Shelby Klingerman, Content Curator |

When you are implementing your new Oracle Cloud application is the perfect time to increase employee engagement and reaffirm your organization’s culture. Transformation requires a focus on not only the technology but also the people and processes within your organization.

 Change will never happen just because you demand that it has to happen. The workforce, especially younger generations, are asking questions like, “Why is this change happening? How will it affect me? How can I benefit from this change?” It’s important to know how to answer these questions for your community and ensure that they develop a sense of ownership over the oncoming project.

 To create that sense of ownership, it’s important to engage your community from the very beginning. Building a sense of camaraderie and strength in your organization is the first step to getting people involved in your Cloud project. Getting everyone on the same page will help your project and the organization as a whole work smoother and faster.

 Develop a Transformation Change Network

One way to engage your community is to develop a Transformation Change Network. Establish champions and change agents in your organization. Your champions should be subject matter experts within your project team that understand the future vision of your organization. The next level contains your change agents, associates who are trusted by management and respected by peers.

 Communication will flow through your Change Network from your sponsors to your champions, then to your agents and finally your end users. These champions and change agents will be the morale and backbone of the sense of ownership and success of adoption of your project.

 Empower Your Users

Another step to community engagement is creating a model or prototype of your project that allows your users to see how the program will work. From there, you can get feedback from users about what works and what doesn’t.

 The key is to avoid letting your users propose new designs. Simply provide them with a proposed design and allow them to voice what doesn’t work well for them. Get to the bottom of what they’re trying to achieve within the program and then you can come back with revisions for them. Allowing users to propose their own design ideas can get complicated because then everyone in the organization will want to throw their ideas in the ring, defeating the purpose of a project team.

 Elements to Focus On

Within your transformation, there are six key components to focus on to ensure community engagement and successful implementation and adoption. These six parts include stakeholder engagement, a communication campaign, a change impact assessment, training and development, readiness and measurement and a benefits realization. Having the right tools and processes to back up these aspects of transformation will yield readiness, engagement, positive behavior and acceptance within your organization.

 Learn More

To learn more about these six components and how to utilize them to empower your champions, change agents and end users, check out the full presentation below.

Additional Resources