Now comes the hard part of Digital Transformation – Organizational Change

Change is something that human beings don’t typically embrace. If you are a change agent or trying to drive large scale transformation for an organization, this is a defect that can prove quite challenging to your work.

Having spent most of my career leading transformation and change through Digital technology, I’ve been on the front lines of this challenge repeatedly. Most recently, I spent nearly three years leading the Digital First transformation for the Comcast Cable company. There were some critical steps that we took as a team in both setting up the efforts and then delivering them for key stakeholders. I believe that others can leverage them to help their own efforts.

The first step is to ensure that you have senior level buy in, so there is air cover for your efforts. In my case, I inherited a program and took over a role that was created out of a Board presentation about the future Digital approach within the company and the efficiencies it would deliver for the organization. Having this senior level approval was a tremendous help to garnering resources, created consistent amplification of our message across the organization, and provided ongoing interest and engagement with our efforts.

With senior level approval secured, it’s time to get out and road show across the organization to the broader leadership team. It’s important to share the high-level vision, but also to battle test one layer down into the details as to what this means and how it will impact each leader’s work and organization. Building feedback into the plans here will help to secure greater buy in as you move forward.

With your plan now in place, it’s time to secure representation from key stakeholder groups across your organization. We created formal champion roles with some of our most critical stakeholders – one from the senior level and one from middle level management. These champions played the dual function of amplifying messaging out into the organization to promote our efforts or to gain critical approvals, but more importantly to pull the right players for critical input as needed to ensure buy in well before deployment of any new efforts.

Note that not everyone will be fully supportive and excited for the change you are bringing. It’s important to understand the seat that each person takes at the table. Meaning, what are their goals and how are they measured, because that lens will impact how they see your efforts. In some cases, you’ll be able to find “win/wins,” but in others you need to understand that you will have both champions and resistors. Those resistors are as important or more important than the champions. What’s the old saying? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. You’ll want to ensure that the resistors are engaged in the process but that your executive sponsors and champions can help to influence the resistors to keep things on track.  

With the vision, the plan, and the team in place, there was one other critical factor that helped us effectively kick off our efforts – a north start metric. The creation of some indication of ongoing demonstrated momentum and progress for the organization to see is critical. In our case, we had a digital customer usage metric that we forecasted, goaled and tracked. We took this to the next level by having it project on a screen in our CEO’s office. Everyone across the team knew this was our key metric, and by moving the metric we could demonstrate we were making an impact. People like to be associated with success, so a clear indicator of momentum will help to bring them on board.

This can be taken to a completely different level by gaining the buy in of executive leadership in compensating the organization against this metric. As they typically say, people tend to be “coin operated,” so if you pay them to do it, they’ll likely follow through. In our case, we were able to get our metric as a part of all bonus able employees’ plans. I can’t understate how much more interest this created in our efforts across the organization.

Now that you have your vision, plan, cross functional team and north star metric in place the foundational layer is set, it’s time to get to work. Ironically, I’m not going to spend time discussing delivering the experiences or products here. Though those efforts present great challenges in and of themselves, it can pale in comparison to the change management necessary to gain buy in with customers, employees, and operationally for the organization.  

Making this change will require communicating progress, elevating challenges, and communicating new feature launches broadly. There are three critical constituents that need to be apprised of efforts and progress of the transformation – leadership, broader employee populations, and customers. In order to keep leadership across the organization apprised we created a variety of forums at different levels of the organization. Most of these forums were monthly and were to both update on progress, but also to elevate challenges and opportunities for greater support across the organization. This also became a place to secure approval for operational changes that would become critical for the Digital transformation to take hold.

The second group, the broader employee base needed to understand what was launching and their customers would be seeing in the marketplace. This was especially important for customer facing roles like phone agents and techs. These communications leveraged existing employee comms channels, special events with give ways to generate excitement, and also one-off broader communications like video updates.

Last, your customers need to be informed of the changes you are delivering for them. When a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? For your customers, if you don’t actively make them aware of the new experiences and features and why they should use them, they likely won’t adopt them. Each launch was accompanied by an external communication plan, some even making it “above the line” with the TV commercial we did about moving online in two clicks in less than a minute. In some cases, we even made operational changes to incent certain behavior changes. For example, we began to charge for a phone payment while the digital transaction was free for the customer. This was taken from the airline playbook of charging for flight phone bookings.

I have tried to lay out some of the key components of change management to help others in their own journey. Life for the change agent would be much easier if it was “build it and they will come.” Instead, there is a broader process of change necessary to engage key stakeholders throughout the process to bring your vision to life. Ignore this challenge at your peril.