Robin Schooling

Is Your Organization Ready for Change? A Practical Readiness Checklist.

If you’ve worked in an organization for more than ten minutes, you’ve lived through a “change management initiative.” The scale of these varies and could entail anything from the mundane – “no more door keys – we’re moving to key cards!!” – to the panic-inducing – “we’re opening a new market in a new country!!”

Different stakes but same reality: you’re asking people to work differently tomorrow than they did yesterday. And if you’ve sat on a steering committee or helped with a rollout, plan you probably started with a kickoff meeting, a roadmap, and a handful of talking points. Useful and necessary … but incomplete.

Because change doesn’t begin at kickoff. It begins at readiness – when leaders must decide whether the organization has the trust, clarity, time, and capability to absorb what’s coming.

In practice, readiness is built on two pillars: the social conditions that enable people to speak up and learn (trust, credibility, psychological safety), and the operating mechanics that translate strategy into observable behaviors with the time, tools, and incentives to match.

When those two pillars intersect? Adoption follows by design … not luck.

What “ready” really means

Before you claim readiness, you must ask yourself a handful of questions:

Why now – and what outcomes justify the disruption?
What, precisely, will be different, and who has the authority, time and resources to make that difference stick?
Where will capacity come from? What stops or slows so this can start?
How will managers be equipped and how will leaders know what new behaviors to model?
What early signals will tell us to course-correct?

If the answers are specific, testable, and resourced, you’re ready; if they’re slogans, you’re not.

So what to do?

Readiness starts with specificity. Leaders frame the reason for change in business terms, and then name – by department, work group and/or role – the behaviors that must shift. “Collaborate more” isn’t adequate while “enter sales activity in the CRM within 24 hours” is. That type of precision creates line-of-sight from Strategy (with a capital “S”) meetings of the C-Suite all the way to a random Tuesday afternoon, while also giving managers something to coach against.

But clarity alone won’t carry the day. You also need a change coalition that runs in both directions: a visible senior sponsor who signals priority through decisions and time, and an operational network of champions who translate intent into local practice. Building this “top-down and bottom-up” structure early strengthens cross-unit communication and trust – the prerequisites for sharing issues before they become resistance.

Finally, ready cultures make it safe to ask naive questions, air risks, and learn in public. Research from Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the most important team dynamic; without it, change activity becomes theater and real problems hide. Leaders can model this by narrating trade-offs, inviting dissent, and rewarding surfacing of risks – not just delivery of results. Is your organization – and your leadership team – ready to do this?

Pressure-test before launch

Before you commit capital and credibility, pause to test whether the organization can absorb the change. A readiness assessment translates ambition into testable conditions – clarity of purpose, capacity, roles, and acknowledgement of the signals you’ll use to course-correct. It’s the difference between approving a plan and confirming the system that will make the plan real.

Begin with purpose and value: what problem or opportunity is this change addressing, and what outcomes will prove it worked? Across studies, the long-run success rate of transformations hovers near 30%. Clarity on value is necessary and also serves as a form of risk control.

Next, map people and roles by identifying sponsors, change agents, stakeholders, and – explicitly – middle managers (and yes…you know who they are). Prosci’s research regularly finds mid-level managers are the group most likely to resist; not because they’re obstacles by nature, but because they’re asked to deliver results while absorbing ambiguity. Equip these critically important middle managers early with message maps, decision rights, and time to brief teams. This is a readiness task, not an afterthought.

Make sure that you anticipate different adoption styles amongst team members as some will want logic and data, while others need reassurance and pacing during the change process. Therefore, make sure you tailor engagement accordingly – providing facts and specifics for “Questioners,” visible autonomy for “Initiators,” broad narrative and connection for “Collaborators,” steady one-to-ones for “Protectors.”

Finally, confirm the organization’s capacity to absorb changes in skills, workload, tools, and incentives. If the environment doesn’t support adoption of the new (desired!) behaviors -i.e. no time for people to practice, misaligned rewards – the old way will win. Readiness reviews should scrutinize things like technical skills, resource availability, and motivation systems (leadership style, rewards, culture, and work design) before even saying “let’s go!”

