Automation to accelerate change management in an enterprise. #ChangeTech

The pace of change in our digital world is super fast.

Change might mean new business processes, new tools or simply a renewed focus on performance in a key area.

With change coming thick and fast, that means change management budgets are increasingly stretched – more change initiatives but the same pot of cash.

That means change managers have a problem: there sometimes isn’t the time or resources to run a full scale change management program with face to face training and above the line communications campaigns.

In digital change there are no 3 month long lead times, changes can sometimes be quite literally overnight.

For change managers that means they need solutions to accelerate their change management programs.

Many are turning to automation to help with the heavy lifting.

We are calling these new tools #ChangeTech. Examples include rise.global the score card platform and kinetik, a digital card game. They cost less than a face to face coach or trainer and can be deployed globally within hours instead of weeks. Perfect for organisations with staff distributed across the country and the planet!

Using rise.global as a ChangeTech tool

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Using a rise.global ScoreBook for your change program requires little more than a connection to the internet, a list of staff and access to activity data.

Via the principles of success tracking and score science, a change manager designs a score that embodies all the desired behaviours of the change.

The score is then automatically calculated each week for each user of the program and delivered to them as a personal scorecard. The scorecard shows their progress in achieving the objectives, the change over time, and crucially, their relative ranking with peers.

One organisation that has already trail-blazed rise.global as a ChangeTech tool is data-driven marketing and loyalty analytics firm Aimia.

Nathalie Maslia, Global Organisational Change Management Consultant at Aimia said, “With the increased digitisation of business, change tends to happen faster and more often across enterprises. This can mean that, when there is a need for change, the budget to communicate and bed down change is tight.

“As part of our transition to Microsoft Office 365 across Aimia, we used a rise.global ScoreBook to communicate adoption of key O365 and Sharepoint behaviours to our staff. Each participating staff member received a personal score showing their progress in achieving the key behaviours we had identified within a short period of time. What could have taken months in terms of awareness and adoption was achieved in weeks.

Another advocate of using automation to accelerate change management is Mike Quindazzi, Managing Director at PwC:

“I am keen to see business leaders adopt social media to build their digital presence and engage in the marketplace. Sharing insights in ways that builds trust is critical to the future of relationships and business development. Leveraging scorecards and leaderboards in ways that help “automate” part of the change management process can be an effective and productive way to aid the process. Adding this element of gamification helps to increase not only user adoption but also expertise on use of the platforms. “

In this growing age of automation it’s no surprise that change management itself should have automated tools to help it do it’s work. We hope to see more #ChangeTech innovation in due course.

McKinsey & Co. research showed that successful execution of change management can boost ROI on an initiative by 143% – now with ChangeTech solutions like rise.global that automate some of the process, more teams will be able to use change management as they seek to embrace and thrive in a world of rapid digital change.

To learn more about rise.global automated solutions to accelerate your next change management initiative, contact us or book a call directly with Toby Beresford via LinkedIn today.

Nudge theory

Nudge theory is an idea that uses psychological concepts to explain why people behave in certain ways.

According to Nudge theory, it takes only small environmental changes, reinforcement or using individual’s inertia to affect people’s behavior. One example, related to eating behavior, is the attempt to encourage healthy eating. Supermarkets simply placed arrows on the floor pointing to the fruit and vegetables, which had the effect of increasing sales of healthy food.

This theory also has a variety of applications to the workplace.

For example, the UK government wanted its citizens to enrol in pensions. Thus, it created an ‘opt out’ system, in which it did not force people to enrol, but obliged people to contact the government if they wanted not to enrol in a pension saving plan. Only 10% of people did.

Another strategy for ‘nudging employees’ is creating new spaces in the workplace, as employees may find it difficult to change their behaviour in a familiar setting. Thus, if you do not want your employees to congregate next to the water cooler, you can change the environment around the cooler, e.g. make it smaller, and thus this behaviour may no longer be desirable. You do not have to force your employees to behave in a certain way, but can subtly ‘nudge’ them in a way that will make your employees more effective, and your business more successful.  

