Most leaders understand that communication alone does not drive successful change. Yet APQC’s research suggests that organizations often place far greater emphasis on communicating change than on understanding what change means for daily work.
In a global, cross-industry survey of more than 1,200 HR leaders conducted in Fall 2025, APQC found that around half of respondents (50.8%) regularly communicate the vision of their transformation initiatives. By contrast, fewer than one in five (17.3%) involve employees early enough to shape how change actually lands. That gap is where adoption often fails.
HR is well-positioned to help ensure that employee insight informs implementation decisions before rollout begins. Doing so can help implementation teams identify challenges before they become adoption problems. The sections below explain what that can look like in practice.
See also: Implementing HR tech: 8 realities HR must realize about rollouts
The adoption gap may start before rollout
Employees are often brought into conversations about change only after key decisions have already been made about how new technologies will be implemented and used. That can limit an organization’s ability to surface adoption risks, challenge assumptions and improve implementation plans before rollout begins.
Communication about change is undeniably important, but implementing new technology is also an operational challenge. Technologies like AI mean that employees are being asked to change how they work, make decisions, evaluate information, interact with customers and coordinate work with others. That kind of change is difficult to fully design from the top down, and many organizations fail to create it. For example, only about 28% of our respondents report success in maximizing workforce adoption of AI and automation.
APQC research has consistently found that organizations achieve stronger adoption outcomes when they involve employees, subject matter experts and operational stakeholders earlier in shaping how new systems and workflows will function.
Employees who are closest to the work often see process exceptions, customer needs and workflow dependencies that may not be visible to project teams until after rollout. Without that insight, organizations may discover challenges only after implementation begins. For example, different teams may develop inconsistent approaches to using new technologies, making adoption harder to govern and scale. Employees may also identify customer-facing realities or process dependencies that were overlooked during planning, forcing managers to create workarounds after launch.
Getting employees involved early does not mean they dictate transformation strategy. Leaders still set direction, but HR can help ensure that employees contribute operational knowledge before implementation decisions roll out across the organization.
Plan for adoption, not just implementation
Early employee input matters because it helps organizations identify implementation risks, surface operational realities and learn how work will actually change. The next step is creating opportunities to capture those insights as early as possible. HR leaders can help do that by creating structured opportunities for employee input, leveraging early adopters and finding reliable ways to measure adoption.
Learn before launch
Organizations often discover adoption challenges after rollout because they have not fully examined what new technologies mean for day-to-day work. HR can help by asking a simple question early in the process: Who understands how work in each part of the business actually gets done? The answer often includes employees, managers and subject matter experts who can help implementation teams identify adoption risks before rollout. Process reviews, workflow mapping and structured discussions with these groups can surface issues that might otherwise emerge only after launch.
APQC finds that organizations achieve stronger transformation outcomes when they take time to understand how work is actually performed before introducing new technologies. For example, healthcare company Roche began its Digital Workspace initiative by examining how employees searched for information, collaborated and completed work before designing the solution itself. That understanding helped shape a system that employees were more likely to adopt.
Let early adopters show the way
Early adopters are employees who have already begun integrating new tools into their day-to-day work. They can often demonstrate practical use cases, share lessons learned and answer questions that formal communications cannot.
Employees often find it easier to adopt new tools when they can learn from these early adopters. Employee-led brownbag events, peer mentoring, communities of practice and similar activities give employees opportunities to ask questions and learn from each other. Peer-to-peer learning helps employees move beyond understanding what the technology does to understanding how it fits into their own work.
Pharmaceutical company Novartis, for example, created a network of local champions to help employees understand how AI-powered knowledge tools fit into their daily work. These champions acted as translators by helping to turn a centralized transformation effort into a series of local, role-specific conversations.
Measure adoption, not just rollout
Organizations often define successful implementation based on measures like training completion rates, communication reach, licenses activated, or rollout timelines. These measures can indicate whether implementation stayed on track, but they don’t reveal whether employees are actually working differently.
A more useful question is: What behaviors should change if adoption is successful? Depending on the use case, organizations might look for increased usage of new tools, fewer manual workarounds, greater consistency in how teams complete key tasks, or evidence that employees are incorporating new tools into everyday decision-making. The specific measures will vary, but the goal is the same: Define the behaviors that should change before rollout begins and measure whether those changes are actually happening.
For example, one organization in our research not only measured usage rates for its AI-powered search system, but also what information employees searched for, where searches failed and whether users changed their behavior after receiving results. These types of measures show how employees are interacting with new tools, rather than simply whether they completed training or received communications.
Design for adoption early
The most important adoption decisions often occur long before training begins or new tools are rolled out. HR leaders are uniquely positioned to influence those decisions by ensuring that employee insight informs implementation plans, adoption strategies and measures of success before rollout begins.
Technology teams may design the tools, but HR can help the business understand how those tools will affect work, where adoption risks are most likely to emerge and what support employees will need to successfully integrate them into daily work.
Data in this content was accurate at the time of publication. For the most current data, visit www.apqc.org.
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