How To Use The 5 Stages Of Readiness For Change Management Results

Change management is an approach to business transformation that prepares a department or an entire organization for significant upcoming change. The approach has been refined over the past 100 years. It is well-suited to develop both readiness and motivation in each team member at your company so that they embrace the implementation of changes and are able to align with the future state of the organization. When these principles are properly considered and integrated into learning gamification or formal company trainings, learners show much stronger performance improvements.

The 20/80 Split

Research has borne out that typically only 20% of a company or non-profit’s workforce wish to make substantive changes. These individuals are fully ready to adopt the changes their organization implements, but for varying reasons, the other 80% of the workforce are not. Most short-sighted change management initiatives rarely achieve the transformative results leaders seek because of the limited focus by their change managers on the “ready 20%".

However, lasting success comes from respectfully engaging all employees in the change process. It means embracing the wider 80% with strategies that move them to motivational readiness. Therefore, organizational leadership are charged with the difficult task of engaging everyone in equal measure to avoid a “quick fix” change management approach that fails to hit the mark.

Besides Falling Earnings Revenue, How Do You Know When It Is Time To Implement Change Management?

It’s helpful to view this problem through a real-world example. Imagine you are a manufacturing company who has grown considerably from its founding 22 years ago. Most of the people working there have been with the company since its founding, because you have incrementally added employees to accommodate steady new growth. As these new people were added, they were trained by more senior team members using a learning and mentorship approach that trains in the flow of work.

Unfortunately, some of these long-standing employees are approaching retirement. This presents a high risk to your company, especially if the manufacturing processes are incomplete, partially or fully relying on undocumented institutional knowledge. Once people leave, there is no guarantee the precision of your processes will remain behind, no matter how thorough they are in communicating to their subordinates.

This situation will likely require leadership to up their management game by investing in a new quality management system, or QMS. That means added responsibilities for long-timers and newcomers alike, both who may see this effort as a burden on their already crunched time. They may ask: Why do we have to change when the system has worked so well for so long?

The 5 Stages Of Readiness Enable Successful Change Management

The answer is: because our organization is changing. But to facilitate true, lasting change in your organization, you must have an understanding of human readiness to change. There are five levels of readiness to change, that can be measured and influenced:

Stage 1: Precontemplation

This means NOT ready to change. These people are absolutely not ready to change, so they must be provided with information on the problem and why the solution, like a quality management system, is necessary to achieving the desired results. Workforce members who are in the precontemplation stage must also be well-informed through multiple methods, of the negative impacts the company will experience by simply retaining the status quo. They need to know that NOT engaging in the development and implementation of the quality management system will hurt them as well. And they also need to hear from the small percentage of people who have bought into the need for the change, so they can better understand how and why those early adopters have embraced the change. After all, they may have personal or professional bad habits they are already in the process of changing so they are capable of performing at their highest level at the workplace.

One of several things your company should start with is holding an all-hands meeting with team members to discuss:

the macro performance challenge(s) your entire organization is facing,
why the company is facing them,
and the change that is needed to ‘right the ship’.

Hopefully you have already identified standard bearers, who are those 20% that have already bought into the solution. Your leadership team should work with them to begin planning the QMS development and implementation process, then train the team members how to facilitate change within the organization so they can take their next steps. It will also help you unearth any damaging assumptions that will undermine business results after the initiative has been completed.

A few weeks after identifying the standard bearers, sketching out the implementation process, and gaining approval from both leadership and your 20%, it’s time to proactively find conflicts. Change advocates should meet with the early adopters in small group huddles to answer questions and to hear any concerns they can think of. It should be an interactive discussion with verbal recognition that this change may be difficult for some. All should be encouraged to express any dissent, so that leadership can understand concerns and find adequate ways to address them. Otherwise, you may run into “guerilla resistance” where there is covert resentment and obfuscation that can destroy the change initiative, and jeopardize company and culture. During this discussion period, it’s critical to shore up strong good faith by demonstrating respect of company team members. If the early adopters don’t feel respected, they will not be effective advocates to those who are not fully be on board with changes envisioned.

One approach is to promise and maintain anonymity. It is an excellent way to proactively address potential guerilla resistance, because you are earnestly trying to bridge the gap. Consider introducing an external, non-biased vendor, consultant, or trained facilitator to employees that is committed to supporting the process. This non-biased entity can help the 20% identify those who might not be ready to make a change or perhaps who were considering it but were still on the fence, without bringing any conflicting personality, emotional baggage, or historical conflict that might exist within the organization. This individual or team can conduct anonymous interviews with individuals who represent those who would be impacted by this change in direction so that we can:

Determine the representational group’s stage of readiness to change, what their objections might be, and the things they will be happy to see happen with the change.
Determine the ”burning platform” for people at each stage of readiness motivation.
Analyze the results to develop a set of communication and action recommendations to move the initiative with higher buy-in by the remaining 80%.

