Key Points
To encourage people to regularly use something new in your organization, you need to consider their experience using it —whether it be a process, practice, system, or even mindset,
Research indicates between 50-90% of people’s adoption choices are explained by five aspects of a change — relative advantage, compatibility, ease of use, trialability, and observability.
Strategies for enhancing each of these attributes in your change solution and process and are offered.
As a middle manager or change agent, you always look for ways to improve your organization. But even the best ideas can fall flat if people don't adopt them. So what makes people choose to adopt new things? Turns out, there are a few key factors. In this article, we'll explore those factors and show you how to use them to increase the adoption of your change initiatives.
Consider five attributes of a change
Decades of research indicate that five things seem to impact whether or not people accept innovations — from new agricultural practices to seat belts to cell phones. In fact, studies show about 50-90% of adoption choices can be explained by people’s perceptions of these five aspects of a change. So, we can predict some reasons that people accept change, but not all of them. Context and individual disposition always play a role.
The five characteristics are:
Relative Advantage: How much better is this than what I am doing/using now? This is one of the strongest predictors of adoption.
Compatibility: How well does the change align with the organization and my team related to our perceived needs, ways of working, and values?
Ease of Use: How easy is this innovation to use?
Observability: Are the benefits and results of using this change obvious or easy to see and explain? Can I see the difference directly, or do I have to wait for a report or for someone up the hierarchy to tell me it's working?
Trialability: Can I experiment/try out the change solution before full adoption?
Let’s explore each attribute and consider strategies to enhance it when developing your change innovation and organizational change management process.
Relative Advantage
People adopt new things for a variety of reasons, but the biggest driver is that it's better than what they are doing now
People want to understand what they will gain by doing something new or doing it in a new way. Why? Because change comes with costs and risks. It’s fair to ask — will the benefits of changing be worth the costs?
In evaluating the relative advantage of an organizational change, staff members may consider whether they gain or lose power, money, time, influence, or comfort.
To improve the relative advance of your chosen change solution, you can:
Identify the clear advantages of this solution over current practice. Communicate how this change will positively influence the efficiency or effectiveness of people's work. Share what alternate options were considered and why they were NOT chosen. Highlight what made this change solution stand out.
Ask: How could we make the change solution a lot better than the current practice? What options do we have to improve it? (End users are often a great source of ideas on this).
Identify future improvements or iterations that may be planned or possible to further improve the benefits of making the change. Be sure to communicate there is "more to come!"
Communicate if circumstances require the change solution to be used, e.g., legal requirements, rising costs of the current practice, or a crisis such as COVID. Especially if the change will not directly enhance individual employees' work experiences, help them to understand why the change is necessary.
Compatibility
People want to understand how the change aligns with what's important to them
People are often looking to identify aspects of stability within a change. So when considering adoption, people want to understand how the organizational change aligns with their/their team's existing values, current ways of working, and perceived needs.
To ensure the compatibility of your chosen change solution, you can:
Engage end-users to understand their perceptions of the change and how it does/doesn't align with what's important to them — their values, needs, and ways of working. Use this information to inform the development of the change solution, implementation efforts, or communications.
Explain why shifts in values or priorities are central to the change. For example, if a team is being asked to focus on efficiency after years of focusing on quality as the highest priority, you can say something like: "We are marrying our long-term focus on quality with greater efficiency. We aim to identify a workable balance between these, but intend to make tradeoffs to increase our efficiency."
Where applicable, link with trialability and explain how rollout and adoption will be informed by direct experience with the change and where adjustments can be made to address areas of incompatibility.
Ease of Use
People are more likely to adopt changes that are simple to use
Organizational change innovations that are relatively easy to adopt or learn may face less resistance than those that are complex and hard to master. Ease of use is relative — what may be simple to a highly experienced group of staff members may seem quite complicated to those newer to the job.
To reduce the complexity of your change solution, you can:
Engage with end users when developing the change solution to pressure test for ease of use.
Plan and resource time, training, and coaching to support end-users to be successful with the new solution.
Establish learning goals to allow adopters time to grow their familiarity and skill with the change solution. Over time, you can add outcome or performance goals to measure proficiency to certain standards.
Gather and communicate tips, tricks, and insights from staff that find success with the change solution.
Make improvements over time, particularly if staff members invent workarounds for deficiencies in the change solution.
Trialability
People like to try before they buy
Trialability reflects the degree to which people can experiment with the change before full adoption.
In the case of an organizational change, this may look like involving impacted staff in the testing of a new system or practice or conducting pilots of a new process with selected teams to learn as you go.
To improve the trialability of your organizational change, you can:
Identify areas that can and cannot be tested or piloted before adoption and communicate why. Where testing or a pilot is possible, explain how this will be done, who will be involved, and how the results will be used.
Make plans for continuous improvement. What opportunities will end users have to provide feedback that informs improvements? It can be helpful to set expectations for when this will happen.
Identify aspects of the change that are optional and open to adaptation or customization to meet group/individual needs. Differentiate those clearly from aspects of the change that are standard and should be adopted "as is."
Observability
People want to see evidence that the change has created benefits
People want to know that the change is worth their effort. Consider how you might make the benefits of the change more apparent to more people. Importantly, benefits can sometimes be more obvious or meaningful to an experienced user than to a novice. Consider the average user when evaluating your solution for observability of benefits.
To support greater observability, you can:
Widely communicate stories and quantitative measures of benefit from using the change solution. Consider highlighting case studies or providing opportunities for those who have experienced success with the change to share their perspectives directly with others.
Encourage staff members who do see the benefits of the change solution to informally share their perspectives with their peers.
If the change solution is more conceptual — such as shifts in culture or values — clarify how you will track progress to help people recognize the benefits in their experience of the organization.
Identify and communicate ancillary benefits that the use of the solution may make possible. For example, if you are adopting a lower-cost solution, this may free up resources for another improvement, which may be more desired by staff.
Try it out
If you're looking to introduce a change in your organization, it's important to consider how people will experience it. By keeping these five characteristics in mind, you can increase the chances of adoption and create a more successful change management process.
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References
Rogers, E. M., Singhal, A., & Quinlan, M. M. (2014). Diffusion of Innovations. In An integrated approach to communication theory and research (pp. 432-448). Routledge.
For those introducing or leading change in an organization, a common goal is to overcome or manage resistance. Alternate strategies encourage us to consider how to proactively build readiness, mitigate potential sources of resistance, and use negative responses to improve our change management practices.