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Clear Review has launched its latest course on the Performance Management Academy - Changing Performance Culture.
This course is all about change management and how it's critical for a culture of high performance. But before we tell you about the course, let’s talk about why change management is vital to embedding continuous performance management and what the consequences are if change projects fail.
Why is change management vital in performance management?
Change management is all about the people side of change. Whatever the change project, none of it will reach its full potential if you don’t bring people along. Often organizations talk about organizational change, and often organizations need to change in line with newprojects. But organizations are made up of people and real change lies in the hand of the people who need to engage in the new process or system. People are complex and change only happens one person at a time.
An IBM survey of over 1200 change practitioners found that only 41% of projects met their objectives. Many change projects fail or don’t fully succeed. Change projects by their nature are often complex and multidimensional and therefore the success measures and metrics need to reflect that. E.g. If you are implementing an HR system, how do you measure success? Is it just by handing out new logons? Is it by seeing how many people have logged in? Although these are both good measures, what if everyone has received their logins but there is no understanding of how this benefits people and what the purpose of it is. The success measure may become a grey area here.
What happens if change management initiatives fail?
If change isn’t considered, there may be two types of failure—low level and high level. Low level failure might be something like a luke-warm reception to the outcomes of the project. Once this project has been completed, and new projects start, old habits may come back, and the new system that you have implemented might not be used. The consequence is that the data you extract from the system then isn’t rich or accurate because your people aren’t inputting. Confidence in the new way of working becomes sapped and people may become weary about big promises about life changing cultural change next time. People are less likely to be advocates of whatever your project is and will be less likely to volunteer for your project next time.
Sometimes there are more high-profile failures in a more dramatic and public way. E.g. where a project is stopped completely, the budget is removed, maybe the resources are taken away and put towards a different priority. No one wants to end up with that kind of scenario.
According to Prosci, addressing the people side of change early in a project helps to avoid or eliminate the "RE"s that appear when individuals do not adopt a new process, system or behaviour. The REs refer to things like restarting, re-valuating, revisiting etc which is all energy sapping. The reason you started out on the journey is because you wanted it to succeed in the first place.
Practical insight is important to support you in the change journey so that you don’t have any of these outcomes and are fully successful in managing change.
A free practical course on Changing Performance Culture
Our Changing Performance Culture course is full of practical insight and valuable resources that you can use to start managing change effectively in your organization. This course comes after our first course on Continuous Performance Management 101 which goes through the core elements of performance management. The Changing Performance Culture is all about change management, goes into detail on how you can implement continuous performance management in your organization, and which change management processes you need to put into place.
Some of the areas covered in the course include: why change management matters, how to communicate the change, a comms plan, a training plan for implementing a new system as well as training managers with people skills. There are plenty of practical activities to get stuck into, which will help you think of all the important aspects of change you’re making, and help you manage change effectively in your organization. You’ll also have the opportunity to share your experiences within the various communities on the Performance Management Academy, as well as learn from other HR professionals on what has worked well for them.
The course is completely free. All you have to do is sign up by clicking the link below, and you’ll get access to all our courses, plus the communities.
