Technology advancements, evolving customer needs, and new competition all influence business dynamics across industries. With constant change, a change management strategy is critical for organizations to develop, scale, and succeed.
However, employees often require external motivation, support, and assistance to overcome the common barriers to change and for organizations to drive business outcomes from change projects.
This external assistance and guidance can come from change leadership inside or outside an organization, including the change leaders themselves, like your change project’s sponsor, change practitioner, change advisory board members, individual people managers, and third-party change consultants.
These leaders, known as change agents, extend the reach of the entire change project team, helping to secure team member buy-in, allocate resources, expand the project scope, improve communication, and tackle any cause of change resistance.
We’ll explore change agents, why organizations use them to research and execute business process improvements, and how they help employees adjust to new ways.
Who Is a Change Agent?
A change agent, also known as an advocate of change, is a person who acts as a catalyst for the change management process. They help an organization, or part of an organization, transform how it operates by inspiring and influencing others. A change agent will promote, champion, enable, and support an organization’s change implementation. According to research from Prosci, organizations that leveraged formal change agents report a 9% higher success rate than those that didn’t.
Responsibilities of Change Agents
Key activities that a change agent performs include:
- Communicating how change benefits the organization and employees and making key organizational change announcements.
- Listening to the involved team members and employees to gain feedback and incorporate it into the implementation process.
- Understanding employees’ reactions to change and reducing resistance to change.
- Actively engaging with employees by conducting change management exercises and change management training.
- Encouraging and supporting employees to become change champions and promote it.
- Identifying and leading other change agents and change consultants to success.
- Providing feedback on challenges facing the change management lead.
Internal vs. External Change Agents
Organizations can utilize change agents from within or outside the organization. Each provides different types of benefits that support employees and organizations. Ultimately, the success of any change project is heavily dependent on the ability of change agents and key decision-makers to work together to design change projects and implement strategies to sway attitudes.
Let’s explore the key differences between internal and external change agents.
Internal change agents
An internal change agent can be a member of leadership, a people manager, a training coordinator, a highly-regarded team member with clout in an organization, or an employee with experience driving change.
A benefit of internal change agents is their awareness of company culture, institutional knowledge, and the organization’s history and social politics. Internal change agents are often highly regarded across the organization as team members who are intelligent, influential, and easy to work with. They work diligently to establish strong relationships to strengthen attitudes and cultural views towards change – even after the implementation.
External change agents
If an organization lacks an internal employee with change management skills, it must hire external change agents to support its initiative.
An external change agent is an outside consultant or third-party change practitioner with relevant expertise to drive change initiatives. Company rules, regulations, and policies do not apply to them, allowing them to deeply analyze varied scenarios and suggest suitable change management models and strategies that help prevent change failures.
Though external change agents provide a fresh perspective, their presence can threaten existing employees, and their appointment can add a costly expense for lengthy change implementations.
Types of Change Agents
Every change initiative has unique requirements for specific change agents to provide support. Here are three types of change agents to support your organizational change:
1. People-Focused Change Agents
People-focused change agents help individual employees cope with change by boosting morale and motivation. They investigate absenteeism, turnover, and the quality of work performed by modifying behavior, enriching jobs, and setting goals.
2. Organizational & Operational Structure Change Agents
These change agents focus on changing the organizational structure to improve team effectiveness and efficiency. Organizational structure change agents use various analytical approaches such as operations research, systems analysis, and policy studies to change the organization’s structure or technology.
3. Internal Process Change Agents
The prime focus of these change agents is internal processes such as intergroup relations, communication, and decision-making. Internal process change agents opt for a cultural change approach to etch the change permanently by conducting sensitivity training, team building, and employee surveys.
Roles of Change Agents in an Organization
A change agent assumes one or more change management roles based on the needs and requirements of a change project. The four distinct roles of change agents are:
1. Consultant
This change agent role behaves as a change consultant to ensure a bidirectional flow of data and then analyzes the data further to provide actionable insights to the team members.
2. Communicator & Advocator
While implementing change, organizations often focus too much on logistics, not change communication.
Gartner suggests that due to poor change communication, 73% of employees experience moderate to high-stress levels, and the affected employees perform 5% less than an average employee.
Therefore, change must be understood and supported by the team members for success – without effective change management communication, the change is destined to fail.
3. Trainer
In addition to being a consultant, a change manager often takes on the role of a trainer to help team members act on the insights gained from data analysis and empower them to acquire new skills to prepare them for the newly implemented software, digital process, or technical change. These internal change agents also provide routine change management training workshops to prepare their team members with adaptability exercises.
