Your organisational change initiative is underway. The project appears to be on schedule, training has been completed, communications have been sent and workshops are well attended. And most importantly, adoption figures look positive.
So, everything is going to plan. However, how confident are you that your change programme is actually working?
Activity isn’t the same as success
When you’re tracking whether your project is progressing and whether milestones have been hit, you’re measuring activity. You’re reporting on metrics like:
- Percentage of employees who completed training.
- Attendance at workshops and briefings.
- Communication open rates.
- Project milestones achieved.
- System implementation dates.
- Adoption of new processes.
These metrics are important. After all, they tell you whether your change programme is being delivered as planned and that’s key when you’re reporting back to the board.
But they don’t tell you whether the change is succeeding.
Employees can complete every training module without feeling confident enough to apply what they’ve learned. They can attend workshops while remaining unconvinced that the change is worthwhile. They can follow a new process because it’s mandatory while quietly believing the previous approach worked better.
In other words, activity tells you what people have done. But it doesn’t tell you what they’re thinking, feeling or experiencing.
So, what should leaders be measuring?
Successful organisational change isn’t defined by whether a project goes live. It’s defined by whether people accept, adopt and sustain the change.
That means you need visibility into the human side of transformation. Questions such as the following determine whether change is building momentum or starting to stall:
- Do employees understand why the change is happening?
- Do they support it?
- Do they feel confident they can implement it?
- Is their confidence increasing or declining?
- Is the reality of the change better or worse than they expected?
Are feedback surveys the answer?
Perhaps you’re already sending out engagement surveys or post-project reviews to answer those questions. But the issue is by the time the results arrive, the chance to influence the outcome might already have passed.
If your employees have spent weeks and months struggling with the new way of working, delayed feedback offers little opportunity to make meaningful adjustments. You need to know how change is landing while the programme is still underway, not after it’s finished.
Introducing Measuring the Prediction Gap
One of the most powerful ways to understand whether organisational change is succeeding is to compare what employees expected with what they are experiencing.
The gap between expectation and experience is known as a prediction error. Measuring these prediction errors gives organisations a completely new perspective on change. This gap tells them about the success of their change programme.
Rather than simply asking whether employees completed their training or attended a workshop, leaders can understand whether people feel the change is turning out better or worse than they anticipated.
Positive prediction errors suggest the programme is exceeding expectations and building confidence. The change programme is being implemented successfully.
Minimal prediction errors indicate the programme is progressing broadly as expected. Here, it’s worth keeping track to make sure that nothing changes, but it’s suggestive of a successful change programme.
And negative prediction errors provide an early warning that employees are experiencing more challenges than anticipated, giving leaders the chance to intervene before momentum is lost. A negative gap needs to be closed by taking immediate action.
Prediction gaps: A better way to measure change success
Operational metrics will always remain important. They tell you whether your programme is being delivered. But understanding how employees are experiencing change tells you whether your programme is working.
After all, successful change isn’t measured by how many people completed the transformation journey. It’s measured by how many people believed in it, adopted it and made it a core part of the way they work.
And that’s the metric many organisations are still missing.
To find out more about Measuring the Prediction Gap within Clever Nelly, download the eBook below.