Faced with change challenges like never before, building personal change competency and organizational change capability is imperative to effectively responding to the global pandemic and to future workplace success. COVID-19 aside, organizations have been facing faster, more complex, more interdependent and cross-functional change in the past years than ever before. As executives look to the future, a growing majority agree that change management is critical to success in times of modern disruption. Strategies to accelerate speed to market, improve products and services and to enhance competitive advantage depend on the collective ability of their workforce to adapt to necessary change.

Prosci’s ADKAR is an acronym that represents the five tangible and concrete outcomes that people need to achieve for lasting change: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. Going through COVID-19 initiated change as individuals, we can use the ADKAR lens to examine the key steps required to successfully adapt to necessary change.

The objective of awareness is to ensure people understand the reason for a change. The spread of COVID-19 brought a new, feverish awareness to the importance of personal hygiene, increased physical isolation, and increased social connection. Life was much different just a few days prior to the first known case – some people understandably resist some the new norms and expectations. Changing conditions require us to shift in different ways to stay safe, connected and productive. Leaders and managers have a responsibility to communicate early, clearly and frequently about the business need for current changes and the business plan to address the changes. Some leaders and managers are misguided in the belief that they should wait until there is complete and perfect knowledge before making an announcement. It is often more effective to get ahead of potential rumor mills by rallying the support of early would-be adopters.

The objective of desire is to inspire people to make a conscious decision to support a change. As much of the corporate workforce transitioned to remote work, once popular memes about surviving meetings that could have been emails slowly gave way to mild appreciation and steeply growing desire for web conferences. To join the Zoom call, or not to join? Camera on, or off? Regardless of which side of the meeting-or-email fence you’re on, these circumstances remind us that successful change, at its core is rooted at the individual level. Organizational performance depends on each individual’s personal choice to engage digitally – this time, influenced by the implications of the COVID-19 induced transition to remote work and their personal circumstances. Leaders and managers must ask questions, truly listen, coach and incentivize now more than ever, to inspire employees to make the personal decision to stay connected and support new ways of working.

The objectives of knowledge and ability are to ensure people have the procedural “know how” and can demonstrate skills needed to be successful. Many organizations for whom remote work was not commonplace raced to mobilize and redeploy employees in response to government mandated lockdowns. The responsibility landed squarely on the shoulders of managers — who themselves may have been inexperienced at remote work and managing virtual teams. Just as in strategic initiatives, the success of rapid change hinged on balancing the emphasis on the technical side of change with the people side of change. The role of managers was to ensure employees have the technology, security settings and procedural knowledge, and that they felt confident and competent in demonstrating ability to keep up with new expectations and achieve desired outcomes. Leaders and managers’ success hinge on their knowledge of how to support individual employees’ transitions and ability to function as communicators, liaisons, advocates of change, resistance managers and finally to coach employees through the uncertainty of change.

The goal of reinforcing change is to recognize success and encourage continuity. As winter approaches, case numbers appear to be spiking across most of the U.S. Some organizations have responded to the potential peril by announcing extended remote work through 2021, rather than return to the physical workplace. Leaders and managers now have months of qualitative, if not quantitative data on remote teams’ performance. These insights indicate areas of improvement as well as what’s working well – success factors that can be reinforced. Leaders and managers should use 1:1 conversations, team meetings as mechanisms for positive feedback to encourage repeat behaviors, rewards and recognition to incentivize employees to remain focused on learning, growth and performance.

A strategy for sustainable success:

Executives prioritize change management maturity as a strategic goal, and champion its integration into all initiatives. Each initiative should implement a change charter and have employees dedicated to managing the people side of change. Executives must act as active and visible sponsors, build supportive coalitions and communicate directly throughout the initiative.

Managers and supervisors use a standard methodology and skills to support initiatives from strategic changes to individual employees’ development.

Role-based change management training is made available for all employees, inclusive of frontline employees and individual contributors.

Developing change capability and achieving this maturity determines how successful an organization can expect to be during this and any time of change.