2 Ways to Measure the Success of Collaborative Change
I spend some time each morning feeding my spirit before trying to help teams evolve the way they work. Call it cleansing the inner vessel or removing the mote in my own eye or getting my own house in order, it helps provide the perspective I need for the day. This morning, I came across a simple article that connected with my efforts to demonstrate success in our change efforts at work.
The article focused on how to measure your own spiritual progress. I found myself slightly editing one of the paragraphs so that it applies to the adoption of new ways of working. For example, the rollout of Yammer or Workplace, or the adoption of more remote teamwork:
I think it is human to want to know how [our rollout is] doing, how we’re measuring up. We yearn to know if we are doing OK. As humans we also crave acceptance and validation. Often in this quest to know where we stand, we gravitate toward that which is easiest to measure — outward [activity]. Additionally, in order to know where we stand, we want to know where those around us stand so we will have points of reference, so these outward [activities] become further ingrained as benchmarks.
You won’t find a more strident advocate than I for analyzing your usage data as part of a rollout of a new technology. Analytics services are invaluable diagnostic tools for finding hotspots, influencers, and personas. Tracking this usage data alongside your business’ key performance indicators is one of the most powerful drivers for change. See this excellent story about Sanofi Pasteur driving innovation as an example. They are measuring actual cost savings generated by ideas that are sourced and refined in their Yammer community.
However, it’s important not to lose sight of the deeper changes we’re trying to drive with this change in tools. Your most important asset is your people. Effecting a change within them to be more eager to share and collaborate, to drive faster decision making and enable broader connections, and to foster trust across the company… these things are likely to have a more lasting and profound impact on your organization than any validation we might receive from our usage numbers. A shift in our team’s culture and values — in their soul, if you will — is going to have a more lasting and pervasive impact on your business than a short term focus on their post response rate.
This reminds me of a conversation our founder, Jarom Reid, had with one of our partners, Hans Schulte from Verity, about how corporations are “crushing people” by focusing too much on hard KPIs rather than truly understanding people and the things that make them more productive and more engaged.
Returning to the Sanofi Pasteur example, this description of the desired change is going to be tough to measure with simple quantitative measures:
“…my challenge was to turn quality from an imposed constraint to a shared passion. Yammer helped me create a platform where this shared passion could grow. The Yammer effect is one of democratization and liberation of knowledge.”
Values and culture aren’t as easily measurable as bottom line cost savings or revenue acceleration, but that doesn’t make it less valuable. To focus entirely on Yammer or Slack or SharePoint usage numbers is really putting the cart (your tools) before the horse (your people). There are interesting things we can track, such as the prevalence of catalysts and connectors among your employees, or the percentage of conversations that are being held in the open vs. in private groups.
So what do we do? We can’t justify our change efforts with simply usage reports and good will. There are two things you can do today:
- Tools that incorporate AI, such as Verity, will get us closer to data that better represents the heart of what drives our employees and evolves our work.
- Demonstrate change by telling stories. At Carpool Agency, telling stories is what we love most about our work. We love crafting a narrative for your organization that not only narrates your impact, but also your transformation.
Reach out to us today to start evolving the way you work, and telling the story of its impact.
References:
- The article that sparked this post.
- Two social enterprise analytics vendors I partner with: tyGraph, and Swoop
