Change Communications

In a recent Melcrum survey, nearly 90 percent of the communication professionals who responded rated “shaping corporate culture” as important or very important. A clear indication that it’s a subject on the minds of many practitioners. Given that corporate culture is something that involves many business functions, this still begs the question of what exactly is communication’s role in shaping it.

When it comes to culture change, the communicator’s dilemma is a thorny one. Organizational communication is first and foremost a reflection of culture. But without communication, there’s no hope of culture change. To get the process in motion, Roger D’Aprix and Cheryl Fields Tyler suggest communicators start by teaching their organizations to communicate more effectively. Here, they share four crucial areas to focus on.

1. Explain why change is necessary
   The driving force of culture change is the marketplace. Its urgencies represent the only compelling rationale for organizational change. Leaders may want to discuss what actions they’ve decided on, but employees want to know why the change is necessary in the first place.
2. Create a clear and compelling plot line
   A clear, simple and compelling “plot line” for the change story is the second essential ingredient to successful culture change. What is the business strategy and how will it make us a winner in the marketplace? How will we need to change to execute this strategy successfully? What will we need to change in the way we do business?
3. Understand those involved in the process
   Creating a successful communication strategy to change culture starts with understanding who needs to be communicating with one another and the current mindset, experience and expectations of these individuals and audiences. For example, front-line managers, caught between the anxiety of middle management and the fear and frustration of employees, ride the rumor mill roller coaster and wonder why no one is telling them what the future holds.
4. Aim to engage
   By this we don’t mean high scores on the annual survey tool, nor a permanent state of employee satisfaction and motivation. The simple truth is that most companies that have cause for major culture transformation are on the negative end of the engagement continuum. Communication strategy that supports engagement in this context must be understood as a sophisticated process that creates the situations and understandings that lead people to literally choose to engage with one another, and through that engagement, to change their behavior.

Source: Strategic Communication Management Volume 10, Issue 3 April/May 2006.

Good to get a reminder from time to time:

During any change, people fall into four categories:

• Acceptance
• Indifference
• Passive Resistance
• Active Resistance

I wouldn’t advocate giving up entirely on the active resistance camp, but we tend to spend too much precious time and energy trying to convert them. Sometimes in the end we just have to let them go (perhaps it is not their journey).

Typically: 13% of any organisation is disengaged, 11% is engaged = total 24% engaged/disengaged.

That means another 76% of your staff have tremendous potential to become peak performers. The trick is finding out what engagement methods work for you.

It’s a long way between awareness and action. It takes a long timefor people to go through the four stages of change: awareness,understanding, commitment and action.

Source: Melcrum Communication Network

The following are extracts from an email bulletin board discussion that I am following. I couldn’t agree more! We all, myself included, tend to get distracted by modern shiny technology… but are we not forgeting something important??!

The problem: how we can we as communicators help change organizational behaviours

A couple of replies:

Since I’ve been in similar situations, I’ll tell you what I’ve done in the past. I’ve identified folks who don’t participate and I’ve taken one, two or three out to lunch (always one on one) or out to coffee (by ‘out’ I mean outside of the building, if possible) and I’ve talked with them very honestly about my concerns. And they’ve been flattered that I cared about what they thought and told me things I’d never even considered and had no idea were going on! It gave me real insight into employees’ needs and how staff reacted to what was being said and – guess what- all kinds of issues came up that no one understood or appreciated. As a result, I adjusted my communications strategy, which ended up in being better and more effective.

So my advice is: Take people out to eat.

————–

I sometimes think the best communications tool available to internal comms practitioners is the $2 cup of coffee.

I know it sounds “corny” and certainly it lacks the glamour of a podcast, blog or intranet. However what could make for more meaningful communications than buying someone a cup of coffee, getting their undivided attention for 10 minutes and finding how they feel about the issues?

The strategic trick of course is to have coffee with the right people: those that others in the workplace look to advice, support, opinion or guidance. Get “key influencers” onside and chances are you will win over others in their network.

“Key influencers” can do three things for the internal communicator. Over coffee they can:

1. Tell you what’s on people’s minds and the type of information they really hunger for.
2. Help you convert company corporate speak in to the language of their “workplace tribe”.
3. Identify the informal opportunities (ones that will never make it into your comms planning) to get the message out.

Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm for change could come right back to the boss talking about change and forgetting to mention the end result. Mangers must paint he big picture and show people when they should stand in the group portrait. What’s the point in struggling up the summit of the mountain if we have no idea what we will see when we get there. Our experience suggests that people react best when managers talk in terns of the “challenge” rather than just change.

Source: Melcum Comms Network

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., Change Communication Guru, recently related an experience which I find an excellent way of explaining how to make change communication work. Here’s her story:

Twenty years ago, I was a therapist in private practice, specializing in short-term therapy for behavioral change. At first, I wasn’t always successful in my attempts to help people whose doctors wanted them to stop smoking, or whose parents wanted them to get better grades, or whose managers wanted them to increase productivity.

