Change Management Success Stories: Don’t Wait to Celebrate!

“Oh look, another change programme – I’ll just wait to see if it goes away.” That’s a fair quote from almost any employee experiencing change, given that change so often fails. So, what can be done to ensure it doesn’t?

If we think about PROSCI’s ADKAR model of what a good change journey looks like, we’ll first build Awareness, then Desire, Knowledge, Ability and eventually Reinforce the change. Change management success stories are your key reinforcements, and if created and communicated as early and regularly as possible, they will propel your people towards adopting your change, ensuring it isn’t just another failed initiative.  

I’ve seen this in practice across many change programmes and industries. Just recently, a global energy company was facing deeply ingrained resistance more than two years after the rollout of a mandatory ERP system, which saw <50% adoption. When we interviewed end users, each used before vs. after examples that irrefutably highlighted the longer-term increases to the organisation’s buying power. Sharing these highly personal testimonials to those with the highest resistance led to a real shift in perception, and increased usage of this critical tool.

Why was this the case? It’s because celebrating milestones and successes produces a whole host of benefits for your people during change.

Change management success stories provide tangible evidence that the change can and will lead to positive outcomes, helping you build belief in the change from the outset. After all, who can argue with facts?

Good success stories leverage the power of the possible and bring to life the amazing things that could happen as a result of the change. Use them to inspire your stakeholders, demonstrating that the change is both achievable and worthwhile, boosting morale and motivation to embrace the change journey.

One of the biggest reasons why change fails is the inability to overcome resistance. Success stories can be used to address this head-on, alleviating fear around the change and building a more positive perception towards it. There’s nothing more comforting than knowing that someone has experienced the same challenge as you and come out successfully on the other side!

Success stories offer practical insights into how change is implemented well, highlighting real scenarios, best practices and lessons learned. This can aid a smoother transition to ‘business as usual’ and build internal change capability.

As your change journey evolves, particularly for prolonged, phased initiatives, success stories can help drive momentum by keeping the change top of mind, ultimately feeding long-term adoption.

By encouraging success stories to be shared widely, you can help build a culture of inclusivity, recognition and continuous improvement. Sharing success stories shows people that embracing change can unlock cumulative improvements, which nudges them towards a more proactive, adaptive mindset – often without them even realising it!

When the people experiencing the change are the face or voice of success stories, it generates more Awareness, Desire and Knowledge amongst peers. This helps bring people along the journey with you through a sense of community, solidarity and shared purpose. What’s more rewarding than that?

Success stories are an opportunity to showcase measurable outcomes and results, whether it’s increased efficiency, cost savings or improved experience. Evidencing clear return on investment to all stakeholders is the strongest case for change – because numbers don’t lie!

We saw this last benefit in action while working with an industry-leading life sciences company, who were seeking to not only build trust but also win funding to deliver a new, internally built risk-sensing tool which would transform their supply chain and procurement processes. With just a basic, prototyped version of the tool available, we partnered with stakeholders to generate a real-time example of how, even in its simplest form, the tool helped mitigate supply chain disruptions following a geo-political event. We evidenced significant time savings, and this early success story was used to engage sponsors to secure the funding to deliver those very benefits across the organisation.  

And, speaking of an early success story…

Change management success stories can be celebrated at any time, not just after the full change has been implemented. Being able to demonstrate early successes in change programmes should be a key ingredient of your secret sauce to carry people through prolonged periods of change.

For example, we were supporting the multi-year rollout of a data reporting tool to increase efficiency and effectiveness in a global life sciences company’s supply chain. We calculated an 87% adoption rate in less than one year, which we used to generate a global campaign of testimonials representing key roles, regions and sectors over the following years of the rollout to drive even more momentum and adoption.

Share your change success stories far and wide, and use them as an opportunity to recognise people across multiple channels, whether in team meetings, townhalls, on the intranet or in newsletters. And what’s more, success stories are also an opportunity for leaders to sponsor the change with evidence to support it.

It may even be worth incentivising success, consulting HR on how demonstrating change through success stories can be embedded into development goals and plans – and rewarded. Again, this helps to build that culture of continuous improvement, empowerment and ownership of driving change.

It’s clear how success stories play a vital role in change management and adoption. They are powerful tools to motivate, assure and guide individuals, teams and entire organisations through change.

And while everyone can – and should – create a success story, there is an art doing it well. This is one area where a specialist change partner can help you do this in a methodological way, backed by data and industry best practice. For example, by:

Understanding your audience and the change impact on them to know where to look for the biggest – and earliest – successes or resistance areas to respond to.

Designing surveys and engaging with priority groups to understand what matters to them and helping you to reflect that in your storytelling.

Crafting role-based lenses for your success stories to create a more personalised, familiar view of ‘what’s in it for me?’ and distilling complex themes into digestible messaging for specific audiences, all connected to strategic business outcomes so people can join the dots on why the change matters.

Through a structured benefit realisation methodology, ensuring your success stories are led by quantifiable metrics which highlight the difference the change is making.

Bringing the stories to life in a way that commands attention, from rich pictures to infographics, animations to videos and everything in between.

Collaborating with you to create a robust change and engagement plan, so you’re sharing these successes with impact in order to really make that change stick.

If you’d like specialist support with your change programme, get in touch with our team for a conversation about how we can help you create change management success stories.