Change Communications

I’ve always felt that an organization can’t change without a clear vision of what the future will look like. In other terms, if the leaders of the change don’t know where they want to be, how can we get there?

Today, I stumbled across a story in the form of a fable that represents well the perils of communicating vision and illustrates the gap between a reality for the organization and what staff perceive.

I’ve replicated it here, but you can read the full article at: Performance Management Company blog

In the Beginning was The Vision
And then came the Assumptions
But the Assumptions were without Form
And the Vision was without substance.

And Darkness was upon the faces of the Workers
As they Spoke amongst themselves, saying:
“It is a Crock of Shit, and it Stinketh, badly.”

So the Workers went to Supervisors and sayeth unto them:
“It is a Pail of Dung, and none may abide the Odor thereof.”

And Supervisors went to Managers, and sayeth unto them:
“It is a Container of Excrement, and it is
so very Strong that none may abide it.”

And Managers went to Directors and sayeth unto them:
“It is a vessel of Fertilizer, and none may abide its Strength.”

And Directors went to Vice Presidents and sayeth:
“It contains that which aids plant Growth, and it is very Strong.”

And Vice Presidents went to Executives and sayeth unto them:
“It promoteth Growth, and it is very very Powerful.”

And Executives went to the President, and sayeth unto him:
“This powerful Vision will actively promote Growth and Efficiency
of our departments and our company overall.”

And the President looked upon the Vision
and saw that it was good.

Thus the Vision became The Reality.

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.

You can’t expect staff morale to be high during change if you have not connected to all the different elements of your employees’ existence. You have to connect with them on three levels:

Their heads – share with them the facts, why is it needed for theorganisation to change, what is the desired outcome for the change etc.

Their hands - share with them what their role will be in the neworganisation, what behaviours will be expected from them, how will thechange effect their daily lives etc.

Their hearts – remember that people share their knowledge and creativity in a trusted environment; they need to feel that they are valued, that they belong, and that they have joined the right company. Connect withthem through emotive messages, which instil pride and provide recognition.

A recent study conducted by ISR has identified four key drivers of employee engagement that apply across the 10 countries surveyed (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UK and the USA). These drivers are summarized as:

Career development: Career development influences engagement for employees in each of the 10 countries studied, with two specific elements most commonly cited: retaining the most talented employees and providing opportunities for personal development. For a few countries other concerns come into play, but the key message is that organizations with high levels of engagement provide employees with opportunities to develop their abilities, learn new skills, acquire new knowledge and realize their potential. When companies invest in their people in this way, their people invest in them.

Leadership: The degree to which senior leaders communicate the organization’s core values and maintain high ethical standards are two elements of leadership which influence engagement in almost all of the countries studied (Hong Kong being the one exception). Employees need to feel that the core values for which their companies stand are unambiguous and clear. What matters most to them is that the values and ethical standards espoused by leaders match the actions that they take – the degree to which those values and standards affect rewards and guide decision-making and behaviors. This is a top-level issue
that would typically be addressed by senior management.

The respect leaders exhibit towards their staff members was another element of leadership common to the majority of countries ISR studied. Successful organizations show respect for each employee’s qualities and contribution – regardless of their job level. In Australia, Germany and the US, the respect issue was also affected by the degree to which managers trust their employees’ judgment.

Image: How much employees are prepared to endorse the products and services which their company provides its customers depends largely on their perceptions of the quality of those goods and services. High levels of employee engagement are inextricably linked with high levels of customer engagement.

Empowerment: Employees want to be involved in decisions that affect their work. The leaders of high-engagement workplaces do not create fear or blame cultures, where employees are reluctant to express their ideas or exercise their initiative. They create a trust and “challenge” environment, in which employees are encouraged to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy and to input and innovate to move the organization forward.

Source: This information comes from a global study of employee engagement produced by international employee research and consulting firm, ISR. For more information visit: www.isrinsight.com