I became instantly and dramatically more effective when I learned the “secret of change.” After that, I could tell if someone was destined to fail based on preliminary conversations to discuss the problem. Those conversations would go something like this:

Client: My doctor wants me to quit smoking.
Me: Good idea. Have your doctor call me for an appointment, and you call back when there’s something you want to do.

Client: My husband hates it when I get fat.
Me: Okay, now I know his concern. What’s yours?

Client: My sales manager would really like me to meet my monthly quota.
Me: I’ll bet she would. What would you really like?

Client: My parents want me to study harder and do better in math.
Me: No doubt. Now, tell me about your goals.

It was a simple and obvious insight: people rarely changed because their doctor, their spouse, or others in their lives wanted them to.

I’m not saying there was anything wrong with trying to change for someone else, I’m only reporting that it didn’t work. The motivation wasn’t strong enough – it wasn’t selfish enough! And when I helped those same individuals identify or develop an overwhelming personal desire for change, the result was almost always a resounding success.

Everything I learned as a therapist has helped me in my work with organizational transformation, but nothing has been quite as powerful as “the secret of change.”

That’s why communicating the WIIFM – What’s in it for me? – is so important. It’s why a change strategy needs to include small wins and rewards along the way. It’s why the real-life stories of those who have succeeded at change are so powerful. And it’s why involving employees in creating change is the ultimate transformation strategy.

Carol Kinsey Goman, Communitelligence

Evidence suggests that only 20% to 50% of large-scale projects succeed, and that the major cause of project failure is a failure to address the “people” issues.

Click on image to view full-size version.

Source: Atos Consulting

Let’s start with the hypothesis that change communication is a management process. No change initiative can suceed on communication alone; it requires management sponsorship. The role of a communication department or professional is therefore to advise, coach and execute communication actions to support the change leader.

So what role does a leader play in this process? A leader communicates:

A) a sense of confidence and control (or lack thereof) to employees.
B) his or her own feelings about the change.
C) the degree to which he/she trusts the abilities of the employees to get through the change.
D) a sense of purpose and commitment (or lack thereof).
E) the degree to which he/she accepts the reactions and feelings of employees.
F) expectations regarding behaviour that is seen as appropriate or inappropriate (ie. rumour-mongering, back-room meetings).
G) the degree to which he/she is “connected to” employees situations and feelings or is “in-touch” with them.

It is clear that if the leader communicates effectively, he or she will be sending messages that decrease resistance, and encourage moving through the change more effectively and positively. The bottom line with all of this is if you screw up communicating with employees, even the smallest changes can result in ugly problems.

Source: Nicholas Ranken

We must become the change we want to see in the world

That is what Gandhi said to his aides as he went on a hunger strike after deadly clashes between his country’s Hindu and Muslim communities. The physically fragile man vowed not to eat again until the two groups stopped fighting. All the pleas of his aides were to no avail. Only when peace returned did he stop his fasting. His actions spoke much louder than any words. Such is the mark of great leaders.

How do you communicate change in your organization? Publications, communication campaigns and training programs can certainly introduce and explain the change. But only when top management “become the change they want to see” in the organization will anybody else believe the change message.

As a leader, manager, or staff specialist, ask yourself: “Have I become the change I want to see in this organization?”

Source: Communication Ideas

Personal thoughts on the role of change communications in major IT deployments:

Create an image of the future:

• From what to what? What will change exactly? Prevent rumours.
• Present the bigger picture, strategy? Why are we doing this, spending all this money?

Aid the transition phase:

• Ensure all actors have the information required to change: training, timings.
• Reassure about technical worries and uncertainties.

Set expectation:

• Scope will invariably change. Descoping, prioritisation. Big impact on user acceptance.
• Provide workarounds and temporary solutions.

Source: Nicholas Ranken, Lawson Project

In a recent survey by the Conference Board, 539 global CEOs were asked to list their top concerns. In Europe and Asia as well as in North America, organizational flexibility and adaptability to change consistently ranked at the top of the list. Only revenue growth was of higher concern.

Source: Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., Communitelligence

A good definition of the role of change communication is given by David Ferrabee of Hill & Knowlton in his professional blog. I quote:

What is Change and Internal Communication…?

… and why should you care!

Those of us working in the occidental world aren’t really making things as much as we used to. And even if we are manufacturing we have largely taken all the possible cost out of the production cycle.

So what does that leave?

People.

If you look at the financial statements of any FT 100 company you will see that ‘people’ costs make up the majority of the business costs. What do we do about them? How do we help them to work smarter? How do we get them to do what is best for the organisation?

That’s where change & internal communications comes in.

In the first quarter of this year there were 28.61 million people working in the United Kingdom, for example. How many of them know what their organisation is trying to do? How many actually know what they could and should be doing to help?

We’ve been talking to a lot of people in the public sector recently too. Did you know there are 5,818,000 public sector employees in the UK? (It took me £1 and ten minutes to get that information from AQA!) In many ways they have a clearer idea of what they should be doing. But few public sector employees receive effective internal communications. If you compare them to places like Vodafone or Diageo, where internal communications is a fairly advanced science, our friends in the public sector are miles behind.

Who is going to fix all this? Good question.

I think I know a few people.

/df

Source: David Ferrabee