Awareness, the first step of the ADKAR model, refers to the realization - not only that change is needed but also that effective change management is needed. At the awareness stage, employees and stakeholders might ask the following questions:
At this stage, you will make the business case to your organization, sharing situations in the past where change management wasn't applied effectively, the risks of what could go wrong if the change is not implemented, and the benefits to the organization should the change successfully occur.
Desire refers to getting people in the organization to participate and support the change. At this phase, there might be questions like:
The goal should be to overcome any resistance to change in this stage by figuring out the root cause for that resistance. Perhaps people don't feel like they have time or energy to learn something new or that they don't have the skills required to operate under the new conditions. Maybe they fear that it will affect their job or even make their job obsolete. It's important to find out those reasons and show that the benefits outweigh the cost to get people on board.
Knowledge is helping people learn the skills and access the information they need to make the change and to help with the change management process. At this stage, people might have questions like
At this stage, a training needs assessment should be done to identify what skills people need to develop across the organization to implement the change. That way, the learning and development team can come up with the correct training and learning solutions to help people gain the necessary knowledge.
Ability refers to people being able to successfully implement new skills and behaviors related to the change. Questions at this stage might include
At this point, you want to make sure you have a way to collect metrics and feedback from employees so that you can continue to monitor their ability to change. You also will want to provide training to anyone who is a change champion in the organization - that might be managers or other leaders or people who have been designated to coach and mentor. You'll also want to make sure employees know where to go for help.
Reinforcement is how the change is sustained or adopted long term. This step is how you keep employees from going back to old behaviors or habits over time. Questions that might be present in this phase are
Communicating the success of the project and how it benefits the organization is important at this stage. You also may want to provide monetary or other incentives to people for successfully adopting the change. You'll also want to continue to collect metrics and feedback to make sure the change has stuck.
