Change Analytics and Emerging Themes from ACMP Global Connect

Change analytics is an evolving space and having the chance to talk about the subject at ACMP Global Connect led to great discussions with change practitioners around the globe. One key theme during many of our conversations focused on change fatigue, the resistance or passive resignation to organizational changes on the part of an employee. Change fatigue continues to be one of the more challenging concepts to measure, as everyone has a different threshold for where they reach the point of being fatigued. However, much like an athlete, there are ways to train for change, including increasing organizational and personal change resilience. Change resilience is easier to measure, as we can use an individual's historical performance and reactions to change to understand where an organization needs to continue to build change muscles.  

In addition to change fatigue and resilience, there were other key themes from questions we received at the conference, including:

Without using surveys, how can you collect sentiment and reaction data?

While surveys are a great tool for understanding how individuals within an organization are feeling towards change, surveys may not always be an option for you and your project. If you are unable to conduct a survey, look for ways that you can capture quantitative data through existing engagement channels. For example, conducting live polls in meetings with groups such as your change network or at the end of a training class. Additionally, you can enhance engagement with focus groups by asking a standard set of questions. Provide questions to leaders to ask in team meetings in advance to guide productive input. If your organization has good adoption of collaboration tools such as Yammer, Teams, or your company intranet, see if you can place a brief poll to capture the feedback you need on a specific topic.

What recommendations do you have when creating survey questions?

While you’ll likely take a unique approach to each project, there are some key guiding principles to use when drafting survey approaches. First, consider the key themes that you want to ask about in your survey. In the classic example using ADKAR, measuring Awareness of, Desire for, Knowledge about, Ability to, and Reinforcement of (the) change, you can group questions and analyze key areas you need to focus actions on. From there, build the specific questions to measure key drivers within these themes. This will allow you to drill down and understand the specific actions to take to improve.

Another key consideration is how you structure your questions and the survey. Do not ask questions where you are leading the respondent to answer in a more positive or negative way. This can be both within the question itself and the answers provided. For Likert scale answers, ensure you are staying balanced on both sides of your answers, providing an equal amount of positive and negative options. Also, make sure to keep questions consistent over time, as you complete multiple pulse surveys. Doing so will allow you to track trends over time. If you change a question from one survey to another, you cannot make a fair comparison to previous results. Finally, while many organizations like to keep pulse surveys completely anonymous, consider using a confidential approach. With this, you can capture a unique identifier about the respondent so you can do further trend analysis within departments, business units, and levels. This is never used to identify the individuals themselves but to pull in key demographic data.

What tools do you recommend when analyzing change management data?

Use the tools, knowledge, and resources you have available to you. While we tend to use Tableau due to the flexibility and robustness of the tool, we know that each organization and individual is different. It is more important to get started than what tool you are using, even if it is as basic as simple charts in Excel. As your abilities, use cases, and needs grow, that is where you can begin to explore other tools. If your organization has a data and analytics team, explore their ability to help you.

We were excited to present at the premier educational event for change management professionals and connect with industry peers. Embracing the changing world and developing skills to get past the roadblocks at a time when change is the only constant is critical. Thank you to attendees and those who asked additional questions in pursuit of learning new best practices and innovations to manage change.

If you are interested in growing your change analytics skill set or need additional support managing change, we are always happy to have more conversation on how we can help. You can learn more about Avaap’s change analytics offerings and connect with us here.