Change Communications

October 11, 2005: Bad leadership is cited most often as cause of poor performance, writes CIO Update columnist Theresa Wellbourne of eePulse.

On my current job working for an IT service provider, I am concerned with what measures can be taken to improve IT team perfomances in order to deliver on time and within budget.

This has brought me to question the role and impact of leadership (essentially project managers) on team performance and I have discovered quite a few articles on this topic in a “corporate” context. In the jargon, it is referred to as “Employee engagement”. What does this mean?

A definition offered by Melcrum Publishing is: creating an emotional connection with employees that releases discretionary effort.

And surely this is what we need in the tough, constraint-filled world of IT projects. That pzang that will motivate team members to go the extra mile and deliver top quality on time. And the only way to create an emotional connection is to understand where your people are – and where their heads are – at any given time.

The pitfall

The common tendency in management circles is to assume greater knowledge than is the case – the false consensus effect. Studies confirm this. The University of Chicago showed that when passing on a simple piece of information, nearly half of the test group (46%) were confident they had been understood by the listener when, in reality, they hadn’t been.

Survey tools are therefore a great way of cutting through all this a getting an honest image or benchmark of the current situation and then opening up honest communication about how people really are based on their verbatim comments.

Tapping into the corporate “energy”

I have discovered an exciting company and a promising tool, eePulse Inc, and it looks like (because I’ve only read articles about them, I haven’t got “hands-on”) they give corporate line management the tools to connect with their personnel.

A recent Melcrum case study of BT Wholesale describes the eePulse tool as having been “critical” in bringing leadership towards understanding employee attitudes and concerns. In a basic format, the tool assesses where employee’s “energy” is, based on research showing that trends in energy levels are a good indicator of levels of motivation and thereby performance.

“If we can understand what is driving people’s energy – not follow the absolute level but follow the trend – then we can start to indentify what are the key things to tackle to get barriers out of the way, so that employees can give that bit of extra discretionary effort because they feel consulted, heard and that they have a part to play.’”

The following are three standard questions used every week:

1. What is your individual energy level? Scale of 1-10, with 10 as “burned out”.
2. What worked well for you this week?
3. What obstacles got in your way this week? What could you do about them?

Taking action
The feedback and indicators collected can be used to shape leadership behaviour. According to Theresa Wellbourne, founder, president and CEO of eePulse and an adjunct professor of Executive Education at the University of Michigan Business School, “energy” is “catchy,” and if the senior leadership team is starting to become de-energized and lose confidence, those attitudes trickle down to the rest of the employee population. In fact, immediate attention to the leadership and management teams is warranted.

Steps for change

To create higher energy and confidence levels in your organization, Wellbourne recommends trying these simple steps:

• Start an open communication process. Specific discussions to diagnose energy, confidence and what’s affecting all employees will help any organization thrive. Give people a venue to voice their opinions, concerns and suggestions without fear of retribution for negative comments.
• Get current data. Collect data through communication efforts, online surveys or other processes. If you have a pulse on what is really going on within your organization, you’ll be able to solve small issues before they become major problems. This can save you time, money and a lot of aggravation.
• Take action. Once you have open dialogue and current data, actually use this information to make change happen. Take action and let all members of the organization know current issues and activities on a regular basis. Then, get feedback and use that data to fine tune your strategy execution.

The BT Wholesale experience

Andrea Wyatt-Budd, leader of engagement and internal communication for BT Wholesale, explains that it has enabled the leadership team to say “We are not really in touch with where our people are. This is what we think the environment of the organisation is. But look at what they are telling us we have created.”

Some of the successes seen at BT Wholesale:

• Changing the climate of responsibility: at first question number three was met with the familiar “It’s everyone else’s fault” or “Senior management should be doing more”… to more reflective responses that show employees taking more responsibility for change, such as “I disagree with the new pay review because I don’t think the communication plan is good enough. I am going to initiate a round of briefings with the head of communications to discuss this.”
• Progress on the difficulties being indentified by employees: during the first trials, “the barriers this week” most commonly raised were around: workload, teamwork and resource levels. By concentrating on these issues, they had moved into “what was working well” within six months. Wyatt-Budd explains this by “taking the comments from eePulse”, putting action plans in place to address these things, and that fed into us turning around our results on those topics”.
• Other parts of the organization are expressing interest in running the same kind of initiative in their units.

My experience

Before I had learnt about “employee engagement”, I called this “creating a dialogue” or “creating a conversation” within our team. Like any human endeavour how can you expect a team to succeed without information circulating in all directions? In my humble experience, I would use surveys to “take the temperature” and use it as a form of dialogue for talking to teams about their concerns in their own words.

