A: Preparing your team for effective change should start as soon as your organization realizes they need to upgrade systems. This is the time to ask your team what they need and why, what is working well, and what isn’t. This sows the seeds of change success. You don’t necessarily need to follow up on their suggestions, but by asking questions you communicate that their needs matter. And that reduces resistance.
These simple questions early on will increase the return on your technology investment.
The Cirrus Team Readiness Assessment will show you which supports will keep your team engaged with the change project. Run the assessment as soon as you’ve selected the new system you want to adopt.
Use the Change Accelerator before your change project starts, so you can avoid the change aggravators that make adoptions go sideways.
A: The Cirrus Team Readiness Assessment is a smart start to your technology adoption—especially if time, price or system competency is important. It uncovers issues like the frequency and type of communication that will smooth the transition, staff capacity, priorities, perceptions and more.
The Assessment provides your organization with clear data on the areas that could slow down or upend a change project. Who thinks they shouldn’t be involved? How do you earn buy-in and trust? Who is skeptical of the coming change because the last one went poorly? Who trusts who in the organization? What do these people want from you? The assessment is anonymized, but provides insights so you can avoid or mitigate disastrous risk.
The Change Accelerator education tool, provides the organization’s change team with information relevant to eight aspects of change: vision, strategy, sponsorship, quick wins, communication, resistance, change teams and skill building. The videos are short, but pacts with information to make your change more successful. Your change team can learn the three topics of resistance and the two common types of resistance.
A: It depends on the size and structure of your organization, the number and size of departments, and the time-frame of your technology adoption.
A: A colleague of ours once said, “All change flows down from the corner office.” Business writers and psychologists have spilled a lot of ink describing the importance of “social proof” and authority in persuading people to change. A leader can provide social proof and authority, even when doing relatively little:
- Sign your name to emails that enthusiastically support the change.
- Prioritize the change over other issues until the most critical parts of change are complete.
- Authorize incentives. Scholarly studies detail how a positive frame of mind and incentives encourage openness to new ideas.
- Make sure that mid-level managers are held accountable if they avoid or disparage the change.
A: No, you can buy the components that you need, for the number of people who need them.
A: The Cirrus Change Readiness platform has benefited teams of 14 to teams in the many hundreds. The Change Accelerator and the TeamReadiness Assessment can both scale, and are mobile optimized.
A: Yes. Cirrus Change works with change managers as well as directly with organizations.