Stage 2: Contemplation

Most people do not just jump to being ready to change. They have to go through a second stage of change called contemplation, where your employees can see the value of making the change, even though they may not yet be fully bought into the solution.

Although these team members are hesitant about the change, there is some good news. They can likely already see the pros and cons of changing, as well as the pros and cons of NOT changing (or have at least given it some thought). That means they understand change is coming, and are starting to move in that direction mentally and emotionally. You are in the perfect place to help them commit more deeply, moving even further towards adopting and carrying out the desired change(s) in your company.

Individuals in contemplation do not necessary need a burning platform, but most need some persuasion by being shown the steps needed to make the change. They need concrete examples of what the target change will look like for them. This means providing engaging case studies on how other people have already made the change, and how they were happy with it is a useful strategy. Some employees respond well to this, but others might still see this as too big of a hurdle to jump through, given their responsibilities. Therefore, your leadership must make sure these colleagues are able to clearly see the path forward as easy and straightforward, perhaps with a written series of steps, where each step has sub-steps. Imagery that illustrates the process through job aids can really help show the ease of this activity. The job aids can be passed out to individuals and discussed in large, periodic “town hall” types of meetings for your workforce.

State 3: Preparation

Many of your employees may have approached the point of readiness to change, becoming actively and positively engaged in at least some of the work to build the QMS. In this stage, providing step-by-step training and structural support on how to write procedures and work instructions can help build their confidence, as well as the actual ability to develop documentation which will actually deliver business process improvement results. Making sure that these team members have all the tools they need, and the time they need to engage in the preparation of these “How To” documents is critical, or the change management process can quickly stall out here.

Stage 4: Action (READINESS TO CHANGE)

After the challenge issues and concerns have become clear to your leadership, you can develop a change strategy for employees at each stage of readiness, marrying the various processes of change to their stage of readiness. If you collaborate with a consulting vendor, your change management strategies might include a multi-pronged, internal communications campaign with specifically tailored messages addressing each distinct readiness group of employees:

Send out a customized, interactive survey with persuasive information, inviting those being surveyed to identify what they do and don’t like about the change, and outlining the benefits they will experience with the change. When employees interact with the survey, they can receive tailored information related to their stage of change. Interaction and engagement, with support, helps smooth the way for change adoption. For those who are engaged in the change, who are bought-in, they require emotional and psychological supports that deliver success for them as they adopt the required change initiative.
Hold regular team or ‘all call’ meetings to give updates on the progress of this change initiative.
Send out a digital game that invites employees to learn through playing, and where bite-sized training is embedded. If they play, you can include incentives such as them being entered into a drawing for a substantial, appealing prize (or series of prizes). These prizes should not be something insignificant, because that sends a message in itself of how you regard these changes - and them.
Distribute weekly newsletters that include what’s happening in the change management initiative, highlighting people and their testimonials. Showing how they engaged in this process and believe in it will help address people who are approaching readiness to change.
Throw a celebratory party for all employees once the QMS is largely in place, thanking them for their efforts and discussing the positive impact of their efforts on the company. This helps to publicly close the loop on the initiative, and provide a reflective point for everyone involved. Although there still may be some details to finalize, or tweaks to make on the system, your broader 80% should, for the most part, be ready to roll.

STAGE 5: MAINTENANCE

Cementing a change takes time as well. The longer an organizational culture has been accustomed to doing things a certain way, the more likely it is that over time they’ll slide back into old ways and the change initiative will ultimately fail. Therefore, maintenance is the fifth readiness stage.

To be in maintenance, and depending on the extent of the change, change implementation and action by most if not all individuals must have been going on for at least six months. Providing ongoing structural support in the form of progress reports, tweaks being made, employee testimonies on the positives, and tips on how to overcome challenges are some of the many ways you can provide that structural support. But DO NOT ASSUME that everything is just fine. It takes diligent oversight to make sure you succeed in this change initiative for the long run.

Conclusion

It sounds like a lot work, because it is. After all, you are making permanent and lasting changes to your organization, which has grown and endured over time. Some members of leadership might certainly buck your approach as being overly inclusive, or perhaps desire an approach that doesn’t address workforce members at their particular stage of change. They may say: Why not just mandate the change and make it happen?

Because evidence proves that doesn’t work. Instead, you have to effectively manage at the speed of change. It’s been shown that:

when your employees are treated with respect and support,
when their concerns are acknowledged,
when they see you have carefully considered and addressed their concerns,
when they are shown how the change will benefit them, and
when they have the needed support and ability to do what is needed to be done,

most will get on board and enthusiastically engage in your company’s change management process. Of course, there will be some who still fight change. That’s a natural response for many people. And it is possible that those that mount guerilla resistance will eventually need to leave the organization if they seek to undermine the cultural engagement with this new process. So keeping vigilant during this ‘’new birth” time will be important.

But if change management is performed correctly, the culture of your organization will remain intact and not veer off into negativity. Your employees will be more empowered to support the company, which will lead to greater productivity and workplace satisfaction.

Written by Sue Ebbers, Ph.D. and published in 2023.

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