In marketing, the churn rate or cancellation rate is the percentage of customers who cancel service after a certain period. In the transformation of a company, I call the churn rate the percentage of people who, after completing a project, abandon the practices and ways of working that they had incorporated during it.
In the transformation of a company, I call the churn rate the percentage of people who, after completing a project, abandon the practices and ways of working that they had incorporated during it.
Specific actions to anticipate and mitigate the churn rate:
- Generate resources: Create self-management systems for new projects so that people can take ownership of the new way of working and continue trying autonomously, develop a community of mentors, referents, materials, and everything that ensures that, when one arises, do it it will be possible and easy.
- Develop leadership: Make sure that leaders prioritize what ensures sustainability on their agendas. Sustainability must be formally on everyone’s agenda.
- Create recognition plans: Evaluate how the new practices are tied to performance evaluations and internal recognition systems and policies. Design new milestones that seek to sustain the new practices and behaviors. That is, make working the new way worthwhile!
- Measures the adoption of behaviors: Establishes tools and develops indicators that evaluate which behaviors are installed (or not) in daily practices.
- Measure the impact on the business: Measuring the behaviors acquired is very positive and necessary, but do not stop tying these indicators to the impact on the company. That is where we close the loop and reaffirm everyone’s trust and commitment to continue with the necessary efforts that a true long-term transformation implies.
In short: achieve an Agile Organizational Transformation
If you want to ensure a profound transformation that is here to stay, use an agile organizational transformation model.
The key is to iterate on these lines of work quickly:
- Transformation Architecture: Lay the foundational bases for change
- Scalability: Start with a pilot, hit a milestone, then scale
- Sustainability: Ensures the adoption of new practices and behaviors
If your transformation project lacks efforts and focus on sustainability and you discover that your churn rate is high, the important thing is to find the root cause. Why did they return to the old practices? Perhaps the resources allocated to the change are not enough? Or is reinforcing those behaviors not enough?
Remember that you must approach it in all its dimensions to achieve a true transformation.
What is the “Churn Rate” of your Transformation project?
