Are your people ready for transformation? A self-evaluation checklist

Across the EU, companies are increasing their digital intensity, but the people side is lagging. 

Just look at how much we talk about AI, and still, it feels like we’re using hammers to crack nuts. 

In 2024, 74% of EU businesses reached at least a basic level of digital intensity. But only 22% provided ICT training to staff. In other words, many organisations are buying more digital capability than their workforce is ready to absorb.

Quick takes

• Treat people’s readiness as a risk, instead of a side topic.
• Do not mistake system rollout for adoption. Going live has nothing to do with changing work-as-it-was.
• If managers cannot explain the change in practical terms, teams will default to old habits.
• External IT support can build the solution, but it cannot create internal ownership. You need to do this part.
• Training only works when it is role-specific, tied to daily work, and reinforced after launch.
• If old approvals, spreadsheets, and workarounds still exist, the new process is not really in place.

Why people’s readiness matters so much

Software changes nothing on its own. Yes, we’re the software company, but we refuse to wear rose-coloured glasses simply because we want to see our clients win.

And you win when people understand what they are expected to do differently starting from August, for instance. 

McKinsey’s transformation research shows that transformation success rates are still very low. What’s more, successful companies are far more likely to provoke behaviour changes rather than relying on just technology. 

Here’s a useful reality check. More than a quarter of Europe’s workforce is already experimenting with AI at work. The change is inevitable, whether you get your workforce to prepare or not. That does not mean everyone needs to become technical, but it means the pace of work redesign is already here.

What does “people readiness” actually mean?

People readiness is whether leaders, managers, and teams are prepared to behave differently, use the new system properly, and stop using the old workarounds.

A company is usually people-ready when five things are true: the case for change is clear, the changed behaviours are specific, managers are aligned, skills and time are in place, and systems and reporting reinforce the new way instead of rewarding the old one. 

That framing aligns with the behaviour-change factors McKinsey links to stronger transformation and with what we at Net Group practice in our work.

Self-evaluation checklist: Are your people actually ready?

Score each line from 0 to 2.

0 = no
1 = partly / inconsistently
2 = yes, with evidence

How to read the score

Where do companies usually score lower than they expect?

Executives often approve the programme and IT delivers the tooling. But then the manager gets left with: 

• keep operations stable, 
• learn the new process, 
• coach the team,
• clean legacy data, and 
• hit the same targets as before. 

This is where ‘management’ can’t really ‘manage’.

The second weak point is reinforcement. Those include structures inside the company that push people to use the new way of working.

People are much more likely to change when the why is clear, leaders role model the behaviour, skills are built, and formal mechanisms reinforce the change. 

If even one of those is missing, people revert to the old.

Common mistakes that make adoption look better than it is

What should you do next if your score is mediocre?

Fix the operating conditions.

Start with three moves. 

First, rewrite the change in business language for each affected team: what starts, what stops, what gets easier, what gets measured. 

Second, give middle managers a simple adoption brief, not a slogan. 

Third, identify and remove the old mechanisms that still reward legacy behaviour.

If the old system, spreadsheet, approval path, or KPI still feels safer than the new one, people will default to old.

What to read next? 

If this checklist shows weak spots, the issue is not in the software or motivation. It is in ownership. 

Most organisations fail to define who carries out transformation through the business once the technology is in place. We explored that problem in more detail in our recent piece, Who owns what in change management for digital transformation? Read that next if you want a clearer view of where vendor responsibility ends, and internal ownership has to begin.