Enterprise-wide change is accelerating. According to research by Gartner, the average number of planned company transformations has increased fivefold since 2016. Few transformations, however, succeed at both raising a company’s performance and sustaining improvement over time, as our analysis has consistently shown.
An organisation's values, beliefs, and behaviours are as critical to success as any strategic plan. In both research and experience, we find that transformations stand the best chance of success when the people-related elements of change are a core focus – especially, the behaviours of people, and the mindsets that drive them. Peter Drucker’s famous line 'culture eats strategy for breakfast' explains why this can play such a significant role in so many transformations that fail to meet their objectives.
McKinsey research also consistently finds that companies that actively engage employees during their transformation, and implement a defined set of organisational health improvement measures, which are aimed creating a high-performing culture in an organization, deliver nearly twice the level of excess total shareholder returns.
Involving people experts early in the transformation journey
The single biggest unlock to embed a people lens in transformation efforts is involving people experts early in the journey, during design phases and ahead of implementation. Doing so achieves efficiencies across three critical levers of success: talent alignment, capability building, and communication. Early involvement also equips people teams to get the most out of an organisation’s workforce. In practice this means:
- Align talent to value: Identifying the roles that drive disproportionate value; move your best people there and remove bottlenecks. Rebalance talent to ensure today’s needs don’t starve tomorrow’s strategy. This can also be a good way of testing resilience and succession planning for the roles people are being pulled from. Track: critical-role coverage, time-to-full-productivity, milestone hit-rate.
- Build capabilities at scale: Standing up targeted, hands-on learning tied to the transformation’s moments of truth; reach at least a third of the workforce to shift behaviours and sustain outcomes. Focusing on also building functional and technical capabilities to develop a strong execution muscle to face continuous change. Track: participation, skill gain, OHI, and performance uplift.
- Engage and communicate with intent: Replacing information vacuums with a drumbeat of tailored messages by layer and segment, with leaders modelling behaviours, ensuring a clear link with a communications schedule and critical transformation milestones. Track: clarity/line-of-sight, sentiment, adoption, regretted attrition.
Embedding the CHRO and HRBPs at the heart of the transformation
It’s tough to change an organisation’s culture if we fail to include the individuals who are closest to some of the critical levers that need to be pulled to do so – whether by shifting the system or building necessary capabilities.
Yet that pattern remains typical in transformations. HR business partners (HRBPs) are often brought in late, or behavioural change is treated as a separate and disconnected initiative which is owned by HR rather than owned by the line, supported by HR.
This approach misses a critical opportunity for HR knowledge and expertise to shape the transformation’s vision, strategy, and design—and ultimately influence the degree to which the changes are adopted and sustained.
HRBPs can also play a critical role amplifying the voice of the people who are affected by organisational change. A network of high-performing HRBPs can act as a bridge between HR and business functions during implementation, while ensuring that the transformation’s strategy and execution are deeply grounded in the reality of how people work, behave, and adapt.
By transitioning from reactive, functionally focused responsibilities to a proactive, strategically integrated mindset, HRBPs and organisations can unlock significant value, drive sustainable transformation, and deliver better long-term performance.
Consider a large industrial company that uncovered more than $200 million in potential EBITDA uplift but was unsure how to turn the opportunities into action or bring its people along. Within weeks, an embedded transformation team worked with the CHRO and high-performing HRBPs to convert the plan into executable initiatives, assess workforce impacts, and execute plans that would shape the organisation’s future operating model. The working model behind this started with the HRBPs, who were assigned to different service lines, each with the responsibility of leading the operating-model design for their respective areas and serving as principal advisors to the corresponding department heads.
Regular working groups brought together HRBPs from all regions involved in or affected by the transformation, ensuring transparency around ongoing activities and providing a forum for sharing best practices across HR and transformation functions. The regional perspectives were especially valuable in identifying local cultural factors within hubs that could affect the success of the operating-model rollout, highlighting lessons learned from previous transformations unique to each region, and surfacing strengths from across the organisation that might otherwise have been lost, had the core design group been limited to those based at HQ.
Six months later, the company had identified $100 million in savings and the mobilised network of HRBPs drove forward implementation across global hubs.
Transformations succeed when they are designed for people, not around them. Thinking about performance and health in a transformation is key - people should not be treated as a separate issue. Organisations who win at the HR side of change elevate the CHRO as one of the chief architects, empowering HRBPs as integrators, and embed the disciplines of talent alignment, capability building, and communication.
They measure input to outcome relentlessly, while looking ahead to tomorrow by building an execution muscle. The result: faster adoption, sustained organisational health, and outperformance in total shareholder returns. Treat people as the engine of value — and transformation will not just land, it will last.
Find out more at www.orphoz.com
The authors wish to thank Meadhbh FitzGerald and Ross Freeman for their contributions to this blog post.