20 change management KPIs to track your organizational change performance

The success of these change initiatives depends largely on how they are measured. By setting the right change management KPIs (key performance indicators), and reviewing performance against them on a regular basis, businesses can gauge the effectiveness of their change projects in-flight. They can make any adjustments necessary to ensure these initiatives stay on track to meet their ultimate objectives.

The precise change management KPIs used to determine the success of an organizational change project will depend on the nature of the change. They will also reflect the specific change management strategy or framework used for project management. But whatever change management metrics are chosen, it’s vital to make sure they are clearly defined. When measuring change, the project leader needs to be transparent about how KPIs will be measured, who will measure them, and when.

Our on-demand webinar entitled Pioneering Sustainable Change & Value with Change Management, will help you set expectations with clear accountabilities for managing change.

To get you thinking about which change management KPIs would be most effective for your own organizational change projects, we’ve defined four common categories, and five possible metrics for each category.

Category 1: Assessing stakeholder and employee engagement

The performance of organizational change initiatives depends as much on the people involved as it does on the technologies or processes, if not more so. This means successful change management involves maximizing stakeholder and employee engagement. Tracking how employees perceive the change, for example by measuring levels of awareness and satisfaction, can help change leaders understand whether employees are involved and committed. This helps confirm the project is on target to reach its objectives.

During the course of a change project, it might help to think of employees as customers. Businesses will monitor the experience of their customers before, during and after using their products or services. They should do the same with employees at every stage of a change project. Regular monitoring will establish trends to indicate whether employee engagement is improving or declining over the course of the initiative.

Measuring stakeholder and employee engagement can use similar techniques to those used to assess customer satisfaction. This might include pulse surveys, NPS surveys or focus groups. Framing qualitative questions on a scale will help to quantify responses, making the resulting insights easier to understand, analyze and share.

Five change management KPIs for employee engagement:

1. Employee awareness of the change
2. Employee understanding of the change
3. Employee buy-in and participation levels
4. Employee sentiment and satisfaction
5. Employee feedback and complaints received

Category 2: Measuring training and communication effectiveness

In addition to assessing how engaged employees and stakeholders are with proposed organizational change, change managers should also determine how prepared they are. Understanding change readiness means measuring the effectiveness of both communication about the change and any training that is being given around new processes or tools. This helps determine whether employees have developed the skillsets necessary to make the change work.

Again, change practitioners can use techniques such as surveys and focus groups to understand how each employee perceives the effectiveness of communications and training. They can also look at the kinds of issues that come up frequently in the business’ internal service desk, and whether these are increasing or decreasing in volume.

But there are other change management KPIs change leaders can use to determine the performance of communications and training resources. If employees have access to a digital hub with training materials such as videos and how-to articles, for instance, change leaders can track engagement rates to find out what is and isn’t resonating. They can use tools that allow each employee to upvote or downvote resources that they find particularly helpful or unhelpful.

Tracking engagement with digital communications can also provide change leaders with valuable insight into which communications channels are working well, and which are best avoided for a particular change management initiative.

Five change management KPIs for communication and training:

1. Rates of engagement with change communications
2. Number of employees that have responded with feedback
3. Percentage of employees that have completed training
4. Level of knowledge retention or skills acquired through training
5. Trending internal help desk queries

Category 3: Tracking the rate of change adoption

Once a change project is in the implementation phase, measuring the rate at which employees and stakeholders are adopting change will help to gauge the level of acceptance. It’s an indicator of change management effectiveness and helps to identify areas where further training or support may be needed.

The main key performance indicator will be the change adoption rate itself, which is usually calculated in the following stages:

• Determine the group impacted by the change: Think about which stakeholders and employees need to change their way of working as part of the change program. In rare cases this may be the entire organization, but it is more likely to be a specific department or a team within that department. Count the number of individuals within that group.
• Define the criteria for change adoption: Decide what constitutes full adoption of the change for the individuals in question. It may simply be completing a training course, but it is more likely to be demonstrating certain behaviors within their daily work, such as using a new system. For longer-term change projects you may want to define milestones that indicate partial adoption of the change.
• Collect data to indicate adoption: Find sources of data that indicate whether each employee has fully adopted the change in question. Ideally this will be data from systems that gives a clear picture of adoption, but surveys can be used in some instances where systems data is unavailable.
• Calculate change adoption percentages: Divide the number of individuals that have fully adopted the change (as per your earlier criteria) by the total number of people in the group impacted by change. Then multiply this figure by 100 to get the change adoption rate as a percentage.

When you use change management KPIs to identify which employees have fully adopted the change, and which have not, you can use that information to focus training and communication. Those that haven’t adopted the change can be encouraged with further support, while those that have could take on the role of change ambassadors, helping their colleagues make the transition.

It may still be necessary to support an employee that has fully adopted the change to make sure they don’t fall back into old ways of working. The change leader may want to define a separate criteria for fully embedded change and measure this as an additional change management KPI.

It can also be useful to measure the speed of adoption, as well as the rate. Knowing how long it takes for employees to fully adopt the change from the point that it is implemented provides valuable insights into the efficiency of the process.

In some cases it might be more appropriate to measure the amount of work, or the percentage of tasks being performed using a new process, or system, rather than focussing on individual adoption. It may be, for instance, that everyone is using the new system, but only to undertake simple tasks. Understanding this trend allows the change leader to adapt the training program and reward structure to focus on more complex tasks that also need to be performed in the new system.

Five change management KPIs for change adoption:

1. Complete change adoption rate for individuals
2. Complete change adoption rate for tasks
3. Achievement rates for change milestones
4. The time-to-adoption for individuals
5. Compliance or adherence rates for new processes

Category 4: Monitoring the results of the change project

Measuring the outcomes of the change project is vital to ensure it meets its objectives. Before the project starts, it’s important to benchmark the existing situation, and then set measurable, achievable targets that can be used to assess progress. Being able to show improvement against these KPIs can help to demonstrate tangible results, maintain enthusiasm for the change project, and build support for further initiatives.

There are a number of change management metrics that can be used to monitor the results of a change initiative. Change success rate, for example, is a broad way of measuring the extent to which the project has achieved its intended objectives or outcomes. Stakeholder perception of the change project’s effectiveness can also be measured using rating scales, satisfaction scores, or other forms of feedback transformed into a quantifiable metric.

Benefit realization metrics can be used that align with the objectives of the change initiative. These might be measures of productivity or efficiency that assess, for instance, how long it takes to perform a particular task, or how many tasks can be completed in a given timeframe. Find out how Accenture reduced its request-to-order cycle time from 30 hours to 15 hours, over the course of 12 months, through a procurement process change initiative.

Ultimately, of course, enterprises will want to know what the impact of the change is on business performance and financial outcomes, which means measuring ROI. This can be determined by quantifying and adding together financial gains from the project, such as increases in revenue, cost savings, productivity gains, or new customer acquisitions. Any costs associated with the change initiative (including training, technology, and disruption costs) should be deducted from this figure. The result should be divided by the total cost, and multiplied by 100 to arrive at a percentage ROI that can be used in your change management KPIs.

Five change management KPIs for benefit realization:

1. Stakeholder perception
2. Productivity and efficiency measures
3. Change project financial gains
4. Change project costs
5. Overall return on investment (ROI)