Opportunity

Faraday Power (pseudonym) is a battery energy storage system (BESS) manufacturing, distribution, and rental services startup in Richmond, California founded in 2020. Their flagship product is designed to replace diesel generators with a clean, silent analogue. Since its inception, the organization experienced rapid growth, ballooning its workforce by 294% between 2023 to 2024. Along with this growth came a need to strengthen systems and processes to ensure ongoing compliance and smooth operations. One major gap surfaced within L&D. Faraday didn’t have a centralized system to deploy, track, and maintain operations-critical training, making the company vulnerable to key knowledge and skill gaps as well as failed compliance audits.

To solve this problem, I initiated a back-end evaluation to determine the efficacy of our current systems and processes to reliably track and deploy training, then used those results to propose and implement a solution designed to address our most salient vulnerabilities. This effort stretched across eight months and incorporated several HPI milestones, including evaluation, needs assessment, instructional design, and change management. For this report, I will focus primarily on the analysis and activities surrounding the change management of the organization’s first Learning Management System (LMS).

Solution

To address performance problems resulting from poor training deployment and tracking systems, I recommended the adoption of a Learning Management System. An LMS would centralize responsibility for deployment and records maintenance and allow the company to: 

• Automatically track and deploy training across modalities 
• Streamline and reduce human error within the scheduling process
• Determine in real-time who among our workforce are up-to-date and in compliance with training requirements 
• Deploy and collect assessments to measure learner response and job transfer
• Create learning paths to ensure a consistent onboarding experience for all new hires

For this solution to work, I applied a change management process aligned with Lewin’s three-step model. The goal of the change management effort was to:

• Configure and implement WorkRamp LMS. 
• Train our workforce to use WorkRamp. 
• Centralize all training schedules, completion tracking, and records maintenance under Learning & Development. 
• Drive system adoption companywide.

Approach

My approach to change management fell into three steps:

Step ONE: Unfreeze the organization

Define the Performance Problem

Borrowing from Lewin’s change theory, Schein & Schein (2016) argue that “the system must first experience enough disequilibrium to force a coping process that goes beyond just reinforcing the assumptions already in place” (p. 323). Lewin terms this awakening process “unfreezing”, or when the organization discovers the motivation needed to change. To determine the extent of Faraday’s training problem, I used two analytical tools—Chevalier’s Behavioral Engineering Model and an Ishikawa diagram—to zero in on the root causes. My analysis uncovered several critical risks.

• Compliance Violations: Manual training deployment and hand-kept recordkeeping to track synchronous trainings were vulnerable to error since multiple stakeholders were responsible for their maintenance. Without records, the organization had no evidence of training completion, making them vulnerable to fines, lawsuits, and factory shut-down. 
• Increased Incident Rates: New employees risked missing training required to stay safe on the job and perform their work functions competently and independently. Without proper training, Faraday could expect to see incident rates climb, especially as they scaled. 
• Reduced Net Profit Margin: An increase in incident rates generates ripple effects across operations. Without a solution in place, the organization could expect to see:
  • Decreased employee productivity (e.g., low morale, sick leave, turnover)
  • Increased worker’s compensation claims
  • Increased rates of property damage, rework, and scrap 
• Increased Rates of Attrition: Employee development in areas outside mandated training would continue to be deployed in irregular, ad hoc bursts making it likely that many employees would receive an inconsistent onboarding experience impacting regrettable attrition rates downstream.

Calculate the Cost of Change

The backend evaluation made it clear to senior leaders that the risks were too steep to ignore: we needed to make a change to the way we deployed and tracked training. But, to make an informed decision, the executive team needed to know how much this was going to cost. By identifying and tallying several cost and savings variables, I determined that the cost of change would total approximately $224,640. This investment was offset by a 5-point margin as we expected to gain over $1 million within the first year. The COO provided his sign-off on the change strategy and lent his support to help ensure system adoption remained a top priority.

