Introducing hybrid-work model
Business across many industries have been adapting their operational strategies to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic for nearly two years at the time of writing. Employees have had to endure constant change in both their professional and personal lives, which has saturated their capacity to adopt further change in their company.
Leading change in hybrid-work models requires change management leaders to use virtual tools and a fresh approach to ensure process and technology updates take root. While the foundational principles of the discipline remain the same, change leaders should leverage data metrics to monitor transformation adoption and employee engagement.
This PEX Network report features insights and real-life examples from experts at Gap Inc., Asahi Europe & International and Nintex. It explores the need for strong change management programs in organizations and provides advice on delivering transformation in a change-saturated environment.
“Bringing transformative change on top of [the change-saturated] context has brought the need to focus and prioritize change efforts to make the best use of change capacity we get from our employees.”
Chris Hetrick, Director of the digital transformation office’s change management center of excellence at Gap Inc
Keeping employees engaged in a change-saturated environment
In PEX Network’s 2022 trends report employee engagement and retention were seen as top challenges for organizations in 2022, as they consolidate their ways of working, adapt processes and implement technology. Just under 45 percent of businesses surveyed in PEX Report 2022 are undergoing an enterprise-wide transformation program which requires a strong change management strategy to drive the engagement needed for implementation success.
Change management can help keep employees motivated in a transformation program by minimizing the disruption of initiatives in a change-saturated environment. Constant adaptation has been the norm since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has produced a level of change exhaustion in work cultures and a lack of change capacity for employees.
According to Chris Hetrick, director of the digital transformation office’s change management center of excellence at Gap Inc., it is critical for leaders to look at the collective change across the organization and gauge just how much employees are coping with day-to-day. They should also take into account the personal impacts of the pandemic, the initial sudden shift to remote work and now a potential return to office working.
“Bringing transformative change on top of that context has brought the need to focus and prioritize change efforts to make the best use of change capacity we get from our employees,” he says. “In this environment you have a lot less room for error to avoid overwhelming people, which can stop them from accepting or readily adopting change when it is more than they are able to [handle].”
At PEX Live: Change management and culture change 2021, Soraya Abdelmageed, change management lead at Asahi Europe & International, agrees that change management is now far more challenging than before the pandemic. She said: “There is a level of fatigue and a loss of connection with people – working remotely for so long has made a huge impact on that and people want to absorb less information.”
To overcome this, she recommended change management leaders acknowledge this fatigue and prioritize sharing information with employees at the right time. Hetrick notes that change initiatives need to be broken down into incremental, manageable doses over a long period of time. The goal of this approach is to make the change “almost not notable for the employees” instead of a “one-time big shock transformation”.
Under 45 percent of organizations surveyed by PEX Network are undergoing an enterprise-wide transformation program.
On-the-job training, microlearning and small, digestible communications around modifications can be embedded in employees’ day-to-day operations to keep them engaged. Hetrick says: “[This will] get them more involved in the overall transformation and progress the change regularly.”
At Gap Inc., Hetrick’s approach to moving the retailer’s culture into a digital-forward one is to use incremental shifts and small behavioral ‘nudges’. The company is continuing to evolve its global, enterprise-wide transformation program, which includes digital initiatives to advance marketing personalization, digital product creation and inventory management capabilities.
The next section of this report offers recommendations on how best to manage change in hybrid-work models.
Also read: How to use data analytics to achieve manufacturing excellence
Managing change in hybrid-work models
The exhaustion triggered by the constant upheaval imposed on employees should not completely freeze organizations’ productivity or their ability to deliver, according to Thomas Kohlenbach, principal consultant at process management and intelligent automation software provider Nintex, the “best services and products to customers on the market” at all times.
To execute this, Kohlenbach notes that change management needs to be established as an official function “which needs to scope clearly what needs to be achieved and in what timeframe”.
“Change management needs to take targeted key processes and [consider the] business areas affected to make baby steps on the change momentum. We cannot switch off old lines to switch on new ones and expect it to be smooth,” Kohlenbach says.
He recommends creating a program that includes a transition period for evaluating tools, and conducts IT integration and data migration. Subject-matter experts should be included at this stage so they can help shape the process optimization.
Asahi Europe & International is embarking on a process transformation project to combine seven enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to a single and centralized solution for its European business. Teams consisting of business process owners, business process leads, and subject-matter experts have been assembled to streamline the journey.
Understanding who these experts were, their experience, what the project needed from them and helping them understand the mission at hand was key to the program’s success, according to the firm’s change management lead Abdelmageed.
In hybrid-work models, the foundational principles of change management that would traditionally take place in-person, such as C-suite communications convincing staff of a transformation’s benefits, can be largely conducted via email and virtual town halls.
Change communications need to focus on, according to Gap Inc.’s Hetrick, how individuals must navigate the evolution, the specific impacts to their jobs and what training looks like for them. The manager and supervisor levels need to be leveraged to lead the change in their teams via virtual or in-person meetings, in small groups or one-to-one meetings that are, according to Hetrick, “much more impactful on the personal level”.
