Change Communications

A recent comment on the following post, “A definition of change communication“, got me thinking about what content we should be providing in this factual, fast and frequent manner?

Projects, and IT projects in particular, are usually run on a tight budget. Time, money and resources are often short. What I see happening is that any old information to hand is packaged and sent out to future users. The information I am thinking about is often extracted from progress reports, the sort of information that team managers give to hierarchy in PowerPoint files to track their progress.

However, successful change communication needs much more than this. It needs to be passed through a filter, a communicator, who will ensure messages are structured for a defined target audience. This should be someone that will digest the information into the following key points (a useful pense-bête):

• What is happening?
• Why is it happening?
• What does it mean (for me)?
• What are the next steps?

And there isn’t just one wise communicator in an ivory tower that can prepare this. It will require regular contact (surveys, conference calls, cups of coffee…) with the stakeholder groups being targeted, or at least a representative. In my experience, key users are invaluable change communication allies.

A simple, factual change message that goes straight to these points is more likely to be taken on-board; especially when it is competing amongst the hundreds of messages that we are “assaulted” with everyday via e-mail, press, radio, TV, intranets, websites, blogs, meetings, conference calls, workshops…

Maybe this sounds like common sense to some, but it surprises me that communications are rarely prepared in this way.

Nicholas

Still on the subject of consulting, I recently came across Schein’s description of three primary models for organizational facilitation.

1. Purchase models: refer to the purchase of expert information and advice
2. Doctor-patient models: refer to the purchase of diagnostic and prescriptive services
3. Process consultation models: refer to collaborative client-consultant relationships in which consultants function as facilitators and help client learn to improve their internal problem-solving processes.

These short descriptions give a good sense of perspective for those involved in change management and coaching with clients, activities which correspond to the process consultation model.

Source: Schein 1988

I thought I’d share a small pearl of wisdom that I recently heard on a training course. It’s about the profession of consulting and it struck a cord with me.

Consulting was described using the concepts of Yin and Yang that originate in ancient Chinese philosophy and metaphysics. In short, these concepts are attributed to two primal opposing but complementary forces found in all things in the universe.

I’ve noticed that consulting is often a balance between the opposing, but complementary, forces of “leadership” and “servitude”.

Ultimately a consultant is hired to provide a service. The definition of servitude given by Wiktionary is: the act or state of being in service to someone. So, I guess that implies that the client is in the driving seat, they are requesting a service.

Yet, a consultant is hired to bring specialised knowledge of a particular domain and should lead a client to make the best choices in relation to his/her stated objective. In change management this often involves challenging a client’s own convictions and resistance to change.

Too much leadership or inappropriate leadership and the consultant will be perceived as arrogant and trying to force his view or theories on the client. However, too little and a consultant is seen as ineffective and not really providing any added value to the client, a kind of (expensive) hired labour.

I thought this was quite an accurate representation of the challenges that a consultant can face. It appears to me that getting this right has just as much to do with relational skills as pure expertise.

Personally, I find this a fine balance; I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

Nicholas

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.

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

Change communications: facts – fast – frequent

Information plus technology does not equal communication. Emails and power points don’t change people’s behaviour.

Ubuntu, from the Zulu and Xhosa languages, means “I am because we are,” as South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu translates it. (Other translations have it as, “A person is a person through other people.” But that’s not quite as catchy.)

Ubuntu — I am because we are — is an appropriate mantra for leaders. It crystallizes a wonderfully inspiring attitude to hold toward all associates in the organization that you jointly serve.

A leader can be no more successful than the quality of the trust and relationship between the people she leads. And so the spirit of ubuntu, of humility and connectedness, permeates a good leader’s every relationship — and all healthy relationships.

Source: Don Blohowiak, Clarifier. Catalyst. Coach.

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

Change communication requires an expanded defintion of communication: from speech writing, intranet content development, e-mail messages, roll-out/cascade programs – and the rest of the current traditional approaches – to a more inclusive overview encompassing leadership behavior, reward systems, organizational goal-setting, recognition programs, work processes, workplace design, and strategic conversations within formal and informal networks.

Most importantly, it means letting go of any preconceived notion of finding “the one right way” to communicate change. No “transformation formula” lasts forever. In fact, the best change-communication techniques aren’t found in any single source or strategy. The most effective guidelines evolve in response to a series of questions:

Question #1 – What is the employees’ perspective?
Front-line employees deal regularly with customers and observe first-hand the issues, challenges, and successes of those they serve. The IT department sees advances in technology before the rest of the organization has adapted to the last update. Professionals throughout the company attend association meetings and have access to experts in their field. Your organization has hired the best and the brightest – and your task is to tap their expertise, points of view, and concerns. The first question to ask is: “What do employees think?”

