The Dashboard Isn't the Change
This is the fourth article in a series exploring change management through a behavioral science lens using ADKAR as a framework.
Have you ever worked for a “metrics-happy” organization? I’m talking PowerBI, Tableau, a CRM, and that department that insists on still using Excel. You’ve got pie charts and color-coded bar graphs that show frequency counts of everything from customer complaints to the number of coffee pods consumed in the break room.
Organizations love metrics.
But during a change initiative, one of the most important questions often gets overlooked:
What exactly are we trying to measure? And why?
We’re pro-metrics ourselves, but measurement for the sake of measurement can at best waste valuable time. At worst, it can change the strategic focus of an organization when that wasn’t the intention.
Oftentimes when metrics do show up in change management initiatives (which they don’t always), they function more as a checklist of change activities. Were discovery workshops conducted? Yes. Was training completed? Yes. 100% across the board.
But from a behavioral science perspective, ability isn't measured by what people know. It's measured by what people do. If a change is successful, not only should employees be behaving differently than they were before; their behavior also should contribute to the company’s business objectives.
Behavior or Outcomes?
There are two common ways organizations can measure the impact of a change. The first is to measure the behavior itself.
For example:
Percentage of requests submitted through the new workflow
Percentage of employees using the new intake form
Percentage of customer handoffs completed using the new process
These measures tell us whether people are working differently. This is useful when employees are learning new skills or you need to be sure they’re engaging in the right behaviors to get results.
The second approach is to measure the outcomes those behaviors are intended to produce.
Examples might include:
Customer satisfaction
Revenue
Quality scores
These measures tell us whether the change is producing value for the organization. They're particularly useful when the result matters more than the specific behaviors used to achieve it.
In some cases, organizations may choose to measure both behaviors and outcomes (when safety or compliance are on the line).
Measurement in Practice
Let's imagine a company is implementing a new customer intake process. During change planning, the project team identifies two goals:
Reduce customer onboarding time.
Improve customer satisfaction.
Those are both outcome measures.
The challenge is that it may take months before those outcomes begin moving. If onboarding times remain unchanged after launch, leaders need a way to determine whether the problem is the new process itself or whether employees simply aren't using it yet.
To address this, the team decides to measure behavior for the first eight weeks after go-live.
They track:
Percentage of customer records entered through the new workflow
Percentage of required intake fields completed correctly
Percentage of handoffs completed using the new process
These measures provide immediate feedback about whether employees are performing the new behaviors. After eight weeks, adoption is consistently above 90%. At that point, the team shifts its attention to onboarding times and customer satisfaction scores.
Why?
Because once they're confident the behavior is occurring, the more important question becomes whether the behavior is producing the desired business result.
This isn't about choosing behavior measures over outcome measures. It's about selecting measures that answer the questions you're trying to answer at a particular point in the change process.
The Ability Question
One of the reasons ability can be difficult to measure is that it sits between behavior and results. If employees aren't performing the new behavior, it's hard to argue they have the ability to do it consistently. If employees are performing the new behavior but the desired results never materialize, it's worth asking whether the behavior was connected to the right outcome in the first place.
This is why the measures we choose matter.
They're not just helping us evaluate a project. They're helping us answer a fundamental question about the change itself:
Can people successfully perform the new way of working?
That's really what ability is trying to answer.
When your organization measures the success of a change initiative, are you measuring the behaviors that drive results, the results themselves, or both?