Now more than ever, organizations must adapt to frequent changes in the economic, technological, and human landscape. From operational shifts to adjustments in business strategies, and from minor workflow changes to complete organizational overhauls, change management is crucial for ensuring smooth transitions. Corporate training is an essential part of this process.
However, every organization is unique. Successful organizational transitions therefore require a structured, well-developed training program tailored to your company’s specific needs.
This post will tell you exactly how to create effective change management training for employees. It outlines the key steps, best practices, and tools needed to design a training program that prepares your staff to successfully embrace and navigate organizational change.
Step 1: Define Your Training Goals
First, identify the organizational goals for the change management training you are about to build. This can be broken down into smaller steps.
First question: What does the company want to achieve with the changes it will introduce? This is your starting point. It may be the adoption of new software, a new annual performance review process, or a company merger, to name a few.
Next, define what a successful change management initiative means for the company. Will it be a smooth, company-wide adoption of new software, or is a department-wide adoption sufficient? This step involves considering metrics and how you will measure the initiative’s success. Clearly define measurable outcomes.
Finally, establish the training goals. What content is necessary for the training to ensure the change management initiative is successful and achieves its outcomes? Conduct surveys or focus groups to pinpoint employee concerns about the changes, identify necessary skill gaps to ensure a smooth transition, and understand their training preferences (e.g., some may prefer eLearning courses over in-person instructor-led workshops).
Step 2: Design a Tailored Training Program
Once training goals are defined, to maximize the success of your change management initiative, tailor training content to the roles and responsibilities of your learner audience. If your audience is not the entire company, you must segment it.
Identify the different groups within the company that will participate in the training program—these will be your audience segments. Match training goals to each segment and customize the training content accordingly. Examples include managers, executives, and frontline employees.
Then, outline the training program’s structure for each segment, including modules, units, lessons, learning activities, and learning assessments.
Pro Tip: Consider a personalized learning approach, which adapts to learner progress and allows customization based on goals, skills, and other factors.
Make sure to cover key change management topics with the training program’s content, such as
- What the change management process looks like, who should be involved in it, with which responsibilities, and at what timing
- The impact of a successful change management process
- How to grow an adaptable and resilient workforce in preparation for future organizational changes
- Effective communication techniques to use during the change
Also, remember to incorporate the skill gaps identified in Step 1, along with staff concerns about the changes, as this information should determine the topics covered in your change management training for employees.
Step 3: Choose the Right Training Methods
In addition to segmenting your audience and structuring the program, you must define the most appropriate training method. This could be a single method or a combination, and it may vary by audience segment.
For instance, you might find it more appropriate to deliver change management training to directors via video-based training and to frontline employees via instructor-led training. This is not a literal recommendation; the choice truly depends on the specific needs of the company or audience segment and the training preferences collected in Step 1.
But here are a few possibilities:
- Blended learning—combines eLearning modules with online workshops and live instructor-moderated discussion sessions, accommodating different learning styles.
- Interactive training—to make training more engaging through the involvement in dialogue (or roleplay) simulations
- Case studies—for a more practical learning experience during which learners read reports of hypothetical organizational change scenarios, analyze, and solve them individually or in a group
- Microlearning—to maximize knowledge retention and fit busy schedules, as training content is organized into very small, easily digestible lessons
When choosing a training method, consider the platforms and tools you’ll need to deliver the program through that method. Consider, as well, the ones you’ll need to track learner results. For instance, you might need a learning management system (LMS) to deliver eLearning modules and to connect them with the LMS—following an eLearning standard like xAPI or cmi5—to do the tracking.
Step 4: Implement the Training Program
Once the design of your change management training program for employees is complete and the content is accessible on your chosen training platform, the next step is to launch the program. For this, strong leadership support is essential. Leaders must advocate for the program and set an example by participating in training sessions themselves, regardless of whether they are part of a specific audience segment.
Next, inform learners about the program’s purpose, how to access it, the completion timeline, and, most importantly, its value to them.
Step 5: Evaluate and Refine the Training Program
Recall the learner results data mentioned in Step 3 that can be gathered through an LMS. This includes, for instance, interactive quiz results or the time learners spent on a certain number of slides or screens in a course.
By analyzing this data, you can uncover knowledge gaps, understand how staff interacted with the training content, and ultimately review and adjust the program to make it more engaging and effective. For instance, you might discover that learners engaged more with content on certain topics, indicating a need for further training in those areas.
However, that’s not the only way to refine your change management training after launch. You can—and should—encourage personnel to evaluate the program upon completion. Ask them to share their feedback through a post-training survey.
Pro Tip: LMSs can facilitate post-training surveys. These platforms also allow you to build and schedule custom reports for result tracking, such as attendance, assessment scores, and course completion rates.
Ensure you diversify the type of training evaluation questions in your post-training survey to capture not only general but also nuanced and detailed opinions. Include multiple-choice, multiple-selection, and free-text questions.
Ultimately, measuring the success of your change management initiative post-training, according to the metrics defined in Step 1, will determine the effectiveness of your change management training for employees. However, collecting learner feedback and tracking learner results are also crucial for continuous program improvement.
For more methods of gathering learner feedback, read our article on learning measurement.
Best Practices for Creating Change Management Training for Employees
As with any other type of training, involving the learner audience in the development of your change management training for employees is ideal. They can best articulate their concerns about the changes and their training preferences. This information is crucial for addressing the challenges of organizational change within your company and should inform the design of the learning experience, influencing the program’s structure, content, and training methods.
It’s also essential to communicate the launch to staff in a timely and thorough manner. You must be very clear about the practicalities of participating in the program and—this is crucial—raise awareness of its importance. If the team doesn’t understand the benefits of dedicating time and effort to the training (not only the benefits to the business but also to their daily lives at work), the entire change management initiative might be jeopardized.
Finally, keep your company’s culture in mind when building the training program. Especially in change management processes, off-the-shelf training solutions can be risky. We recommend custom solutions that take into consideration the company’s values, beliefs, practices, and behaviors throughout the entire learning experience design.
Preparing Employees for Organizational Change
A well-crafted change management training program is fundamental in preparing workforces for organizational change. It dramatically increases the chances of a smooth software adoption, an organizational structure overhaul, or whatever change is being implemented.
To summarize, ensure you:
- Define the outcomes of the organizational change and the goals for the training program
- Segment your learner audience and, then, customize the training content and outline the program’s structure per segment
- Choose appropriate training methods
- Ask for leadership support
- Communicate the launch properly
- And—very important—never stop gathering learner feedback and tracking learner results to improve the program accordingly
We can help you every step of the way, so if your company will experience organizational change, and you want the transition to be a success, reach out to us today!