Secure Cross-functional Leadership Buy-in

I presented these same findings to all MGR 5+ leaders within Operations to ensure they were aware of the problem, why it happened, what we planned to do to remediate, and how we expected them to help support. I kept stakeholders informed and engaged in the remediation plan by 

• attending weekly Safety Leadership Team meetings
• “gamifying” completion rates
• recognizing those who made it to the 100% compliance club
• facilitating raffles for those who’d completed all their required training
• sending weekly progress reports to people leaders informing them about the status of their direct reports
• drafting manager-facing talk tracks to motivate completion
• developing an escalation pathway for non-compliance to help managers whose directs remained out of compliance despite repeated reminders to complete overdue training

With much of the safety and compliance training remediation work in the rear-view window, I could focus on LMS adoption as the next major recommendation in our strategy. I completed a stakeholder impact analysis to help pinpoint driving and resisting forces surrounding this change effort, which helped me determine where our change management strategy needed to focus moving forward.

Step Two: mOVE toward a new status quo

In the second phase, I Moved the organization to a new status quo.

Configure the LMS for the Organization

At this stage, the solution has wide organizational support, but for the adoption to be a success I needed to ensure system readiness. I wrote a job description for an LMS administrator and hired a whip-smart talent to head-up our configuration efforts. The two of us worked in partnership with the LMS vendor to set up the system’s back end. I also identified employees across the company to serve as WorkRamp champions. These individuals volunteered to help us perform pre-launch beta testing.  

Announce and repeat system arrival

I designed and launched a communication plan and specific change notifications to engage the entire workforce using multiple comms channels (e.g., display screens, manager meetings, email, Slack, stickers) to ensure system adoption was widely known. The strategy was multi-pronged depending on the audience.

All Employees	People Leaders	Facilitators
Two months prior to launch, all employees were informed about system adoption including when WorkRamp was coming, why we were adopting the system, and how this would impact them at a high-level.	This group received weekly communication, including how to navigate the platform as managers, how to manage their teams, generate reports, and send communications within the system.	These employees were made aware of our new way of implementing training and how this new system would impact their work, including how to take attendance, deliver training virtually, reschedule events, and communicate with learners.

To learn more about the methods of communication, see the change notifications here.

Launch the Learning Management System

Finally, launch day arrived! I made WorkRamp Launch Day a celebration, leveraging the leaderboards function to create an engagement contest in which prizes could be earned for # of badges earned, # of courses added to queue, and # of hours of training taken. A festive slide advertising system go-live was added to the display screen rotation. Employees were also given specially designed Faraday Academy stickers and pins.

Step three: rEFREEZE the new status quo

In the final phase, I worked to Refreeze the new status quo by: 

1. Rebranding the learning Slack channel 
2. Deploying role-specific user training 
3. Publishing and advertising a resource hub
4. Deploying all training through WorkRamp
5. Gamifying engagement by hosting contests and raffles (e.g., leaderboards)

After launch, training was a critical change management tool used to ensure smooth adoption and ongoing performance support. Our training plan included: 

• Vendor-created eLearning pathways
• Several live employee- and manager-facing system training sessions
• Live office hours
• An informational Confluence page that included job aides, FAQ, and demo videos
• A WorkRamp-specific Jira ticketing portal for technical issues or questions
• A dedicated SME to provide a central point-of-contact for technical questions

Results

This 8-month effort culminated in a successful system launch ahead of our target date of May 1. Within that time, we hit our desired short- and intermediate-term outcomes:

• Onboarded a new LMS administrator
• Soft launched with trainers and champions
• Build a New Hire Onboarding learning pathway in the system
• Imported all safety and compliance eLearning records into the platform
• Built automations to prep for auto-deployment to new hires, internal transfers, and promotions
• Launched LMS to entire workforce by May 1

The best news of all was the ease with which we were able to pass a safety training audit during a surprise visit from the county environmental health inspector within weeks after launch, demonstrating how vital this system will be for the long-term health of the organization.

References

• Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2012). Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organizational change. Kogan Page.
• HBS Online Staff. (2017, Nov 02). A 3-step change management framework for businesses. Harvard Business School Online. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/a-3-step-framework-for-managing-organizational-change
• Practical Psychology. (2022, Jun 22). Lewin’s Change Theory – UnFreeze, Change, ReFreeze Method [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5pe7EGtjMw
• Schein, P. A., & Schein, E. H. (2016). Organizational culture and leadership. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
• Watson, M. D. M. (2020). Nudge change management. 9m Publishing.