In the midst of a major transformation initiative, senior managers are frequently surprised by what employees say in response to open-ended survey questions. As a result, we are big fans of making sure senior management hears these comments. We are also big fans of ensuring senior management acts visibly and appropriately in response to what they hear.
A while back, our company was retained by a client in the midst of a reorganization. The 7,000 employee business was moving from a single corporate entity to a divisional structure along product lines. It had been widely stated that the moves would not cut headcount except for a few senior-level positions. The economy was healthy and this company was meeting its objectives when this was underway.
We ran a survey to assess the situation, and here are a few of the comments we received:
Give the big picture. As people become aware of this, then you can start drilling down into levels of detail.
It appears we are doing a lot of explaining without a lot of information being revealed. Rumors, speculation and anxiety grows while we wait. I would have done more “behind the scenes” work and made the changes less visible to the organization until we were ready to make the change.
I would like to see more “personal” meetings with senior levels. Although the communications are effective, they speak to a broad audience. I would like to see members of the executive team go to each site and personally speak to smaller groups of people to explain the rationale and changes.
The communications have improved from senior management. There should be a weekly bulletins.
Be open and honest. The rumor mill is rampant about 20% head count reductions. The change was not communicated this way in the beginning. There is even less communication now than ever. Associates want to know the dates when they will find out about their destiny. The vision about accelerated growth has disappeared. There is next-to-no communication about process changes unless you are directly involved.
Keep up the good work.
Set an exact timetable. We keep hearing conflicting dates.
My manager has done an abysmal job of explaining this to our group, has shown no compassion and seems disinterested in our concerns. The process is too slow and is killing our culture. We hear very little from the executives and they don’t do any “walking around.”
Will these moves really change the company and break down silos? Or is really a financial restructuring that will enable us to sell off parts of the company?
What are the takeaways:
Rumors fill vacuums.
Leaders can’t over-communicate. Be visible. Some people want more detail and some want less. There is no way to make everybody happy.
Have a plan and communicate your plan. Set expectations and then meet them.
Novice communications professionals love to write goals along the lines of, “Create 100% awareness of the benefits of Initiative X.”
Don’t do it. Never make the goal 100%. Let me explain with a story.
On February 23, 2007, The Wall Street Journal published a piece on how the Census Bureau is planning for the 2010 census. Question number 3 will be, “What is this person’s sex? (Mark ONE box).”
You would assume that 100% of people should be able to answer this question correctly. This would be a bad assumption. In a 2005 field test, .05% of people asked checked both answers. Extrapolated out, 150,000 people in our country of 300 million would answer this question incorrectly.
If you choose to pursue 100% of anything – even the most basic communication goal – you will fail. Just think about the 150,000 confused folks among us.
So what is realistic?
If you don’t have 70% of people prepared to move in a particular direction, the group will take an inordinate amount of time to go. 70% is your awareness tipping point.
The high 80s begin to become problematic. You are spending lots of resources for the last few points of awareness. Perfect will become the enemy of good.
If information is fairly basic, low 80s is a reasonable, yet challenging goal. If the information is more complex, 75% is reasonable.
Don’t forget, new hires, vacations, leaves of absence, travel schedules all get in the way of achieving super-high awareness numbers. It won’t be your efforts that are the issue; it will be the changing nature of your audience.
Remember, the internal communicator’s job is to broadcast messages to everybody, and management’s job is to narrowcast within their area of responsibility. The two efforts need to work together. Practically speaking, managers will be picking up “loose ends” that don’t get addressed during your broadcasting. On the other hand, recognize you must reach that 70% minimum. Without it, management’s initiative will be fighting an uphill battle.
A large part of this year’s summer vacation involved college visits with my high school senior. I had plenty of time to reflect on all the things that have happened in her lifetime as I drove through cornfield after cornfield, and she slept soundly with her iPod blaring. One of those thoughts was a wake-up call for me.
