Change Readiness Assessment: Is Your Organization Ready for What Lies Ahead?

What is Change Readiness?  

You’ve decided to take big steps in achieving your mission objectives by undergoing a digital transformation but is your organization's culture going to support or hinder you in implementing changes? Change readiness is the degree to which your organization’s culture supports your ability to design, implement, and manage change. Change readiness is rooted in how much your culture supports individual agency and how flexible it is with control.  

Some parts of your culture support your people in taking action (agency), and others support your leaders in managing the organization’s affairs (control). If you don’t have the right amount of each, change becomes difficult. 

About the Change Readiness Assessment 

Our Change Readiness Assessment is designed to identify underlying patterns in your organization that are most likely to derail your digital change efforts and bring them to the surface so that they can be addressed. This will make it easier to solve problems before they emerge. 

The underlying model here is the culture assessment doesn’t tell you if your culture is good or bad, but instead pinpoints where your culture is along the continuum from traditional to futurist. Neither side of the spectrum is going to be perfect for every culture—it depends on what drives your success—but when it comes to change readiness, there are specific areas that you do want to be more futurist. 

Cultures that are TRADITIONAL minimize agency and maximize control. Traditional management (20th century) was about command and control and change was carefully scripted from the top. Individuals were not encouraged to act on their own, and change was expected to be slow and incremental. 

Cultures that are FUTURIST maximize agency and minimize control. Over the last 15 years, a more futurist approach to management has evolved where employees are empowered to take action and leadership is less about control and more about facilitating the right results. Change in these cultures is rapid, iterative, and focused on unlocking new value. 

 This assessment shows you where you fall on that traditional/futurist scale, and areas where you are too traditional may create roadblocks to your change efforts. 

In the assessment, there are 64 individual culture questions. The culture questions are rating statements, and employees are asked to share their experience around each statement—was it true all the time for them, not at all, or somewhere in between? Not all the questions are directly related to change, but understanding your overall culture patterns is also important for interpreting your change data. 

How Does it Work? 

The first step is having your staff complete a 15-minute survey. Once complete, we will compile and analyze the results before sharing an executive summary filled with high-level reporting of our findings. This offers you valuable insights and recommendations that you can use to calculate where your organization stands in terms of being ready for change. By revealing the internal dynamics that make change hard, you can proactively address your change-related trouble spots. 

 It shows you how your organization approaches the 8 core elements of workplace culture, which has implications for your ability to design, implement, and manage change. 

How Can We Use the Results of the Assessment? 

Your results will include:  

• Overall Culture score. How futurist are you (and how do you compare to our overall aggregate data)? 

• Culture Marker scores. How futurist are you on the 8 core elements of culture (we call them Culture Markers)? We’ll pay specific attention to “agility” and “innovation.” 

• Agency and Control scores. How futurist are you on the specific areas of culture that relate to change? 

• Change readiness analysis. For each Marker, we’ll focus on the agency and control aspects to reveal how ready you are for change.  

• Culture pattern analysis. We’ll share a summary of how similar your culture patterns were to the patterns that have emerged from our research using the aggregate culture data. 

Once you know what areas may be hindering your change readiness you can take the initiative toward those areas. Maybe you need to take a deeper look at how your teams collaborate, or maybe you need to chat with your teams about being more proactive with sharing information. As you move forward with your digital transformation you can refer back to your report to diagnose problems that are slowing down your change process as they come up.  

Getting Started 

Ready to get started? Contact us to learn how to get started!