Listen to this articleThe Change Shop is an organizational change and transformation platform designed to provide Change Leaders (think, Executives, Project Managers, Human Resources professionals, and Change Management consultants) with tools to manage change at work. Below is our recent interview with Robert Smith, the Founder & CEO of The Change Shop:
Q: Can you give us insights into your features?
A: Launched in 2018, the Change Shop is a cloud-based change management software, built for multi-platform environments (including mobile) that helps stakeholders manage relationships and align change impacts. Large-scale transformation efforts like software implementations, leadership changes, mergers/acquisitions, can quickly become unwieldy and difficult to manage especially when trying to do it using just spreadsheets. The Change Shop platform solves this by bringing together six, integrated tools to collect feedback from team members then use that data to track, manage, and even predict, workers’ sentiments about workplace change at different stages of (beginning, middle, end) transformation efforts. When combined, these tools help Change Leaders ensure their workplace change and transformation efforts run smoothly and realize their potential and expected results.
Q: Why is there a need for transformational workplace change? How do you help leaders manage them?
A: Research from advisory firm Gartner shows that 75% of businesses expect to multiply the types of “major change initiatives” they will launch over the next 3 years but only 34% of these efforts will be “a clear success”. This means there’s a 2 in 3 chance that any given organizational change will partially or completely fail. Our research shows that 60 to 70% of the reasons workplace changes fail are due to people-related factors. We’ve even developed a free change risk calculator that allows Change Leaders to account for these risks in financial terms.
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Our research into the factors that cause workplace changes succeed or fail led us to develop the 2IsC(™) Impact, Influence, and Consistency Model detailed in the book, Selling Change: How Successful Leaders Use Impact, Influence, and Consistency to Transform Their Organizations. Since most change efforts fail due to people-related factors, by tackling those factors directly at the source–’the people’, then we can significantly mitigate change risks by directly addressing concerns workers have and also target attitudes and behaviors that prompt people to “want to” change. Our platform does this by allowing users to provide their feedback about the change initiative and what can be done to make it a success. Change Leaders can then easily see this information in pre-built, easy-to-interpret reports and use our Improve tool to manage the process end-to-end.
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Q: What are the four principles of The Change Shop? What makes you stand out?
A: There are four principles that drive our platform design decisions. The first is, ‘give voice to the team’ which is about allowing team members to provide their perspective and input on
what’s changing. The second is ‘compare results’. We have a philosophy of never change alone by which we mean other leaders have gone through similar types of change efforts so those learnings can be leveraged to avoid mistakes and improve outcomes. We do this through change benchmarks. The third is, ‘engage the team’, which is about leading change in ways that increase commitment to changes at work. The last principle is to ‘use data’ which is about using the perspectives of team members along with analytics to keep change initiatives moving in the right direction. Each enhancement we make to the platform supports one or more of these principles.
Q: What are the company’s plans and goals for the future?
A: We are in growth mode for the foreseeable future. Last year, we tripled our subscriber base which was great validation of the work we’re doing and its importance in the market. We are also in discussions with several large tech firms that are interested in offering our platform on a white-label basis. Our platform was recognized as one of 2019’s top 10 most innovative HR analytics providers by Analytics Insight magazine and I had the pleasure of presenting at the 2020 HR West Conference in the Bay area this past March on the role of people data during organizational change. Depending on what happens with the COVID19 epidemic the globe is facing (thank you to our first responders and medical professionals), we are planning to demo our platform at the HR Technology conference this coming October. Headquartered in the greater Washington D.C. area and led by a team of award-winning change management consultants and software engineers, the Change Shop supports some of the largest technology, manufacturing, retail, and non-profit sector organizations.
