How to boost adoption within your team : a change management quick guide

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Why is change management important? 

A 2019 Gartner study revealed that most chief human resources officers are unhappy with the speed of change implementation in their organizations.

Why is that? Well, 80% of companies manage change from the top-down, according to the study. With this approach, leadership makes the calls, creates the plan, and sends instructions for company-wide rollout.

While it may seem like the quickest way to implement change, it's not the best solution in the long term.

Many times, leadership blames employees for unsuccessful changes. However, the data suggests that most employees possess the skills and willingness to undergo organizational changes.

The issue lies in deciding who is part of the strategizing, decision-making, and implementation part of change management.

Today, companies are complex. For changes to be effective, they require more input across the organization. In other words, change management should be inclusive.

Change is constant, and developing a model that works for your business is the best way you can manage the people-side of change and set everyone up for success.

The ADKAR® model breaks down the human side of managing change.

You should work through each letter of the acronym, and keep the focus on the individuals within your company.

 

Awareness: 

The goal is to learn the business reasons for change.
At the end of this stage, everyone should be on board and understand why the company needs the change. 

Here are a several tactics you can use to increase Awareness:

• Having internal kick off at the beginning of the HubSpot implementation project to communicate the project goals and objectives, timeline and stakeholders.
• Internal meetings to outline what are the challenges that the new tool will address. Communicate on the risks of not changing - what is the company/team loosing (time, money, customers ?).
• Develop an elevator speech about the project and gain consensus from the key stakeholders around this statement. Make sure it is spread widely within the team or organisation (consider how you’re going to ensure everyone is going to see this - posters, emails, etc.).
• Communicate widely / uniformly and as often as possible to minimize misinformation and increase awareness.

Desire: 

Once the people of your organization understand the WHY of the change, you need to work on desire so that people make a personal commitment to support the change. 

This focuses on getting everyone engaged and willingly participating in the change. Once you have full buy-in, the next stage is measuring if the individuals in your company want to help and become part of the process.

How to work on Desire: 

• Explain what are the benefits of the change, for each team / category of users / individual users. How is it going to benefit them specifically ? 
• Benefits for marketing teams - at a strategic and operational level.
• Sales ops benefits.
• As individuals (personal factors, financial factors, etc.).
• What are they gaining from this? Time? Productivity? 
• How is the change ultimately contributing to the global strategy of the company ? 
• Think of having key incentive / reward programs towards KPIs for each team.  

Knowledge: 

In this stage, you're working toward understanding how to change.
This can come in the form of formal training or simple one-on-one coaching so those affected by the change feel prepared to handle it.

How to implement Knowledge:

• If you haven’t done so already, book a meeting with Hubspot Onboarding Team.
• Use Hubspot Academy resources for your specific Hub  : 
• Sales Hub training. 
• Marketing Hub training. 
• Service Hub training. 
• In order to increase accountability, check (and share) completion on the Hubspot academy portal. Consider making a competition for the first three people to pass their Hub certification.
• Assess team knowledge at the beginning of the process in order to create tailor made training and address potential knowledge gaps. 
• Have champions / key users attend the onboarding sessions so that they can get familiar with the tool. Rely on them to train the rest of the team.
• Leverage the HubSpot Knowledge Base and Community (onboarding section : quick tutorials). 
• Use the project tool in your Hubspot account to keep track and assign the different trainings. Make sure to ensure accountability from both users and managers for training completion. 

 

Ability: 

You must now focus on how to implement the change at the required performance / operational level. Knowing the required job skills is only the beginning – the people involved need to be supported in the early stages to ensure they can incorporate change in daily tasks.

Tactics to work on Ability:

• Create an internal operating procedure defining the roles and responsibilities and communicate this to all stakeholders together with the expectations for each category of users on a daily basis. Why not record a “One day in Hubspot” video for each team. 
• Where to go for help : Define the ressources your employees can use if they need help : 
• Support 
• Community 
• Knowledge Base
• And the champions of course! 
• Create room for your employees to practice / train together.
• Define a key stakeholder / champion to be the owner of the knowledge on the platform and get this person to set up weekly office hours during which employees can come and ask operational questions. 
• Go through use cases training sessions. 

 

Reinforcement: 

Lastly, you need to sustain the change. This final step is often the most missed. 

An organization needs to continually reinforce change to avoid employees from reverting back to the old way of doing things.

Tactics for Reinforcement:

• Create a buddy program in the company so that people can share ideas / processes they discovered in Hubspot. (ex: 1 bi-weekly session). 
• Organise a team launch event to celebrate the change.
• Organise quarterly informal meetings with management where people can share ideas and feelings and be informed of the ongoing achievements and upcoming news. 
• Extend the key incentive / reward program if necessary to boost reinforcement. 
• Assign to key owner metrics to measure success / progress and share them on a consistent basis with the team (Assign a Hubspot Dashboard focused on the change KPIs).
• Set up safe places / office hours to gather feedback on a consistent basis to keep maintaining the change. (Create forms to allow anonymous feedback or questions related to fears / feelings). 

We hope those tactics will help you to drive a better adoption in your teams. 

The ADKAR model allows you to focus on the people's side of the change and to make sure that no one is left on the side of the road during the process. 
Do not hesitate to reach out to your Hubspot Onboarding Specialist to ask for any material regarding the different phases. 

Additional Resource: 
Change Management Blog Post