Nudge theory was originally suggested by Thaler and Sunstein in their book Nudge. You can find out more about both academics and many more behavior science experts by visiting the “Behaviour Explorers” leaderboard on rise.

If you want to find out more about how Nudge theory can help your business, see the infographic below created by PsySci.

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This is a guest post by Marcus Clarke of PsySci. Thanks Marcus!

New rise.global theme for 2018 – Boxes

ScoreBook

We love our themes here at rise.

That’s why we’ve gone ahead and freshly baked a new theme for you to use in 2018.

It’s called “boxes” and it will display everyone in a beautiful box grid.

There are some whizzy additional features that will drive increased engagement and dwell time too:

  • space for your own desktop and mobile display advertising (whether 3rd party snippets or native)
  • search for users
  • sort by name
  • optional whether to include rank
  • popup easy swipe guide to each user’s bio

We’ve also added some features that are only available to registered followers – this helps build the follower community around your ScoreBook. Don’t forget you can have as many followers as you like.

  • filter by any team or division
  • filter by newcomers, climbers, fallers
  • download whole list
  • hashtag link to the conversation
  • link to the synched twitter list

To demo the new theme Nick and I have been busy launching a few ScoreBooks, here are some great examples for you to check out, right now:

Sales Professionals

Screenshot 2018-01-24 10.28.34

GDPR Guides

Screenshot 2018-01-24 10.31.32

Behaviour Explorers

Screenshot 2018-01-24 10.28.07

The Boxes theme is available to all users.

Changing behaviour with a simple score [webinar – 30 Jan]

Next Tuesday we will be running our first ever webinar on “Score Science” – the art and science of using a personal score to change behaviour.

Popularised by FitBit™ this personal analytics technique is now being used by organisations across the globe including PwC, IBM and the United Nations.

In this intro-level webinar (limited to 100 attendees) Toby Beresford, rise.global founder, will explain the approach, share real world examples and outline the benefits of using a single score to drive behaviour change.

By attending you will learn:

  • what is score science
  • how a single score provides great feedback
  • how leading global organisations are helping distributed employees develop positive habits

This webinar is free to attend. You are encouraged to ask as many questions as you like!

TIME:
1600 (GMT) / 1100 (EST)

DATE:
30 JANUARY 2018

Sign up to attend

Please note the webinar uses zoom.us – for best experience download and install zoom ahead of time.

webinar

Update, here’s the webinar recording:

Lexicon changes

We’ve made some changes to our core product lexicon:

  • Board Managers are now known as Administrators
  • Players are now as Users
  • Boards are now as ScoreBooks
  • Releases are now as Score Bulletins
  • Data Collectors are now as Score Collectors
  • Data Entries are now Score Entries

Over the years our product has changed from where we started out – as a way to generate leaderboards – to reflect our changed focus as a way to generate individual scorecards.

Indeed one of our biggest customers hardly shows the leaderboard to its users at all.

Updated – 22 Jan 2019 – Boards (aka ScoreCards) are now known as ScoreBooks

Setting up a success tracking practice

rawpixel-com-252127.jpgMany organisations need a success tracking practice, they just don’t realise it yet.

As any Team Sky cyclist will tell you – it’s great to be able to rely on the Team Sky staff team and the array of coaches on everything from telemetrics to nutrition.

Think about having your own team of performance coaches at work – wouldn’t that be fabulous?

Well some organisations are already well on their way – PwC, the United Nations and others – have set up success tracking programs, initially targeted at social media success. Employees can sign up to the program and they get personalised tracking scores combined with peer networking and coaching advice to help them succeed at social media.

The success tracking approach is one that you can introduce into your own organisation, or as a consultant, you can provide as a service to your clients. All it needs is a blend of coaching and attention to numerical feedback.

Learn more in this slide deck:

Dunning Kruger Effect and why scorekeeping matters

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We all need ways to get an accurate reflection of our true skills. Photo credit: Septian Simon

One of the reasons we all need good scorekeeping is that it is a human trait  to misperceive our own strengths and weaknesses.