The Execution Phase

Execution begins by making your Strategy (yes; with a capital “S”) observable in the flow of work. Back up messages and communication with routines that make the new behaviors unavoidable and then allow your managers to become translators … not simply messengers. When your managers are empowered from the beginning, that is where adoption will take root.

Consider incorporating your change coalition into ongoing business operations for a defined period of time (not forever). The senior sponsor should continue to signal priority through cadence and decisions, while the champion network promotes quick fixes or recalibrations across teams and surfaces friction before it hardens into resistance. Formalizing these roles ensures momentum depends on system … not personality.

As you transition from planning to execution, the goal is straightforward: make the desired behavior the easiest behavior. And then make it the expected one.

Readiness isn’t just a planning meeting; it’s the decisive phase of change.

And when you establish business-level outcomes, charter a two-direction coalition, and ensure psychologically safe conditions for learning, you materially improve the odds … moving from good intent to truly meaningful outcomes.

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Employee Well-Being Strategy: Culture, Trust and Measurable Results

Please forget the company-branded swag and wellness-week photo op. Please. Employee well-being has nothing to do with hoodies with the company logo and lunch on Fridays. Rather, employee well-being is the lived experience of work: how work is designed, how people are led, and whether the social contract between organization and employee is felt as fair, safe, and meaningful.

It’s holistic by nature – spanning mental and emotional health, physical safety, financial stability, social connection, and a sense of purpose – and it shows up not as a single program but as an ecosystem of everyday practices. A common and basic definition I’ve long liked is that well-being is “the holistic state of an employee’s physical, mental, emotional, social, and financial health at work,”

What makes this more than a feel-good ambition is the mounting evidence that workplace climate is the carrier wave for everything else. The Johns Hopkins/Great Place to Work (GPTW) 2024 analysis – based on 1.5M U.S. survey responses annually – shows that a “climate of well-being” is anchored in culture, management practices, and HR processes; when these are healthy, you see higher resilience, belonging, and performance, and when they wobble, engagement and outcomes wobble with them. In practical terms, the drivers are specific and actionable: mental and emotional support, a clear sense of purpose, personal support from managers, fair and transparent compensation (financial health), and meaningful connections at work.

The macro picture underscores urgency:

Gallup’s 2024 report notes global engagement at ~21–23%, with signs of decline and particularly steep drops among managers; engagement is tightly interwoven with life evaluation and overall well-being, making it both a moral and economic issue.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2022 Framework reframed workplaces as engines of mental health and set five essentials – Protection from Harm, Connection & Community, Work-Life Harmony, Mattering at Work, and Opportunity for Growth that now guide many corporate roadmaps.
APA’s ongoing “Work in America” research shows that job insecurity, workload, and unfair treatment remain potent stressors – conditions organizations directly control.
McKinsey’s global analysis adds a caution: employers often over-invest in individual coping tools and under-invest in the work design and leadership conditions that cause distress in the first place.

The business translation is straightforward: well-being is not a perk – it’s a design choice. Leaders who elevated people practices during the pandemic saw meaningful spikes in well-being and results; many organizations slid back as urgency faded, and the trendlines followed. Companies recognized for culture strength (e.g., Fortune 100 Best Companies) consistently outperform peers on trust, inclusion, growth, and benefits – inputs that correlate with both climate of well-being and financial outcomes. Ultimately, well-being matters because it’s the substrate of reliable performance: when people experience safety, fairness, clarity, and purpose, they adapt faster, serve customers better, and stay longer. Anything less is simply extracting effort on borrowed time.

Building Trust and a Culture of Well-Being (no budget required)

Trust is the oxygen of well-being: invisible when present, suffocating when absent. You build it not with grand programs but with thousands of small, observable choices that tell people, “You matter here.” Budgets help, but they’re not the engine. Behavior is.

Start by making work predictable and humane. Publish how decisions get made – who decides, on what criteria, by when. When priorities shift (they will), say what changed and why. Uncertainty isn’t the enemy; secrecy is. Consistency in how you set goals, review progress, and course-correct reduces the ambient anxiety that erodes well-being faster than any workload ever could.

