The value of real-time feedback in organizational change

Behavioural inertia is powerful. Changing mindsets and behaviours in the organizational context is hard work that requires much leadership effort and time. How then do organizations - and the leaders who steer them - adapt to changing technology, processes and competition while changing employee mindsets and behaviours? Organizations from across the spectrum are constantly looking for ways to adapt to the ever-changing business landscape while keeping employees and team members engaged and on-board.

In this article, lets explore one of many key tactics that isn’t just endemic to managing change, but an important leadership trait in general. The tactic is feedback. Real-time, in the moment, contextual feedback.

Let’s evaluate this using a ‘Situation, Complication, Resolution’ paradigm.

Situation:

An large organization was implementing a new sales analytics tool to a large workforce of sales team members. The objective of the new tool was to enable sales team members to gain more insight into sales leads to better understand customer needs. Armed with better information about their customers, the salesforce could increase top-line revenue and improve the performance of the organization. The solution would help the company move away from a largely paper-based system for managing sales leads to an electronic system.

Complication:

After a large investment in project planning, the company launched the new solution to its salesforce with much fanfare. The rollout went ahead with early involvement of the salesforce in the decision making along with ample training to support the adoption of the new solution. However, despite all the upfront effort, the organization found that adoption of the new system wasn’t on target. Sales team members continued to use the paper-based system to manage their sales leads. The salesforce was reverting back to the old ways of working (‘behavioural inertia’).

Resolution:

After the change team started to investigate the reasons behind the resistance and low levels of adoption, an unexpected discovery surfaced. The salesforce was not receiving feedback about the downstream effects of the new solution on their performance. They felt as though they were only entering data into this electronic database that did not provide them with the insights they needed in the moment. A case in point, insights into the company’s profit margin for a diversified product mix were most useful in the moment while having face time with the customer, instead of much later. Instantaneous feedback was the missing ingredient. The organization reached out to the vendor who was able to develop a solution for the sales analytics tool.

With the adjustment in place, sales team members were now able to see how their actions were impacting their revenue in real time. In a few weeks, the tool became an indispensable tool for the sales team, leading to significant revenue growth across the organization.

In most business settings, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviours to the bottom line, we will tend towards behaviours that are easiest in the moment. Real time feedback provides a checkpoint that encourages desirable behaviours and discourages undesirable ones.

There are numerous way to drive instant feedback, irrespective of if your organization is implementing an analytics tool or restructuring an organization. Some include face-to-face discussion, prompts, real-time polls and surveys. There are also numerous apps and startups working on solutions that will help offer real-time feedback that drives team member engagement.

In order to stay on top of a change effort, it is important to keep track of how stakeholders are doing. A feedback loop of this kind will ensure that if necessary, leadership can provide the target audience with resources that help course correct.