When we investigate the reasons behind this failure rate, it appears that resistance to change is one of the main challenges hurting transformation projects. Employees lack a good understanding of the objectives to be achieved. Ultimately projects very rarely fail for technical reasons, more often than not it is human aspects that lead to failed programs. A sustained user engagement is absolutely necessary.

Rally employees through a common objective

Change should always be connected to the company’s strategic goals and challenges. It is essential to create meaning by mobilizing teams to tackle these challenges. The key is to offer employees a story that they can connect to and rely on a leader capable of embodying it.

If there is a case in which the OKRs are a real game changer, it is the digital transformation of organizations. The setting of objectives is also crucial because it allows everyone to know what is expected of them individually and/or collectively. It gives direction.

Obviously, for employees to feel fully engaged, they need clear goals and objectives. But is that enough to drive long-term performance and engagement?

KPIs to boost employees engagement and take ownership of success

Change starts with people. So, how do you create meaning in the workplace for your employees?

Bill Taylor, Fast Company’s co-founder, explains in an article for Harvard Business Review that meaning is the key to giving employees pride in what they do.

To put it simply, people want to feel proud of their work.

People need autonomy and ownership. For that, objectives need to be translated into tangible KPIs that should be specific and measurable to make each employee at an individual level feel proud of what they do.

It has been established that KPIs are reliable and tangible metrics used to assess employee performance. But what we tend to ignore is that KPIs can also be a source of constant engagement for employees and lead to improved adoption and performance.

It is essential to communicate the indicators chosen along with the objectives to be reached, as they will set the direction and pace of the actions to be taken. Employees need to be able to consult their indicators at any time and in any location and to analyze them immediately. Monitoring the evolution of the indicators, comparing them with colleagues or peers, measuring progress and knowing how much remains to be done to reach the objective are a must if you want to keep them motivated over time.

Furthermore, monitoring KPIs allows managers to see who is struggling in their daily tasks, who needs support, and send them relevant training and useful content to help them bridge the gap to success.
Because of these specific KPIs, recommendations will be personalized and tailored to the employees’ needs, avoiding them to crawl under a massive amount of information.

Define KPIs that can resonate with your employees

Only 26% of employees understand how their individual tasks relate to company goals.

These KPIs need to be defined from the top-level vision and percolate down into the organization by team, by department, by region and even by individual.

Every success can be measured and monitored with Key Performance Indicators, specific and personalized to each profile.

In the context of a transformation project, different KPIs are essential, depending on the phase and objective you are trying to reach. During the awareness stage, you will focus more on KPIs such as “rate of participation in training”, “number of content viewed or read”… While during the phase of adoption, you want to monitor KPIs related to data quality and the adoption of new tools and processes.

These KPIs are really the foundation for measuring,​ designing, and calibrating​ success metrics​ and basically assessing success.

What are the metrics that matter for a successful program?

One of our customers, a global leader in human resources solutions reached a successful digital transformation by using several KPIs around the Salesforce Sales Cloud platform achieving 90% adoption rate.

KPIs that has been defined for the adoption of a new CRM tool included:

• Compliance to sales process
• % of opportunities with valid closing dates
• % opportunities leveraging V360
• % of active opportunities updated since last month
• % Territory active accounts
• % of tier 1 accounts with at least 5 contacts
• Conversion rate
• Data quality
• Number of customer appointments
• Number of generated opportunities
• Activation rate
• Rate of responsiveness to messages

These KPIs have defined implicitly a certain desired behavior to adopt and recommended actions to perform to achieve those KPIs.
They are continuously monitored over time and compared to the objectives set within the platform. They therefore made it possible to measure and track adoption, reinforcement and performance and showed real improvement. The results speak for themselves:

• + 90 % vs 40% CRM Adoption
• + 40% Customer portfolio
• +45% opportunity conversion rate

Do you want to discover more of our Customer Stories? Check out our customer cases here

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