About the time my daughter was born, I gave a speech at the annual meeting of the National Food Broker Association about technology changes and business. I can remember showing a mockup of an e-mail message and talking about how e-mail would change how business would operate. I remember the following line in particular:
“I estimate the average age in this room is about 40 years old. My guess is that many of you have never used a personal computer. There is now this thing called e-mail and many of you will think that your secretary will take care of your e-mail just as she has always typed your memos. The reality is – most of you have 25 or more years in the workforce. If you think you can avoid using a personal computer for the next 25 years – good luck. There will be plenty of 20- and 30-somethings who will be happy to compete for your job.”
Guess what? I am now the guy in the audience. I’m the one who is at risk of falling behind. The scary part is, I’m an early adopter of technology and I struggle to keep up with the pace of change.
So like e-mail from the early 1990s, what is the technology innovation with the most potential to disrupt how businesses operate in the 2010s? I won’t claim it is No. 1, but Web feeds or syndication is good choice. It is those little buttons:
If you don’t know what they are, you need to. The 3:44 video explains it better than any text could:
Think about some of the changes that are enabled in a business environment:
Collaboration and Innovation – Technology becomes another glue to connect knowledge – relationships are no longer the sole connector. An engineer working in a widget factory in Poland can easily be aware of developments in the widget factories in South Korea and Tennessee. New communities develop throughout the organization, and traditional boundaries blur.
Productivity – Access to information directly correlates with an ability to perform in a work setting. Syndication fundamentally changes how information can be provided and increases in productivity should be expected. At a minimum, managerial spans of control can be expanded.
Rethinking the Internal Communication Function - The internal communication function typically works as a mass-media broadcaster today. Messages are controlled and broadcast over a few channels of distribution. With corporate blogging and syndication now available with virtually no barrier to entry, message control is gone and channels multiply wildly. Doesn’t this change the work of Internal Communications?
You might want to try to figure out those orange buttons before some whippersnapper is competing for your job.
The first three steps of The Brookside Group’s ASPIRE Change Leadership ModelTMtell you where you are, where you will go and how you are going to get there. The fourth step is the journey itself. “Implement Initiatives” encourages a deliberate, cautious, metrics-based approach to executing the change program. At its core is a set of approaches to overcome resistance.
Regardless of whether your proposed change is significant or relatively minor, you can anticipate resistance from some or all employees impacted by the effort. In fact, SHRM’s 2007 study on Change Management shows that about 70% of major organizational changes encounter employee resistance.
Your employee’s resistance can have many origins – such as differing on why change is needed, what change is needed or how to go about the change – and take many forms. They may show obvious signs of resistance, as when they strongly object to, or refuse to cooperate with, the change. Sometimes their resistance takes on a more subtle appearance, as when they show apathy.
It is vital that you, as a change sponsor, not only anticipate resistance from your employees, but have a plan to detect, diagnose and eliminate it. You also must understand why they resist change so that, from the very beginning of your initiative, you can undertake preventative measures to minimize its potential effect on your success.
As discussed in our post about setting goals, gaining input on goals enables people to become aware, understand and participate in the change process. At one client, we used a three-step implementation approach for most tactics. It wasn’t the three steps that were important, it was the fact that people got to participate in the rollout of every tactic that was important. The approach consists of:
The Laboratory – the laboratory was essentially a focus group. Beyond providing the project team the input on how to adjust messages and timing, it gave the project team the confidence that they would be able to rollout the tactics.
The Pilot – the pilot was a internally visible test marketing of various concepts. The project team used the pilot to use new presentation material, validate training material and test new support tools. The pilot participants became change agents and ambassadors of the new ways of working. “I was part of the pilot, and it mostly worked. We recommended a few changes, but it can work for you too.”
The Rollout – the third and final stage, the rollout is the large scale implementation of the change. By this point, confidence is high and resistance is significantly lowered.
Resistance to change isn’t necessarily all bad, as it sometimes can serve a constructive purpose. Allowing employees to express their beliefs and feelings will help you identify where their concerns lie and how to address those concerns to achieve the needed commitment to your change program.
It is fairly predicatable: change teams have challenges developing role clarity. What are the organization leader’s responsibilities? How do leadership responsibilties differ from the management level responsibilties? What is the communicator’s role? What should the communicator expect from leadership?
Org Readiness
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