If a change program is not working, then it is consuming financial and human resources for no purpose. Circumstances can exist in which a change program causes a business to perform worse. A study of benchmarking total quality management (TQM) in the United States found it worked best in firms already performing well, had no effect on mid-level firms and had a deleterious effect on poor performing firms.4 Managers need hard evidence of the impact of their change program. It is possible that the change intervention, with some rectification, can be made to work better for the overall good of the business. Managers need to measure, recognise and act on the differ¬ence between an effective change intervention and an ineffective one.
The objective of this chapter is to introduce a range of approaches to both the measurement of change and the evaluation of change interventions. We look first at how conventional measures, strategy-driven measures and benchmarking can be used to measure change. Second, we cover a number of approaches to the measurement and evaluation of change interventions. We review the causality problem outlined above.
Then we look at some existing and proposed tools used by management to evaluate change interventions; TQM analytical tools, the human resources (HR) scorecard and action research. In this chapter, we refer to the Norske Skog Boyer mill case (end- of-book case 3, page 383), which is about an Australian operation that illustrates several of these approaches (notably, strategy-driven measurement and benchmarking).
Measures of change
Here, we look at three ways in which managers can quantify change. Most common are financial indicators of performance. In most cases, measures of financial performance look backwards, linking the present to the past. Second are strategy-driven measures. These measures may be non-financial (for example, quantifying customer satisfaction or safety performance) and may look forwards, evaluating present performance in relation to future targets. Third are benchmarks, which measure the changing gap between an organisation’s performance and world best practice.
Conventional financial measures
In the past, managers have assessed change mainly by examining financial indicators of performance. Dollar-based indicators or ratios are the basic building block or standard from which measures of business activity or performance are derived. Such financial measures can be used to. evaluate whether an organisation is benefiting from change. Before describing some common financial indicators of change, we need to make three cautionary points.
first, long-term financial data are needed to measure and evaluate change, not just a comparison of the current and preceding years. Analysis of trends over three to five years reduces the influence of atypical events. Current results also may be a poor indicator of the future because they still carry the legacy of past successes in innovation or investment that are running down, or the effects of data manipulation by management. Conversely, current results may fail to indicate that current investments or change initiatives are about to bear fruit.
Second, financial measures will not help the analyst distinguish performance results arising from an effective change program from those caused by changes in the state of the economy, the industry environment or the quality of organisational strategy. They reveal what is happening, but not necessarily why it is happening.
Third, to understand the processes behind particular financial results, analysts today frequently look at techniques to integrate non-financial measures of 'activities’ or ‘processes’ with measures of financial performance. Sole reliance on financial measures is often thought to be inadequate. Examples of non-financial measures include both simple quantity data relating to numbers of product faults, safety incidents and the like, and attitudinal data on customer satisfaction and employee attitudes, for example.
Despite these cautions, financial measures remain vital when assessing how an organisation is changing. Included in the list below are ways of measuring financial or economic performance that can be used to evaluate change. For simplicity, we have excluded several commonly used financial ratios (including asset use, liquidity and capital structure ratios), which relate more to capital market behaviour than to operational performance. You should be aware, however, that a complete assessment of change cannot occur without incorporating measures of the efficient use of capital. The following are financial measures of change.
• Share price performance. Shareholders must receive a reasonable return on invest¬ment, so they are stakeholders in successful change. Share price performance is one measure relevant to them. Frequently, this financial measure is assessed by com¬parison with trends in share prices for other firms listed on a particular exchange. This measure is not applicable to all organisations. It can be used only for listed firms, which make up a minority of all businesses. Further, it mainly indicates expec¬tations of future performance in earnings and dividends, and is a very indirect measure of the past record of change.
• Market share. Customers too are stakeholders in successful change. One way of meas¬uring their response to organisation change is whether that business’s market share is growing or declining. This element is not always easy to measure. Reliable data on some markets may not be available. Further, multiproduct businesses may find per¬formance varies across their portfolio of markets. Also, better measures of customer response other than market share may be possible. Surveys of customer satisfaction, for example, often give more direct and relevant information about customer reactions to organisational change. Such surveys can identify varying degrees of satisfaction among different groups of customers. They also can discriminate among attitudes to different factors in customer value such as cost, quality and timely delivery.
• Overall performance measures. These financial measures include return on equity (profit after tax divided by shareholder’s funds); return on total assets (earnings before interest and tax divided by total assets); and sales growth (current year’s sales divided by previous year’s sales). Return on equity is the most widely used ratio, showing overall performance.1 In recent years, many firms have adopted economic value added as a financial metric in which net accounting income is adjusted to remove a capital charge. Businesses that cannot cover their risk-adjusted cost of capital are deemed to ‘destroy shareholder value’ as opposed to ‘creating shareholder value’.6 For the purpose of evaluating organisational change, these ratios must be plotted over several years.
• Profitability measures. These ratios include net profit/sales (opening profit before tax divided by sales); profit after tax/sales; and expenses/sales. The first two profit/sales ratios may be published, but often are a poor indicator of management quality. Con¬versely, changes in expenses/sales ratios over time may be a good indicator of the effective management of change, but such data (although collected internally) may not be released externally. Like overall performance measures, profitability needs to be assessed by the trend over time.
• Cash flow. This financial measure is an absolute figure trended over time, rather than a ratio. Ability to generate improved cash flow is an important indicator of good management performance, but data need to be treated cautiously to allow for abnormal borrowings for investment.
• Internal targets or budgets. Unlike the measures outlined above, this financial measure can be used to evaluate change at the devolved level of a department or work section within an organisation. If budgets are set appropriately to incorporate expected inputs and outputs of the change program, then meeting those targets can be a useful indicator of performance.
One difficulty with the financial measures of performance outlined above is that they may not agree. Performance according to different measures can diverge if those measures reflect the separate needs of various stakeholders such as the organisation’s shareholders and customers. One example is when increasing market share (and customer satisfaction) requires lower prices, which reduce profitability and return on equity (and shareholder satisfaction). The inclusion of employees and suppliers as other stakeholder groups can exacerbate such tensions, although conventional accounting performance measures do not test for their satisfaction. How can an holistic assessment of performance be achieved, integrating the different available measures into a single coherent picture? One solution is to link performance measures to clearly defined strategic goals.