This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect and was first covered in the paper Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

What’s interesting is that the effect occurs at both ends of the ability spectrum:

  • beginners tend to over estimate their strengths
  • experts tend to underestimate them

That’s where a good scorekeeping and success tracking program can help each of us – by providing an accurate reflection of progress against either pre-defined standards, peer comparison or both.

Success Tracking for Sports Bars

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Photo Credit: James Sutton

A question on the Q&A site Quora, “What are the KPIs for a Sports Bar in 2017?“, prompted a revisit of the G.E.R.M. model for phasing your success tracking metrics.

Here’s the G.E.R.M. inspired answer:

G = Getting Going

  • are we putting on our target number of sports viewing events in the categories we’re focusing on – e.g. # major events per month

E= Engagement

  • are our audience enjoying the experience. – e.g. can we count/estimate dwell time, whether they are repeat visiting

R = Reach

  • are people bringing friends? how many parties have we accepted each month? is overall footfall increasing?

M = Monetisation

  • is spend on food and drinks increasing? are people tweeting and sharing their experience online (this is a form of monetisation as they are effectively doing your advertising for you – “earned media”)

 

Importantly with any G.E.R.M. success tracking program – it is vital to focus only on the metrics of one phase at a time – there is no point in working on Reach if you don’t have Engagement.

At a recent meetup, I found one e-commerce entrepreneur making that very mistake, this time in a costly way. He was shelling out hundreds of pounds a day for Adwords without first ensuring that his conversion rate was sufficient to make it worth it. Without a good conversion rate (akin here to an engagement metric) on your sample cohort there is no point in growing your advertising spend to reach a larger  group – you’ll just get the same dismal conversion rate but with a larger number of people.

New Top 100 Image Generator

You asked and we provided – you can now generate a Top 100 image from your Rise Board for sharing far and wide.

I’ve started including it in my release announcement Tweets too, with immediate good evidence of higher engagement than previous tweets with similar content.

For instance this post scored over 400 impressions and 26 engagements

Screenshot 2017-09-11 10.18.00

While a similar tweet in May with only the top 10 scored only 200 impressions and one engagement…

Screenshot 2017-09-11 10.26.49.png

I hope you enjoy the new image feature.

 

Building collective leadership capability in your organisation with success tracking

A recent Management Today article said that Leadership development is stuck in the dark ages. A key reason for this is a lack of flexibility in moving to a collective leadership model:

There is a transition occurring from the old paradigm in which leadership resided in a person or role, to a new one in which leadership is a collective process that is spread throughout teams and networks of people.

Collective leadership  is particularly suited to very large organisations that act more like business ecosystems than single entities.

In the technology and professional services world, collective leadership also makes sense. One person cannot be expert in everything.

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Collective leaders will need tools to influence others. Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

 

The Kings Fund has published a paper, for example, on the need to develop collective leadership within health care. They describe collective leadership as follows:

Collective leadership entails distributing and allocating leadership power to wherever expertise, capability and motivation sit within organisations.

One of the key skills of a collective leader, someone usually without the necessary command and control clout, is to influence and persuade colleagues to act in a certain way and develop in a certain direction.

A key approach to achieve collective leadership is success tracking.

Success tracking entails helping people track their own journey to success, and at the same time influencing the definition of what success looks like – perfect for collective leaders.

One of the interesting aspects (and challenges) of collective leadership is that aspiring leaders using social media can be very influential in directing the organisation.

I’ve seen a junior partner launch a success tracking program at a top consulting firm which other partners have then signed up to. They are tracking their success according to the scoring rules set by the junior partner.  Most interestingly, this unsanctioned success tracking program has had much much higher engagement than the original formal tracking and development program. Indeed it has now been brought into the fold as part of the formal social media success tracking offered to partners.

The challenge for those looking to develop organisation leaders is then to spot those who are already leading and support their development.

What better way to do this than to introduce the success tracking approach into your leadership development curriculum?