“We need to empower managers and give them the [required] tools and resources to communicate the change impacts and coach their teams through it,” Hetrick explains. “Democratizing the change and building a change-capable organization is really essential in this new hybrid-work model.
“There is a level of fatigue and a loss of connection with people – working remotely for so long has made a huge impact on that and people want to absorb less information.”
Soraya Abdelmageed, Change management lead at Asahi Europe & International
Abdelmageed agrees that line managers play a vital role in change management success: “The best and most practical way to embed change is by leveraging the mid-manager section that we tend to forget about because we are focused on end users and leadership.”
Change influencers need to be equipped with tools to drive employee engagement in the project. Kohlenbach notes that the likes of Microsoft white boards and Zoom breakout rooms “need to be in the toolbox of change managers, who also need to think about putting a little gamification, points of engagement and incentives in meetings”.
The next section will look at how to monitor the adoption of change initiatives using traditional systems and data tools.
Also read: Optimization of remote work in SMBs'
How to monitor the adoption of change initiatives
Measuring how change is adopted during a transformation project is defined in the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the project and the business objectives, with Gap Inc.’s Hetrick explaining that “organizations need to look at the anticipated business results of a tool being adopted”.
At Asahi Europe & International, the blueprint, implementation plan and roadmap are each tied to adoption KPIs that specify the number of users of a certain process and the desired accuracy levels.
Tools like dashboards and business reports can be really effective in monitoring transformation adoption. Hetrick notes: “Change analytics using more digital capabilities is a really interesting growth area within change management because readiness and adoption have traditionally been assessed through surveys.”
According to PEX Report 2022, data analytics and business intelligence is the top solution invested in until mid-2022. While the discipline of change management will remain unchanged, Nintex’s Kohlenbach believes that the skill set within the function needs to be updated with a datacentric mind-set.
Traditional models like Prosci ADKAR® where organizations can work toward building awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement, can be tied to measure metrics to inform surveys. Focus groups and one-to-one interviews can provide qualitative data to support the survey insights.
“You can pull the data into some interesting dashboards using some data visualization capabilities to filter the feedback and tie it to specific groups, functions and regions,” explains Hetrick. “It allows companies to see what areas of change need to be affected to be successful to help focus change efforts and resources.”
At Asahi, Abdelmageed’s team plans to collect stakeholder feedback via formal and informal channels, such as interviews, surveys and polls. Abdelmageed explains: “We are really trying to get a sense of how clear people are on why we are doing this project.”
Observing the engagement of employees is trickier. The fundamentals afforded through available data tools, however, still show promise.
At Asahi Europe & International, Abdelmageed’s team measures employee engagement by reviewing the number of views acquired by the transformation program’s profile webpages. The average time spent on the pages and the volume of sign-ups for events connected to the program are also monitored.
To keep employees engaged in the transformation, organizations need to work on both the macro and micro levels. On the macro side, companies need to have leaders which transition into approaching mentoring and communicating around the transformation clearly while avoiding long and detailed emails, as explains Kohlenbach.
“If you are being transparent and honest to yourself and the employees, communicate progress and celebrate successes, people are going to be interested in their work and want to understand what is going on,” he says. “There needs to be underlying culture of empowerment with an open-door policy where employees can ask questions to leadership.”
On the micro level, change management leaders need to understand the personal impact of change on employees with caring empathy to keep them motivated. Kohlenbach says: “The transformation’s program of work needs to be broken down into the impact of change on a single employee and how managers can support them day-to-day. At the end of the day, [as employees] we [all] want to be taken cared after and be heard, we do not want to be told what to do.”
Also read: How digital intelligence enhances process visibility
Another element to take into account is the age of the new workforce, which requires bespoke modes of communication. Kohlenbach explains: “No one under 30 wants to read 30-page documents, they want snapshots, quick information that needs to be mobile and accessible anytime, anywhere.”
The implementation of technologies reshapes how businesses operate. They will especially play a big role in the realm of communications which Kohlenbach deems the most important element of change management.
“How we communicate change better is important and we will see the establishment of change management as the new normal in companies – this will develop a continuous improvement mind-set,” he says.
Hetrick sees the personalization of the change experience to individual employees as key in the future. He explains: “If you think of the end-users of the change as customers, they will expect a personalized experience – organizations can leverage tools and digital technology to deliver this to help people navigate the change.”
With companies leveraging technologies and implementing a change-forward culture, they can ensure change is implemented as effectively as possible and monitored to ensure success every step of the way.
“Change management needs to take targeted key processes and [consider the] business areas affected to make baby steps on the change momentum. We cannot switch off old lines to switch on new ones and expect it to be smooth.”
Thomas Kohlenbach, Principal consultant at Nintex
Top takeaways from this report
- Breaking change initiatives into smaller, more manageable doses will help employees adopt change in a change-saturated context.
- Mid-managers need to be leveraged to embed change within an organization.
- While the traditional monitoring methods such as surveys will not disappear, change management leaders should combine these with insight from data tools.
“Democratizing the change and building a change-capable organization is really essential in this new hybrid work model.”
Chris Hetrick, Director of the change management center of excellence at Gap Inc
How do you conduct change management initiatives in your company? Let us know in the comments below.