Question #2 – Did you “set the stage” for change?
The best time to discuss the forces of change is well in advance of an organization’s response to them. Everyone in the organization needs a realistic appreciation of the precursors of change and transformation – the impact of globalization, market fluctuations, technological innovations, societal and demographic changes in the customer base, new products/services of competitors, new government and regulatory decisions. And here technology can be a great asset. Although it certainly shouldn’t be the only medium, the intranet can be a timely vehicle for competitive and industry information.

Question #3 – How will you track employee perceptions?
Employee interaction and feedback loops help communicators track the level of workforce comprehension. Whether you supply an email box or a phone number for individuals to ask questions about the change, use online surveys to query a sampling of the workforce, or create Communication Advisory Teams to represent their fellow workers, the greatest advantages come when organizational feedback is gathered immediately after the delivery of an important message.

Question #4 – Do you have honest answers to tough questions?
Not only can employees tolerate honest disclosure, they are increasingly demanding it. And when it comes to change, employees want straight answers to these tough questions:
* Will I keep my job?
* How will pay and benefits be affected?
* How will this affect my opportunities for advancement?
* Will I have a new boss?
* What new skills will I need?
* What will be expected of me?
* How will I be trained/supported for the new challenges?
* How will I be measured?
* What are the rewards or consequences?

Question #5 – Can you answer the most important question: What’s in it for them? There are personal advantages to be found in almost every change, but people may need help discovering what the advantages are. Sometimes employees just need to be guided through a few questions: What are your career goals? What are the skills you would like to learn? What job-related experiences would you like have? In what ways might this change help you to fulfill some of your personal objectives?

Question #6 – Have you narrowed the “say-do” gap?
Organizations send two concurrent sets of messages about change. Formal communication is what companies “say” to employees about the organization and its goals. Informal communication is what the company “does” in terms of rewards, compensation, training, leadership behavior, organizational structure, etc. to demonstrate and support what it says. For today’s skeptical employee audiences, rhetoric without action quickly disintegrates into empty slogans and company propaganda.

Question #7- Who’s vision is it?
Effective communicators understand the power of vision to imbue people with a sense of purpose, direction and energy. But if the vision belongs only to top management, it will never be an effective force for transformation. In the end, people have to feel that the vision belongs to them. The power of a vision comes truly into play only when the employees themselves have had some part in its creation. So the communicator’s role moves from crafting executive speeches to facilitating interactive events.

Question #8 – Can you paint the big-little picture?
Vision is the big picture, and it is crucial to the success of the enterprise. But along with the big picture, people also need the little picture so they know where their contribution fits into the corporate strategy. And here’s where first-line supervisors can be the most effective communicators. In face-to-face discussions with their team members, supervisors become a vital link in turning the organizational vision into practical and meaningful actions.

Question #9 – Are you emotionally literate?
People have to understand the rationale for change – the business case, the marketplace reality. But change is more than just the logic behind it. Large-scale organizational change almost invariably triggers the same sequence of emotional reactions — denial, negativity, a choice point, acceptance, and commitment. Communicators who track this emotional process design strategies that help people accept and move through the various stages.

Question #10 – Are you telling stories?
Good stories are more powerful than plain facts. This is not to reject the value in facts, of course, but simply to recognize their limits in influencing people. People make decisions based on what facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves. Stories give facts meaning. Stories resonate with adults in ways that can bring them back to a childlike open-mindedness – and make them less resistant to experimentation and change.

Question #11 – Do you know how change really gets communicated?
Town hall meetings in which senior leaders speak openly about change, great stories that embody the spirit of change, well-designed intranets filled with pertinent information about the forces and progress of change, interactive “transformation sessions” in which a cross-section of the organization co-creates a vision and develops the strategy, online employee surveys that query and monitor a work force as it deals with the nuances of change, icons and symbols and signage that visually reinforce change, and (especially) first-line supervisors who are trained and prepared to engage their direct reports in a dialogue about what change means to them – these are (and will remain) vital tools for communicators. But, as powerful as they are, these are formal communication channels operating within the organizational hierarchy. And a single informal channel, the company grapevine, can undermine them all.

In the hallways, around the water cooler or coffee pot, over the telephone, as part of a blog, in rouge web sites, and through e-mail messages, news is exchanged and candid opinions are offered. It is during these “off-line” exchanges and daily conversations that people decide whether or not to support change. Want to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your change communication? Then find ways to identify, involve, and enlist your organization’s social networks and informal opinion leaders.

Question #12 – Are you positioning change as an event or a corporate mindset?
If adaptable, change-adept organizations are what CEOs want, then the only communication strategy that’s going to produce the desired result is one that includes instability as a positive element – and ongoing change as “business as usual.” So, a final question: Are you still referring to change as “the event” or are you positioning it as a constant corporate mindset and vital component of organizational success?

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