Change Communications

Statistics taken from Melcrum research on Senior Leadership Communication:

• 57% of survey respondents do not think that their leaders’ verbal communication skills are good, and 17% say they have an autocratic CEO
• 39% of executive team senior leaders don’t agree that their involvement in communication is important to business performance
• 64% of companies don’t measure senior leaders’ communication performance at all
• 45% of communicators think that convincing their senior leaders to even make the time to communicate is a top challenge

Source http://www.melcrum.com/

What is the right way to communicate with employees during unpredictable times? We can all be subject to disruption ranging from terrorist attacks to natural disasters and organizational change, so it pays to know how best to act during difficult times.
by Al Siebert, director, The Resiliency Center

When facilitating meetings at times when people have heightened emotions, always remember to:

1. Deal with your own feelings first
To facilitate well, you must first deal with your own feelings. Remember not to impose them or your values on others.

2. Conduct a group “check in”
If people are feeling emotional about organizational or world events, focus on their feelings first before trying to cover agenda items. Ask each person to comment on how they feel about the events, express any concerns they have and comment on how they feel about being at the meeting. Look at each person closely while they are speaking to judge for yourself how “present” or emotionally distracted they are.

If people are feeling emotional about organizational or world events, focus on their feelings first before trying to cover agenda items.

3. Discuss the agenda
Ask each person to say if they feel they can be involved in discussions about the agenda items. Make it safe for them to say no if they can’t. Acknowledge their feelings, don’t suppress them, then focus the group on the things that must get done.

4. Reschedule some items on the agenda if necessary
If the majority of the group says they don’t feel that they can focus on the meeting, then save all agenda items that require open discussion until a later date. Limit the meeting to essential information items that are very time relevant.
Limit the meeting to essential information items that are very time relevant.

5. Be prepared to postpone to a later date
Meetings usually require a relaxed atmosphere conducive to open discussion — this may be difficult in times of stress. Resiliency research shows that feelings of distress, anguish, anger and anxiety will constrict and narrow cognitive processes. Postponing a meeting is a rational course of action when involved group discussion, analysis, problem-solving and goal-setting is required.

What skills do leaders need to use during change? Find out how to create meaning, focus and direction by helping employees move past the psychological stages of shock, delusion, anger and depression to the stages where they let go of their old ties and explore the possibilities of the new situation. by Marie Mosely, business psychologist

1. Use storytelling to create links
Stories help to create meaning in a chaotic world. People need some sense of predictability and stability, particularly when they’re going through restructures and transitions. Stories help staff to understand links between the past, present and future. They are universal and understood in all languages and by all cultures. They engage people and, if told well, create a positive anticipation for the future.

2. Build scenarios for the future
Get people thinking about how they would like the story to end. Scenario building helps people to understand the challenges ahead. It creates relevance and meaning and links the past with the possible futures. It cuts through the day-to-day beliefs and assumptions that can blinker an organization and its people, and it creates a positive self-belief that, whatever happens, they can cope. It also helps people focus on how they might best use their time, effort, talents and skills.
Scenario building helps people to understand the challenges ahead.

3. Use internal communication effectively
Make sure that internal communication systems are as effective as they can be. Spending a lot of time and money on external communications is a waste if employees are demotivated and don’t know what’s happening or where the organization is going. They will either clam up or communicate in rumors.

4. Create discomfort
In order to move from our current state, we need to create discomfort. Comfort creates acceptance and inaction. People change the way they are doing things for two reasons: inspiration or desperation. Leaders need to encourage staff to be motivated by both.
People change the way they are doing things for two reasons: inspiration or desperation.

5. Challenge successful models
Successful models are hard to challenge but people often maintain the status quo with processes and procedures that work now, when they should be thinking about what’s on the horizon and how it will affect the business in the future.

To speed up a major change in your company, think about how your intranet, paper and face-to-face communication contribute to the process.

In an in-depth report on managing major change called “Communicating Big Change Using Small Communication,” authors Dr TJ Larkin and Sandar Larkin explore the idea of using “thousands of small face-to-face conversations between managers and employees” to bring about big change in large companies. Drawing on various research findings, the report outlines the effectiveness of each of the main communication channels and when and how they should be used in a major change campaign. This can briefly be summarized as follows:

1. Intranet: best for short, quick information retrieval Internet is the best channel for searching and retrieving factual information. This implies that the company intranet is most useful during the implementation phase when employees need to quickly find small pieces of information located within large data sets. It’s wrong, however, to rely on the intranet as your major communication channel during the planning phase of the change. Using intranet instead of face to face is a mistake. Intranet is not employees’ preferred choice and does not change behavior. It’s also a poor choice for sensitive information.

Don’t rely on the intranet as your major communication channel during the planning phase of the change.

2. Paper: best for learning complicated informationWhen ideas on a computer screen become complicated — employees hit “print.” Research shows that employees prefer paper as soon as new material becomes difficult to understand. Although less certain than employees’ preference (i.e., face-to-face communication), many studies also show improved comprehension. With difficult topics, employees often learn more when reading from paper than from a web page. This means paper plays an especially important role during implementation when there may be many new and complicated ideas to communicate. Paper also plays an important supporting role in face-to-face communication. It’s wrong, however, to rely on paper as your primary communication channel during the planning phase of a big change.

With difficult topics, employees often learn more when reading from paper than from a web page.

3. Face to face: changes behavior If your change means employees must change the way they behave, then face to face is the best channel for communicating the message. “Diffusion of innovation” is the study of how groups adopt new behaviors. The leading expert of this approach is Professor Everett Rogers. Surveying 50 years of research and 4,000 studies, Rogers concludes that mediated information (print and electronic) creates awareness of new ideas but rarely adoption. On the other hand, face-to-face communication with a respected member of your own group (opinion leader) delivers the most new behavior.

A study by the Hay Group, Key Driver Analysis, also examined different ways to communicate and the associated amount of employee support forthe change. The correlations discovered by the Hay Group show most support when employees learn about the change from their own managers.

Experience from a major IT project in the telecommunications sector:

- Consultation of acteurs sociaux obligatory for programme management (respect of legal framework)
- Dedicated communication plan
- IRP communicate with staff
- Need to inform management in parralel or they feel excluded
- CCE for a company, CE for a location, CHSCT health, quality and safety
- Scope for communicating out of project, limited strictly to what was presented to IRPs
- Careful with associating employees to deployment. Not appreciated by IRP who see the effort as a CHCT bis.

CE = Comité d’entreprise
IRP = Instance de Representation du Personnel
CHSCT = health, quality and safety board

Communication: 3 axes

1. Project Communication: internal teams
2. General Communication: corporate comms - act as relay to corporate communication (direction communication)
3. Operation Communications : managerial chain

Scope, specificities of each target audience and group responsibile for
contact (emetteurs)Inventory of existing medias

Internal newsletter:
-Structure comm plan against programme milestones.
-Style brief and factual. Honest, show avancement and blocages.
-Raise user point of view ‘du côté des utilisateurs’.

Manager communication:
- do not force them into “project communication”
- instead give them tools to explain the changes to the impacts/change for their business

Seperate plan for managing communications to social actors: see seperate post

According to Melcrum’s latest study into leadership communication, 45% of communicators say convincing senior leaders to make the time to communicate is one of the greatest challenges they face.

40% say getting senior leaders to communicate on a regular basis — not just when company results are announced — is a major problem; and 38% say their senior leaders think of communication solely as the role of the communication department.

Melcrum, The Source for Communicators, 6 October 2005