How to Manage Change and Motivate Users
By Linda Lea Larson

When your support organization changes, by implementing a new strategy, process, or technology, you’ll be faced with multiple change management issues. When faced with these challenges (and you will be), your first priority is to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of the vision of the initiative and what’s in it for them. In the first few weeks, any incentives you can provide will help adoption immensely. After the first few weeks, as the use of the system increases, you can move on to rewarding users for accomplishing specific goals. Then, as the system and user behavior matures, recognizing those who go above and beyond the call becomes the key motivator.
How users respond to change is closely tied the organization’s expectations and culture. Each practice listed below must be tuned to your specific organizational culture. A practice that is spectacularly successful in one organization may be a disaster in another. The key is to honor existing cultural norms while motivating the desired changes.

Continuous Communication
A well-structured, active, aggressive communication plan is vital to your success in managing change. A monthly newsletter should recognize individuals, provide project updates, and offer tips and hints on using the new applications. A project website can keep everyone informed about what’s happening and a mailbox for communicating with management can give staff a feeling that management is committed, not just involved — provided that management responds to messages submitted.

Performance Management
Tie effective change management directly to individual and group performance evaluations. If the organization uses a Balanced Scorecard or some other goal-setting method at the corporate level, support groups should align their goals to the organization’s goals. Individual and group performance plans should include goals that are tied to the new expected behavior.

Coaching Council
Coaches need to share their experiences, issues, ideas, questions, suggestions, quality improvements, and more. Lively group discussions ensure that coaches enhance their own skills and that everyone reinforces the same behavior. Coaches should be the ones to decide what to report to management. Trust is critical to successful coaching programs and you don’t want protégés to feel that their coaches are just management spies. Communication to management should be specific to an issue but not to an individual or group, unless specific individual or group action is required.

Contextual Role Play
To ensure others completely understand the expected changes, a coach should meet with a protégé and role-play a scenario that demonstrates the behavior. This reinforces the new workflow and the context in which it should be used. It also reinforces the expected quality of work.

Awards and Incentives
Awards and incentives promote spirit and motivate users toward desired behaviors. The incentives must be culturally appropriate, fair, balanced, and aligned with project goals. Key performance indicators are the primary drivers of reward programs. It’s important to have both group and individual rewards in most cultures.

Celebrations
Celebrate meeting key milestones and reinforce the value of the new process. In today’s fast-paced culture, it’s easy to let key milestones pass by unobserved. While you want the new behavior to become a core value, developing the new culture will take effort and dedication. Successes should be celebrated.

User Certification Program
Certified users are proficient, resulting in the support organization getting the desired benefits, both for the company and for its customers. A three-level certification program for basic proficiency, intermediate proficiency, and expert certification is typical. Make the program meaningful and beneficial to the employee as well as the company. That is, tie it to performance management, salary scale, and promotions.

Recognition
Once the new behavior becomes standard operating procedure, a mature organization typically moves beyond structured contests, awards, and incentives. They replace the early motivators with on-going programs for personal and group recognition. Informal, periodic recognition without defined patterns seems to work better than formally scheduled kudos.

Following these practices will help you manage changes in your organization while honoring the existing culture.

About the Author
Linda Lea Larson is a Principal Consultant with Primus Knowledge Solutions, Inc. where she manages strategic accounts and facilitates customer deployment of Primus KnowledgeCenter. Her responsibilities include delivery of workshops for coaching, train-the-trainer, and change management. She counsels customer management on organizational change and how to align the support organization to corporate objectives.