1,800 Employees Impacted… Change Successful Thanks to ADKAR & Great Sponsor

By Corey Niemeyer, Colorado Department of Public Safety

May 6, 2021

In the Fall of 2019, the Colorado Department of Public Safety (CDPS) decided to move forward with digitizing our employee performance management system. The large-scale change meant that every employee at CDPS would view and sign off on their performance management plan (PMP) inside of a web based application, instead of a PDF form as has always been done previously. Luckily, the decision to digitize this process came before COVID-19 when a large part of our workforce suddenly needed to work from home. 

As with any large change, there was bound to be resistance at every level of the organization. HR’s Employee Engagement Team foresaw a lot of this resistance and designed the implementation with change management in mind to help folks adjust to the change. Using ideas from both Lean & Agile, the team began by hosting focus groups to discuss challenges around the PDF system and what they would like in a web based application. The team then created a minimally viable product to test on end users and to gain real feedback and user stories. Through making adjustments based on the invaluable feedback and suggestions from the end user testing, the team gained trust while building toward implementation of a successful product. 

Crafting and using a successful change management plan that centered around employee needs was a critical part of the project. When planning the communications, training and change schedule, the team used an ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) analysis to see what parts we were hitting well and where we should add more focus. It was valuable to do that exercise and think about the change from the view of the employees who would be impacted. 

CDPS’s HR Director was the sponsor for the project and was actively involved in promoting the change and removing any barriers that we faced. She communicated with leadership from in the various divisions to get them excited about the change and to become promoters of the change themselves. She asked the division leaders to send the first communication about the change to their staff so that they would hear it first from their own divisions, and not from the Executive Director's Office. The team communicated about the upcoming changes frequently and were always sure to hit on why it mattered for the average employee and what the change meant in terms of making the PMP process better. 

Training was a huge part of the project as well, since telling employees about the change, without teaching them how to use the new system would have led to a poor implementation and unhappy employees. The team created a training website loaded with mini videos showing how to do each step. This web based training was available 24/7 for employees to view and take at their own pace. The team also conducted many instructor-led training sessions where learners were given test accounts with fun character names, such as Bill & Ted, and got to go into the system and complete the process for themselves in a learning environment. This was very valuable, because the employees who attended the instructor-led training sessions and got to use the system, would then go and talk about how much better the new system was then the old PDF version. When employees would hear that the change was a good thing from their work colleagues, it built trust in the new process and encouraged them to be excited about the change as well. 

Initial change management was so successful that the change proceeded straight through the sudden shock of COVID-19 sending employees home. While working remotely, the Employee Engagement Team shifted to providing all online instructor-led training that still allowed participants to learn in the fun test accounts. CDPS HR asked several stakeholders whether they would prefer to postpone the change away from PDFs given all the changes and uncertainty of the new pandemic experience. Employees preferred to proceed with the change to the new system, even while given the option to revert.

The main takeaway from this success story from the Employee Engagement Team’s point of view is that having an active and supportive sponsor, coordinating early and often with those impacted by the change, offering effective training and building a coalition of folks who are excited about the change, will be extremely helpful in implementing a successful project.