HP: Change Experience Framework

Overview

HP's Change Experience Framework is a process that helps HR leaders determine the necessary actions to shape desired change experiences and achieve successful change outcomes. Developed by HP's Global Change Management Experience Center of Excellence (COE), the framework emerged from an internal review that revealed change management could go very well or very poorly — and that consistent success required focusing on the process of change management itself.

The Challenge

HP recognized that for change management to consistently drive scalable success, the COE needed to move beyond ad-hoc approaches. Their internal review uncovered best practices alongside significant opportunities for growth and refinement. The goal was clear: ensure every change initiative at HP, large or small, implemented identified best practices for driving change success.

Solution Overview

Three key elements make the Change Experience Framework a success:

1. Experience-based objectives
2. Change experience journey maps
3. Scalable change resources

For large-scale transformation, change initiative stakeholders co-create experience-based objectives and change experience journey maps in a two- to three-day change experience workshop. For smaller-scale initiatives, HP created streamlined, quick-start training and tools.

Solution Components

Experience-Based Objective Setting

HP realized that the way employees are treated during an organizational change will influence their adoption of desired behaviors, so focusing on behavior change alone is not enough. HR must also set goals to actively shape a positive experience.

Within HP's approach, experience-based objectives exist alongside programmatic ones. Initiative teams articulate specific, employee-experience-centric goals with support from the central change management team. Change initiative teams "start at the end goal" of a positive employee experience and work backward to specific change tactics.

Change Experience Journey Maps

To align change tactics with employees' priorities, HP maps the employee experience through a given change to identify key milestones and touchpoints.

Stakeholders involved in a change initiative's creation and execution — including the business initiative team, HR, and other subject matter experts — create a start-to-finish journey map during a change experience workshop.

In a "walk the walls" activity, stakeholders document each initiative milestone, touchpoint, and associated moment of truth:

• Milestones — significant events for the change initiative
• Touchpoints — change activities or knowledge to be shared with employees
• Moments of truth — when employees could implicitly or explicitly judge management of the experience

Asking "If we get it right, what would our employees say?" reinforces the importance of employees' experience relative to programmatic change objectives.

Scalable Change Resources

HP takes an agile approach to change experience management by scaling training and tools to support leaders at all expertise levels.

After receiving feedback that the full framework was too complex for novices, the change management team streamlined it into a quick-start guide with six key elements:

1. Define the desired experience — Start your change journey with a clearly defined end state and case for change
2. Know your stakeholders — Understand who's impacted and how it will affect them
3. Understand what's changing — Identify and document the impact of the change
4. Map the change experience journey — Define the journey stakeholders will take to get to the end state
5. Build your change experience — Identify tactics and develop a schedule to deliver the change experience
6. Measure readiness — Build feedback mechanisms to monitor and report on readiness

The quick-start guide features self-service training with easy-to-follow instructions, peer support guidance, a targeted number of resources to avoid overwhelming novices, and advanced training readily accessible for those who want it.

Results

HP's assessment of whether the framework works is based on employees' accounts of the change experience. The "What will employees say" statements, created at the beginning of a change initiative, establish the primary success metric. HP asks, "Did employees say what we wanted them to say?"

By making the framework approachable for busy, nonexpert change leaders, HP's change management team can support change experiences throughout the organization at every scale.

"Including experience metrics as part of the program's overall dashboard is essential to ensuring the employee experience is front and center at all times. It also shifts the program team's definition of success to include the human factor." — Amanda Hume, Head of Change Experience, HP

Key Takeaways

• Start with the end experience in mind — Define what employees should feel and say before designing change tactics
• Journey mapping reveals blind spots — Walking through the change from the employee's perspective uncovers moments that could make or break adoption
• Scalability requires simplicity — A framework that only experts can use will never achieve organization-wide impact
• Experience metrics matter as much as programmatic ones — Measuring how employees experience change is essential to defining success