Corporate Change: Five Awakenings from The Last Month

During the pandemic, most teams changed more in ten weeks than in the last ten years. For decades, we believed successful corporate transformation was almost beyond reach; it was too hard to make significant change stick – especially in larger companies. So many companies attempted to make major change happen. Most failed in the achievement of what we call the North Star, such as return on investment, increases in employee engagement, technology adoption, cost reduction, and so on.

Why? It’s easy to implement technology, it’s harder to get people to use it correctly. It’s easy to define a change in process, it’s harder to get people to follow it consistently. It’s easy to ask for culture change, though without the right methodology, it’s hard for people to take it seriously and make it sustainable.

If we are honest, most of us had been begrudgingly happy with the status quo because it meant that we didn’t need to change anything ourselves. We were too busy. We were already working too many hours without a break, and we wanted all or part of our weekends to ourselves. We didn’t want to have to invest in changing something and, along the way, help others change and be successful too. But we learned a lot about organizational change from the seismic shifts brought about by the pandemic. Here are the top 5 corporate awakenings that we should take away.