Managers are, of course, key to success. Equip them – through expectation, repetition, and modeling – to hold short, regular 1:1s focused on two things: clarity and care. Give them a script such as these four questions they can ask at every 1:1:

What’s most important this week?
What might get in your way?
What do you need from me?
What feedback do you have for how I’m leading?

A five-minute cadence, done relentlessly, will outperform a once-a-year checklist every time. It also costs nothing (nothing!) and creates a shared map of reality.

Next, narrow the gap between stated values and lived experience. If you say “people first,” prove it by how you allocate time. Consider instituting organizational practices such as:

Protecting focus hours.
Ending meetings at :25 and :55 to return ten minutes per hour to the team.
Making “no-meeting Fridays” a default, not a slogan.

And yes; those examples are all about providing some autonomy and allowing employees to reclaim time – this is one of the most credible well-being signals you can send because time is the currency employees’ trust.

Practicing Psychological Safety for All

Remember that psychological safety isn’t a “feeling” you can order; it’s an outcome of how you respond to risk and error. Think about normalizing learning moments with a simple, public ritual: when something goes sideways, host a 20-minute “What We Learned” debrief that captures:

the decision as it was understood
signals we missed
one practice we’ll try next time

Notice there is no blame? No theatrics? This strengthens trust as well and over time, people will surface issues earlier because they know they won’t be punished for being honest.

Community matters when building trust as well. Consider creating cross-functional peer circles of 5 – 7 people who meet monthly with a rotating discussion topic. They could be charged with devising solutions to a thorny problem, holding a post-mortem on something that didn’t work, or ideating about a growth goal. Don’t over-engineer this though – provide the peer-circles with a one-page guide and let then run their own meetings! These groups can reduce isolation, cross-pollinate solutions, and grow informal safety nets – again, at near-zero cost.

Finally, remember that even the healthiest cultures stumble, but what distinguishes high-trust teams is speed and sincerity of repair. When you overstep, acknowledge the impact (not just intent), name what you’ll change, and check back later. Repair closes the loop between harm and growth and teaches everyone that missteps are survivable.

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None of this requires a wellness budget. It requires leadership attention and discipline – routinized, and visible. Think about an easy 30-day starting plan:

publish your company’s decision-making rhythms and meeting norms
institute five-minute weekly 1:1s for clarity and care,
run one no-blame “What We Learned” session after a real miss
launch one cross-functional peer circle

Then watch for new signs of trust – things like fewer surprises, faster help-seeking, and employees seeming to give a palpable exhale in the day-to-day. That’s your climate of well-being taking shape.

Measuring Success and Iterating for the Future

Well-being work is only real when it shows up in outcomes people can feel and leaders can steward. Success can be tracked (data!), but this measurement also includes the feedback system that tells you whether your culture is becoming more humane and more effective – or just more performative. There’s some “sensing” that goes on as well that also allows you to learn, adjust and repeat.

Start by defining what “good” will look like in three areas:

Tactics (“are we doing the right things?”) reflect activity and experience: manager 1:1 cadence, meeting load, schedule predictability, perceived clarity.
Practices:(“is behavior changing?”) capture habits: time reclaimed, response-time norms adhered to, psychological safety scores, peer help-seeking, cross-team referrals.
Effects “(is the organization healthier?”) are business and people outcomes: regrettable turnover, internal mobility, absence and overtime patterns, quality/defect rates, customer NPS, safety incidents.

The trap is obsessing over the last horizon while ignoring the first two. You need the full chain – from inputs to behaviors to outcomes – so you can attribute improvement to something you did.

Here are a few ways to measure (easily) the impact of changes even if you are a small team without much of a budget or fancy technology:

Design a simple scorecard you can maintain on your own (no data science team needed!). Think about these four lenses:
- Vitality (energy, capacity)
- Work Design (focus time, workload fairness)
- Social Trust (psychological safety, sense of belonging)
- Enablement (clarity, tools, autonomy)

For each lens, pick two quantitative indicators and one qualitative pulse. For example: Vitality might pair weekly workload reasonableness and PTO utilization with a free-text “What restored your energy this month?” prompt. Social Trust might combine a safety item (“I can speak up without negative consequences”) and interruption tracking with a monthly debrief story about a risk taken and how it was handled.

