Data Driven Approach to Change Management

Data seems to be everywhere today. It consumes us. Anything you want to know seems to be at your fingertips. Every year 1.2 trillion searches take place on google. The amount of data in the world was estimated to be 44 zettabytes in 2020. By 2025, the amount of data generated each day is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally. The rate at which we create new data has been growing increasingly for years. Each day on Earth we generate 500 million tweets, 294 billion emails, 4 million gigabytes of Facebook data, 65 billion WhatsApp messages and 720,000 hours of new content added on YouTube. In the first part of the 21^st century we collected more data than in all the rest of our history. That is a lot of data. How do we utilize all this data to our advantage without making our heads spin?

The aim is to make better decisions, more quickly using data in real time. Data can be utilized in various ways to increase success within an organization, increase profits, improve business processes, and retain and gain more customers. But, using data to increase a company’s bottom line is not the only benefit of a company becoming more data driven, leveraging data can also help lead more successful change management initiatives. As companies adapt to the future of digitization this also comes with the need to track and understand data that can support the right type of change. Many organizations face a cultural challenge when changing data behaviors. Currently, studies show that on average, less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions—and less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. How do we know what data is the right data to use? “Good” data is crucial in making good business decisions. Data is considered “good” data when analyzed, could result in actionable strategies.

As companies are collecting more and more data, data driven business has become a hot topic in recent years. But change management has been slow to react. A recent survey by EY highlights that 81% of businesses agree that data should be at the heart of all decision making. The same report shows that only 31% of companies have significantly restructured their operations to do this. Many companies rely on their internal teams to project outcomes utilizing emotion, intuition, or external pressures. But, as the University of North Carolina’s Community and Economic Development shared “Decision making in the modern world is based on data. Statistical analysis offers the most objective, informed way to analyze a situation and project the impact of different courses of action.” Yet, according to KPMG, 67 percent of CEOs have ignored the insights provided by data analysis because it contradicts their own intuition or experience.” We can use traditional change management tools to capture data to later be analyzed in new and innovative ways to gain a full understanding of what the organization did and did not do well during the change and to provide future changes that help the organization be more successful.

Only 67% of organizations include project change management in their initiatives according to KPMG. Although change management is not known as an analytical field. There are many benefits to using data throughout change management initiatives, including predicting risk, improving results and tracking progress. And companies at the forefront of using analytical tools as part of change can set themselves up for success. The use of data is only growing and the increase in the amounts and uses of data will continue to make the business landscape even more competitive. Real change begins when data-savvy leaders and data professionals recognize the role that change management can play in the success of a data-driven organization. Many Change Guides tools are available electronically and can be customized to fit an organizations specific need and help them collect the types of data to maximize their effectiveness for change.

What ways can data be used when managing change?

Replace Traditional Annual Employee Engagement Surveys

According to the 2022 Gallup report, 51% of employees are disengaged in the workplace. The report also shows that companies with a highly engaged workforce have 21% higher profitability and have 17% higher productivity than companies with a disengaged workforce. Real time employee engagement tools like pulse surveys are now available and rather than replace traditional annual surveys, these analytical tools can be used with traditional surveys together.

Capture Data Throughout Change Management Projects

Research conducted by Deloitte shows that high performing organizations are 3.5 times more likely to use data to inform change efforts and 4 times more likely to gain worker input when shaping changes. Often there is no comparison data to compare from project to project. By capturing data in current projects that data can be tracked and used to predict risks, adoption, and sustainability in future projects. Tools such as Change Guides Change Readiness Audit, Commitment Assessment and Change Integration Checklist can be delivered using pulse survey technology or even small focus groups to quickly gain a sense of how things are going before, during, and after changes.

Change Management Dashboards

The typical organization today has undertaken five major firmwide changes in the past three years — and nearly 75% expect to multiply the types of major change initiatives they will undertake in the next three years. Yet half of the change initiatives fail, and only 34% are a clear success according to a recent Gartner poll. A dashboard can present a set of metrics or statistics that give a snapshot of the state of the change management process. Developing and utilizing the Change Guides Change Readiness Audit and the Change Integration Audit can act as Change Management Dashboards that can help an organization understand the trends relating to change management and take appropriate action to pivot and balance change implementation.

As technology continues to advance and more and more data is collected. Recognizing the value of data and increasing data literacy within organizations is changing what it means to be a data driven company. By 2025, it’s estimated that companies across all sectors will cultivate a data-driven culture, with employees using data to optimize nearly every aspect of their work. According to the McKinsey report, smart workflows and seamless interactions among humans and machines will likely be as standard as the corporate balance sheet. Organizations of the future will leverage data in every decision they make to support success. And the field of change management will need to embrace the data-driven model while still focusing on the human elements of change such as communication, collaboration, innovation, motivation, and personal impact.