the specific goal of the gamification strategy, is it to be used alongside additional training or support, or is it a part of the vision of the strategic programme? It always should align with the goals and the benefits of the initiative.

  3. Resources

• The gamification strategy should always be included in the initiative's budget. It’s essential prior to going ahead with the change initiative, businesses should ensure that there is enough money.

  4. Support

• Its recommended that strong leaders are used to action engagement and communicate with people. The specific leader should be someone who people recognise and can increase interest in the initiative. While gamification is a method that isn’t always widely used (although it is growing in popularity), people may be hesitant to start. So, the specific leader should be the point of call for anyone with questions or concerns.

Most importantly:

Founder of X4MIS, Bruce Swain, said in a keynote speech at DisruptHR in Wellington:

“I wrote a blog last year about 5 things your change consultant won’t tell you. Number 5 on that list is ‘it’s all about the people helping people to do things the new way, it’s just about helping people change behaviour. There is a very simple explanation for this I got from a book by Aubrey Daniels. It says:  “People do what they do because of what happens to them when they do it”.

If you make it difficult for them to do it the new way, they won’t do it. It’s just about making it easy, inclusive, take away the barriers and people will change and want to do it the new way.”   It’s about helping people with the change. It’s not about making people figure it out as they go. The questions that need to be answered are: Does it meet the goals of what the initiative was meant to achieve? If not, then the change is not successful. Adoption is about whether we have it right. Once the initiatives benefits become realised then comes the optimisation stage.