AJC OCM Awareness

Hi, I'm Andrea Jones and today we're going to talk about the first A in the Prosci Adkar methodology of change management called awareness. So first, what is awareness in change management? Awareness is all of the end users who are going to be using a new system or using a new piece of equipment or using a new office space or doing whatever it is that needs to be done in a changed state. All of those people are aware there's a change coming. That's it. That's what awareness is. Okay, so now you know what it is. When is it appropriate to make these people aware? I was on the call with a CEO a few days ago and he said, and I wrote it down to remember exactly. Those guys don't even know what's coming. For system implementation to be done in about six months, okay, system implementation, six months, that's probably sufficient actually. You don't need to have know it's coming that far in advance. However, I would say no later than a quarter, three months before you intend to make that change a reality in their lives, you should get them aware. It takes human beings some time to get through all the stages of, you know, confusion and all the other stages we're going to talk about in the change management process. So three months in advance, I would say minimum. If it's a very small change, maybe you can give yourself some leeway on that. But that's kind of to the next couple of points here. So awareness is them knowing when is at least three months in advance and how this will very much depend on your organization. Do you send an email? Are you a newsletter company? Do you have an intranet? Right. Or is it all hands meetings that you take or is it managers discussing things with people? I would say there's more than one channel to make people aware. And in fact, if you think about your own email inbox, probably burying things under an email is not the best way. A change we made at ajc, we did a video ahead of time and sent it the night before an all hands meeting so that people could watch it and then ask their questions the next day. And then we followed up with everybody. We had our managers do that so that there was a one on one conversation with the report back to me. So I knew that everyone had been talked to and I was able to address any additional questions they had. So there's lots of ways to do it. More than one is most likely the best bet. And if you do go through to the point of having managers talking to individuals, which is ultimately the best way to ensure every human being has been talked to at least once and they're aware. I would also follow up with making sure you track that they have done it and not just expect that they do have those conversations. All right, finally, what is the best way to do this if you don't have experience or haven't done it before? At ajc, we are offering a coached service. So if you have someone in your own organization, maybe it's your VP of hr, or it's somebody who's a project manager who's interested in change management, that might have five to ten hours a week through the course of your change implementation. Lighter in the earlier end, heavier towards the end, and we'll talk about that later in the next video series. That person can be coached by one of our people to follow the whole process. Right. And they can talk through the awareness channels and the best messaging verbiage to use and how to do the follow up and all of those things. So that's a way you can do it without having to even hire an outsourced change manager, which of course we do as well. Hope that was helpful on awareness. Thanks so much for watching.