Use mixed methods. Numbers tell you where to look; narratives tell you why it’s happening. Trend lines without stories can push you into Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure). Ask for tiny, frequent anecdotes from team members such as “Describe a recent moment when the team protected focus – or didn’t.” Pair those with operational telemetry you already have such as calendar analytics for meeting volume or ticketing systems for handoff latency.

Make causality humble but useful. Instead of claiming “our peer circles reduced attrition by 10%,” run small, time-boxed comparisons. Pilot an intervention with two willing teams and leave a similar team as a comparison group. Pre-register a handful of expected effects (e.g., safety, help-seeking, rework) and assess after six to eight weeks. You won’t reach lab-grade certainty, but you’ll avoid the biggest attribution errors and make smarter resource calls.

Institutionalize a learning cadence. On a monthly basis, conduct your operational health check (the scorecard). Quarterly you can institute a “What We Changed” review in which leaders publicly name two practices they’ll stop, start, or modify based on the data. And then annually, consider doing a focused deep dive on one systemic constraint – meeting design, workload distribution, or manager spans of control – with a clear hypothesis and a 90-day trial.

Finally, iterate like an engineer and a neighbor. Engineers test, learn, and refactor. Neighbors notice, ask, and help.

Be both.

Remember that the future of well-being isn’t merely a destination; it’s your organization’s increasing ability to sense strain early, respond with care and clarity, and keep improving. And when you communicate that cycle to your employees – signal, learning, adjustment, outcome – you’re not just measuring well-being.

You’re leading it.

RecFest Lessons: Practical Ways to Modernize Hiring

While swinging through Nashville last week at RecFest, I scribbled a few notes as I went. What follows (below) are the bits that stuck once the music faded and my feet stopped hurting. Revolutionary? Busting the lid off TA via transformation or disruption? Maybe not. But slight changes like these and step-by-step iterations in our individual workplaces, or collectively as talent professionals, shift our mindset. Adjust our roles. Modernize how we approach what we do.

And make work better.

Self-Serve

We must stop designing hiring as if every touch requires HR’s hand on the doorknob. The parts of the process that are repeatable – requisition posting, basic scheduling – belong in a self-service flow that managers can run with confidence. Recruiting’s role then is to set the standard, provide the scaffolding, and step in where judgment matters – not to serve as perpetual hall monitors. ACTION ITEM: Think about how to equip hiring managers with appropriate tools/technology (and clear expectations) so they can move faster without sacrificing quality.

Learn From Others

The most useful recruiting ideas rarely come from recruiting alone. Product teams talk in experiments and feedback loops; marketing obsesses over message-market fit; customer success understands what keeps people engaged over the long haul. When we deliberately look across those fences – reading what they read, borrowing how they test, adopting their debrief habits – we expand our playbook in ways a TA-only echo chamber simply can’t. Cross-pollination is not a nice-to-have; it’s oxygen.

Measure What Matters

On the content front, the message was blunt: views are not outcomes, and vanity metrics (number of followers!!) do not hire engineers, nurses, or accountants. What matters is whether a piece of content prompts a next step – clicking through to a role, joining a live Q&A, referring a friend, or starting an application. That means tracking behavior, not just impressions, and it also means honoring qualitative signal. When a candidate says, “I saw your staff designer explain the portfolio review and it made me apply,” that anecdote is also data. Collect it.

The Robots

Generative AI, for all the noise, landed in a very grounded place for me: effective use is a craft you develop through repetition, not a wave-your-magic-wand transformation. Standing up a safe sandbox, saving your best prompts, and building one small tool that lightens the load this month will be more valuable than a twelve-month “plan.” What can you tackle? How to hone your skills? Think about using generative AI to clean up job descriptions, generate structured interview kits that align to outcomes, draft first-pass candidate communications that a human then sharpens. Practice breeds discernment and the more we use the tools, the better we get at knowing when to trust them and when to press for depth. Now go build a Personal GPT! (or two)!

