Reinforcement Mechanisms: Making the New Way the Easy Way
The reinforcement plan has three items: a recognition scheme for early adopters, a monthly newsletter of success stories, and posters in the break room. Meanwhile the new process takes eleven clicks where the old one took four, the report people actually need is not built yet, and the legacy screen still works. Reinforcement, in that […]
Deskless and Frontline Workers: Readiness Without Email
Almost every readiness practice assumes a particular person: someone with a work email address, a laptop, a calendar with gaps in it, and the discretion to spend twenty minutes on a survey. A warehouse operative, a nurse, a driver, a retail assistant and a field engineer have none of those things. When a programme reports […]
Works Councils and Change Programmes: Consultation Without Delay
The German go-live slipped by four months. Not for a technical reason — the build was finished — but because the works agreement covering the new system had not been concluded, and without it the system could not be switched on. The programme plan had a line for it. It said “works council briefing”, it […]
Active Sponsorship: What Sponsors Must Do, Not Just Say
The sponsor has done everything asked of them. They opened the kick-off, recorded a video, mentioned the programme in the quarterly town hall, and attend the steering committee most months. The programme still cannot get two people released from operations, two functions have been disagreeing about master data ownership since May, and nobody believes the […]
Onboarding New Joiners After Go-Live: The Gap Nobody Owns
The programme trained 1,400 people and closed. Fourteen months later, ordinary turnover means several hundred of the people doing those jobs were not trained by anybody, because the training function was disbanded, the environment was decommissioned and the super users have moved on. New joiners learn the system the only way available: by sitting next […]
Super Users: How to Select, Train and Keep Them
Super users are usually selected the same way. An email goes to managers asking for nominations, and the names that come back are the people who could most easily be spared. That single sentence explains most of what goes wrong afterwards. The role that determines whether a hundred people can work is being staffed by […]
Who Should Deliver the Message? Choosing Messengers by Trust, Not Rank
The CEO recorded a three-minute video about the transformation. It is well made, sincere, and has been watched by 18 per cent of the workforce, most of whom stopped before the end. In the same week, a shift supervisor told her team in about forty seconds that the new scanning process is slower for a […]
Communication Is Not Engagement: What the Difference Costs You
The plan has an engagement workstream. Inside it are a communications calendar, a newsletter, a set of roadshows and an intranet page. Every one of those is communication. None of them is engagement, and the substitution is so routine that most programmes never notice they have made it. The distinction, stated plainly Communication transmits a […]
Why Change Communication Fails When It’s Only Broadcast
The communications plan is on track. Eleven emails sent, two town halls held, an intranet hub live, a monthly newsletter, and a video from the sponsor with 3,400 views. The readiness survey comes back and 44 per cent of people say they do not know what is changing for them. Both statements are accurate, and […]
Anonymity, Trust and Response Rates in Readiness Surveys
The readiness survey promises anonymity. It also asks for function, location, role level and team, because the programme needs to know where the risk sits. In a team of six, those four fields identify everyone. The respondents work this out considerably faster than the programme does, and they answer accordingly. Anonymous and confidential are not […]