Below are a couple of examples of how this can be applied to a project environment, taken from my most recent mission:

My personal conclusion is that this process works well. The results above form part of an in-depth audit; a snapshot at one particular point in time. However, this was a heavy process to manage and a lighter and shorter set of questions would be more efficient on a more frequent basis.

1. Keep it short

You know what it feels like to be given a questionnaire that is pages and pages long. I usually have a strong desire to run in the opposite direction.

I have a rule: if possible, no more than 10 questions.

If the questionnaire is too long or complex it can actually produce the opposite of what you are trying to achieve; a frustrated reader will either skip questions or give poor quality answers. A short, simple and clear survey is much more likely to encourage the reader to spend a bit more time on the responses he/she is going to give.

2. Know what you want to find out (and how you want exploit that information)

How can you possibly collect and effectively work with information if you don’t have a very clear idea of what it is you want? It’s like trying to go somewhere with a map but not knowing where you want to get to.

• For each survey: define clear objectives, what is it exactly that you want to learn? Why? What are you going to do with this information?
• For each question: make sure you know how you will interpret the results. How are you going to be able to illustrate what is being said? How will this help you make decisions?

If this planning is done carefully you will avoid the following pitfalls:

• Unquantifiable replies: for example, a quantitive measure (such as a rating of 1-4) may be more appropriate than the traditional open text box. If you have 200 text answers to wade through, or even 20, how can you get an effective idea of the group’s opinions or a trend? Text boxes are good for subjective information and suggestions and should be used sparingly.
• Repetition of the same question in different forms: this is very common in surveys where the objective is not clear. The questions end up being a series of stabs in the dark.

3. Simplify your life

Life is complicated enough. Why complicate it more with Excel spreadsheets, word documents, email exchanges, manual counting of results or – god fobid – paper answers?! Very good, reasonably priced survey and questionnaire tools exist on the Web. Not only does this solve the problem of distributing the survey and collecting the results, most sites also include tools for presenting and/or exporting the data collected. All you need to do is send an URL to your target audience and sit back and watch the data come in.

Here are a couple of places to start:

1. http://www.questionmark.com – a heavy duty solution, good if you need to do a lot of surveys and assessments.
2. http://www.surveymonkey.com – a light-weight option, quick and effective. Good when you need to go quickly.

Alternatively you could try some of the advertisements on the side of this blog… :)

4. Know who you are adressing

What you ask and how you ask it (phrasing) should be adapted to your target audience.

Example: A common mistake is to see the survey from your (management) perspective. You know you need to work out what from your team can take from its current experience (organisation, process etc) and apply to future projects. The mistake is to ask your team this question directly. The team members are not necessarily project managers and will not give you the answeres you require. It is much more effective to ask what worked well and with this information you can decide what would be good for future projects.

5. Make sure you have the required management support and means to act on any findings

Avoid doing a survey just for the sake of being able to say you have done one. By sending a survey you are sending a strong message that you want to listen to the opinions of those being questioned; a survey implies some sort of change. If the survey reveals problems and no action is taken you will de-credibilse yourself.

Furthermore, be as open as possible about the results, findings and actions (even if you don’t have the means to act on all points, at least recognise the issues identified) resulting from the exercise, it will work in your favour and show that the team or organisation is capable of listening and adapting.

And that is really what it is all about, no?

Nicholas Ranken

EDIT 28/8/2006 For guidance on responding to a survey, check out this post on Lee Smith’s Talking Internal Communication

I love this definition of change communication, it is so true and so necessary!

Change communications: facts – fast – frequent

Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together. — V. M. Kelly

Here is what you can do to create a winning team:

1. Make sure the team has a challenging goal to achieve. (*)
2. Ensure all team members understand the goal and are committed to it. (*)
3. Provide the necessary training to master the needed skills.
4. Stay the course even when things are tough. Keep all eyes on the ball. (*)
5. Resolve conflict before it distracts people and splits the team.
6. Measure the team’s progress, and make the score known to all. (*)
7. Ask team members for their input and find out what they need to win. (*)
8. Encourage diversity of styles within a shared dedication to the goal. (*)
9. The coach is to motivate and guide, but not hold players’ hands.
10. Celebrate small wins along the way, until you achieve the big one. (*)

(c) Communication Ideas

(*) Points that an active communication strategy can contribute to. I recently experimented putting these points into practice in a project involving 170 people over 10 months in three different geographic locations.