Internal Brand

Internal mobility deserves the same intentionality we pour into external brand work, because employees cannot pursue what they cannot see. Naming the program, explaining the rules of the road, and telling honest stories about lateral moves, stretch assignments, and returns from leaves builds credibility and momentum. When the paths are visible and the process is comprehensible, people stay to grow; when they aren’t, they understandably assume their next step lives somewhere else.

Get a Move On

And finally, the adoption gap is real and it’s shaping candidate behavior. Roughly two out of five job seekers report using AI in their search while only about one in five TA teams are using it on the inside. That imbalance shows up as glossy interview answers, faster candidate communications than we return, and expectations that outpace our workflows. The fix isn’t to outlaw tools; it’s to update the game. We can design assessments that surface how someone thinks and solves, invite transparent use of AI with “show your work” expectations, and automate the drudgery so our time goes to judgment, coaching, and decision-making … the “human” part of our work that we’re supposedly protecting.

Lots to think about – which is, of course, always the sign of a great conference!

In short, none of these things require a sweeping reinvention. Rather, they require disciplined choices made repeatedly – clearer ownership for managers, tighter signals in our marketing, small but relentless practice with AI, and visible paths for people who already work with us. If we treat these as habits rather than campaigns, hiring gets faster and fairer, managers get better at the work that’s theirs, and talent acquisition professionals earn back time for coaching and judgment.

So pick one move, put it in play for thirty days, write down what you learn, and then do the next one. Progress can compound and recruiting effectiveness can shift in the wake of steady, practical actions.

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Shout outs to Steve Levy, Gerry Crispin, Rhona Barrett-Pierce, Audra Knight, and Johnny Campbell for giving me some nuggets to think about during their sessions!

Unpacking a Bad Day at Work

Did you ever get a mouthful of sand? Swimming in the ocean, face-planting on the beach, or sliding into home plate during a neighborhood baseball game as a kid? One second you’re fine; the next you’re crunching grit between your molars like a feral oyster. You spit, you swish, you spit again. Eventually the residue leaves your mouth – but it takes longer than you think.

That’s the taste a bad day at work leaves behind.

But what makes a bad day at work? (Or a good one, for that matter?) I, personally, know the feeling immediately: I get home (or leave my WFH office at the other end of the house) and I’m irritable, ravenous, and vaguely committed to watching strangers renovate kitchens until my brain powers down. I don’t have a story about the day so much as a mood. It’s the aftertaste.

For me, a bad day happens when:

The cadence is off. There’s no rhythm…just …volume. A “quick sync” mutates, then collides with the next meeting, and before you know it you’ve spent more energy transitioning than doing
There are far (FAR!) too many pancake stacks. Calls and meetings layer so tightly you can taste the syrup.
There’s bad news. A project falls apart or HQ makes a decision you don’t agree with and can’t reverse. A colleague leaves which is somehow both understandable (yay for them!) – yet selfishly or personally inconvenient for you.
You’ve been riding the conveyor belt of busywork. This is the purest distillation of the sand-in-your-teeth feeling and happens when you do things like shuttle documents to the correct folder so someone else can move them back. Perhaps you endlessly answer questions that contain their own answers or host the same-meetings-you’ve-hosted-for-5-years just to prove it was done, and the ritual was performed. It’s inertia dressed up as “work”.

None of these things are catastrophic…but all of them can be corrosive. Death – and defeat – by a thousand nudges.

So how to flip this? Truly, unless you are in a horrific and/or dysfunctional workplace, bad days can become good days (or at least decent) without a grand reinvention. You can, however, introduce some counterweights:

define how you will make your time more meaningful
unstack the pancakes (I do like that analogy!)
say NO to busywork for the sake of “looking busy” (it’s not the same as useful)

Will there still be days that taste like sand? Of course. Work involves other people, changing conditions, and the occasional plot twist we never saw coming. But if you load up more and more good days, they can give you enough spark to carry on into ALL the tomorrows – with your teeth blissfully grit-free.