Organizations also leverage third-party expertise or change management tools like Whatfix’s digital adoption platform to provide employee training and onboarding for a new process or application. Whatfix fosters a self-help culture and provides guided in-app training & user onboarding experiences via features such as in-app interactive walkthroughs and customizable pop-ups, providing contextual training and on-demand support – all in the flow of work.
4. Researcher
As a researcher, a change agent focuses on solving current problems and anticipating future concerns. He also conducts competitive analysis, force field analysis, and evaluates the effectiveness of an organization’s implementation plan and overall change management strategy.
5. Influencer
An influencer is an agent of change that has strong relationships with critical team members across departments who is viewed positively as a voice of reason. This person may not officially be a part of a change rollout, but is critical in earning the trust and buy-in from an overall workforce.
Agents of Change Examples
Examples of change agents can be seen across all types of organizations, teams, and industries, as well as in the different roles of change agents. The principal change agent will depend on an organization’s change life cycle.
For example, John King, chairman of British Airways, made difficult decisions such as downsizing, organizational restructuring, and eliminating unprofitable routes, allowing the airline to upgrade its fleet of jets and cut costs. This allowed British Airways to transform from a position of state-owned weakness to a globally renowned pioneer of privatized carriers.
A few examples of different agents of change examples include:
- A consultant or internal researcher tasked with identifying what changes are needed in an organization
- A leader of a cross-functional stretch team tasked with creating an innovative solution to a complex problem that continues to trouble a company
- A training facilitator tasked with training and supporting team members during a change
- A manager or director tasked with implementing a new software system or digital transformation process
What Are the Characteristics of Successful Change Agents?
The role of a change agent has become critical now more than ever, as failure initiatives can result in damaging losses and set back the company’s performance by years. For example, Nike’s failed ERP implementation cost the company a total loss of $500 million from lost sales and project budget costs, as well as several lawsuits resulting from unfulfilled orders.
Key qualities of a change agent, as well as their relationship with the key decision-makers, ultimately decide the fate of any change initiative. To become a truly effective change agent, look to develop the following characteristics and qualities:
- Understands the Vision
- Broad & Acute Knowledge
- Patient, Yet Persistent
- Builds Strong Interpersonal Relationships
- Leads by Example
- Pragmatic
- Enthusiastic
- Well Respected
- Strong Communicator
- Good Negotiator
- Empathetic
- Organized
Techniques Used By Change Agents
An effective change leader will utilize various change management models, strategies, and exercises to drive adoption and support organizational change. Here are a few of the commonly used change techniques implemented by change agents:
1. Change Management Exercises
A change agent must conduct activities and exercises encouraging employees to understand and embrace change. Change management exercises provide an opportunity to communicate about the change, gauge the underlying objectives, and understand the organizational benefits of getting on board early on.
2. WIIFM
WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) is a crucial technique for change agents. Change agents must appeal to employees by addressing individual concerns. They customize communication based on employees’ or teams’ level of involvement in the change and its impact on them.
For example, imagine you’re switching payroll processing from biweekly to monthly. This will affect everyone within the organization, but accounting will be affected more than other departments. You’ll need to communicate with each department differently and provide the payroll team with acute details on the change.
3. Stakeholder Analysis
Stakeholder analysis is a project management technique used to analyze and categorize stakeholders affected by the change initiative. This analysis provides insights into how change agents can address the stakeholders’ interests, keep them on board with the transformation, and help avoid disruption. The change agent should create a matrix of all stakeholders and assess and record their expected attitudes to the transformation.
4. Persuasive Technique
A change agent must construct a compelling argument to influence and convince people on the need and benefits of the change initiative, as well as the associated implementation plan required to deliver it. The specific strategies the change agent uses will vary according to the activities and the stakeholders.
5. MoSCoW Technique
The MoSCoW method is a prioritization technique that change agents use to gain a shared understanding of the importance of different deliverables. MoSCoW stands for:
- Must have
- Should have
- Could have
- Won’t have
The change owner should use the output from MoSCoW analysis to tailor their influencing strategy according to the ‘must haves’.
Change Clicks Better With Whatfix
Whether large or small, every organizational change requires one or more change agents to facilitate the project. An external or internal change agent has the skill set to guide and facilitate the change effort and set your organization up for success.
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, enable your employees on internally used applications and customers on custom apps with in-app guided experiences and support in the flow of work.
Guide new users to become proficient faster with Tours, Task Lists, and Flows. Drive adoption of new features, infrequently done tasks, and advanced workflows with Smart Tips. Use Self Help to provide on-demand IT support that integrates with your knowledge repositories.
Schedule a personalized demo with our experts to know how Whatfix can be your partner in change.
