The Challenge
We know that it can be a challenge to gather meaningful feedback from stakeholders on a planned or completed Change Management program for a Workday implementation. Whether the purpose of gathering the feedback is to assess the readiness of a group of stakeholders and gauge their initial feelings before a change occurs, or to evaluate the impact of the change on its workforce post-change, Collaborative Solutions understands that it’s no small task to develop tools or activities to gather feedback, conduct feedback gathering techniques, collect stakeholder responses, analyze results to come up with useful data, and report out on feedback gathered. With years of Change Management experience, we know first-hand the amount of work and planning that this requires! Remember…change isn’t always easy!
We often spend so much time and effort on planning and executing change programs for Workday deployments that it can be easy to forget that end users will actually have to operate within that newly changed world. Since end users will actually operate in this world, who better to serve as test cases than the end users themselves?
There are many ways to gather feedback, so coming up with a plan before haphazardly rolling out a feedback mechanism like a survey is essential in order to get the right feedback. Potential techniques for gathering useful feedback include:
- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Casual conversation
- Feedback boxes
- Usability tests
- Direct interaction
- Social media
Important questions to consider when deciding what the most appropriate techniques are for your audience can include:
- What are the customer’s goals?
- What are the customer’s feedback needs?
- What is the size of the desired stakeholder audience?
- What are the expectations of the stakeholder audience?
- Does the stakeholder audience represent the entire organization or a limited number of stakeholders?
- Is the change being tested pre-implementation or post-implementation?
- Is the customer willing to incentivize the stakeholder responses?
As you can see, it is vital to come up with a well-thought out plan before picking a technique. We will take a deeper look at some of these tools and methods in part two of this blog series, Collecting Feedback from Stakeholders: Designing Tools & Activities to Collect Responses, so stay tuned!