Everywhere you look these days the focus in Human Resources and Employee Communication is managing change within organizations. But most of these programs fail to achieve their objectives. During bad economic times the focus is usually on providing coaching on understanding the emotions people go through during change, helping employees deal with the complex emotions of watching colleagues leave, communication strategies that utilise management hierarchies to communicate face to face with their teams on what is happening next in organizational restructures and so on.
The reason why this approach does not work is because the focus is on managing fear, not change. And this is why managers don't follow through with the key messages and face to face discussions with their teams that you have so cleverly crafted. I realise that some "studies" show that employees trust their immediate manager or supervisor more than anyone in the organization. Therefore it must follow that if you are designing a communication and change strategy focused on organizational restructures and downsizing the smart thing to do would be to utilize them as a key part of your face to face strategy.
Actually this is not the case and there are many reasons why this is not the way to approach change during these times. Think about it. Here you have an entire organization paralysed with fear. Budget cuts all around, negative media speculation, no one is secure. And the only person who really knows what is being planned is the CEO. Is it any wonder, when you give a script for managers and supervisors to communicate to staff, their teams ask what's going to happen with our jobs, and the manager or supervisor in the spirit of trust and honesty says, "I don't know, I don't even know what is going happen to me." So this is why you need to take a different approach to face to face communication during these times.
So here is an example of how you can still give accountability for specific messages to managers and supervisors and at the same time utilize your CEO as a key communicator during times of change .
During another "bad" economic time, during which the organization had 9 new competitors during one year I implemented the following strategy.
1. Firstly I had arranged for the CEO to meet with each of the state managers of the business divisions in each state individually. The win for the CEO was to hear first hand how business was in each business division in each state and to meet with key clients at the same time.
2. He explained honestly to each State Manager the reality of the situation with the business and why he had to rely on them.
3. He gave them specific actions of what he wanted from them and they in return delivered and stepped up and managed in some instances the total closure of state offices in true leadership style.
4. We then held "Business Reality" workshops for one day in each state which all managers and supervisors attended. The CEO was present at each and shared with them real business data and the issues facing the organization and asked for their input in coming up with options and innovative ideas to grow the business.
5. These ideas were then considered by the Executive team and the best were implemented in each business division and state.
6. The supervisors and managers now had something to share with their teams – specific action plans for their division. And more importantly the key issues that the CEO had asked them to focus on.
The outcome was that despite going through extensive downsizing, restructures and everyone having to reapply for new roles, we grew the business by 25% in that year. Obviously the strategy was much more detailed than outlined above, but the purpose of this article is share why I think managers and supervisors are not the best face to face communicators during times of change.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on change management and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.changemanagementtips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
One of the common mistakes people make when designing a change program is assuming that if a person is a team leader, supervisor or senior manager they should naturally know how to communicate face to face with their teams. However communication skills are rarely one of the key competencies that is taught or measured by organizations. There is however a very easy way to ensure that there is structure and content that make it very easy for managers at all levels to follow.
What is needed is structure and process and team briefing which is a formal communication cascading process via management is a tool that perfectly fits the bill. It has three levels of cascading messages:
1. The first is the CEO who at his executive team briefings decides which topics for that week he wants communicated to employees.
2. This is then circulated out to his direct reports who then have to communicate those issues and decide the top 5 issues for their respective divisions and then finally the top 5 issues for their teams.
3. So the only aspect of a team brief that changes is the last section which is how what is happening in the company and our division relates to the work we are doing in our team. This is the section that always changes depending on your team in the division.
The reason this works is simple. The only aspect a manager has to think about is what is happening in the organization that will effect his team that week or month depending on the frequency of the team briefing process. The rest of the information is already determined by the divisional head and the CEO. The team brief should only take around 15 minutes so it can be incorporated into a regular team meeting. And most importantly it is constant as the CEO has his Executive team meeting dates set for the entire year and this ensures that everyone from the Executive team to the frontline know what is happening in the organization.
The key factor to the success of team briefings is that they are driven by the CEO. Whenever your CEO talks with managers and employees he should ask whether they had in fact attended a team briefing and how regularly they occured.This way if they are not he can say to his direct reports, "I am conducting my team brief with you now so there is no excuse for you not to do the same with your team members".
So these are the keys to making Team Briefings work.
1. Make sure that you put in place a simple process
2. Make sure that the CEO drives it and that his direct reports understand the importance to the CEO - not you. Afterall you are not their boss, he is.
3. Ensure that the topics are the type of content that management are comfortable and knowledgeable about
4. Provide a feedback loop, again this is part of the process, if there is a question that management do not know the answer to, there must be a formal easy process for them to follow to quickly obtain the answer and respond to the employee.
5. Team briefings should only take 15 minutes, they can also be incorporated into regular weekly meetings.
When it comes to cascading information in a face to face format via management remember that as with anything, there will be some topics that employees want to hear directly from the CEO and other topics they are happy to hear from their manager. Generally when it comes to significant issues such as retrenchments, closure of offices and mergers or acquisitions employees generally want to hear this from the person at the top. Day to day, week by week and month by month operational issues they are comfortable in hearing from their manager who manages their daily work.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on change management and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.changemanagementtips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
When you think about the millions of dollars organizations spend each year on IT programs of work, wouldn't it be prudent knowing that employees actually understand and most importantly embrace the reason behind the changes? There is one way of ensuring that employees and their managers have got the message and truly understand the reasons for the new system implementation. And that is the means that you communicate change.
Let's start with reviewing how most organizations manage technology based change. If your organization's approach to this type of change is new skills training and employee communication strategies that include stakeholder management (translated briefings), intranet and email updates then that's not managing change, rather it is focussed on information. So what is the difference and why do we need to do anything more than provide information?
IT systems are not introduced for the sake of a new system itself, they are introduced because there are benefits to be realised from a business management perspective. This may include more information on customer profiles and identifying other products or services clients may be interested in purchasing, the chagnes might focus on back office systems such as greater information for human resources management or accounting or they may focus on the supply chain and logistics. Whatever the reason there is a business reason for change and this is what employees need to understand if the full benefits of any system implementation is going to be realised.
Let's look at an example. This financial services organisation was introducing a new back office system. In the past employees worked in separate divisions so customers were transferred from one area to another to process their request. The new system meant that all of the customer details were now available to employees and that they would now work in teams and "own" the customer from the commencement to end of transaction. It was a complete system and work style change so before specific system training was introduced a simulated work area was established and employees were taken through the customer experience. It was important that they understood the benefits to the customer by looking at the changes through the eyes of the customer. This way we created the "Aha" moment, employees got the message better than any intranet, information session or email bulletin could have conveyed it. And when employees went into system training they clearly understood the benefits and business reasons behind the changes.
The five key things to remember when communicating technology changes.
1. Be very clear about the business reasons for the changes – who will benefit and what will those benefits be?
2. Establish why those benefits are important? What will the impact be on the organization?
3. Decide the key messages for your information strategy – what will you need to communicate, to whom and when?
4. Concurrently design an engagement strategy at key points in your project plan that will engage employees at all levels in the reason for the technology changes.
5. Remember to ensure engagement the message is not about the system itself but about the business reasons for the changes.
Finally, as change management professionals can we take the same approach to managing system changes and apply it to every new organization? The answer is clearly no because as every organization's culture is different, so it follows that every approach to change management and employee communication must be different to maximise the investment and potential of the system changes that are implemented.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on change management and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.itculturalchangetips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
If your employee communication strategy to communicate change focuses on stakeholder communication plans, an intranet site, CEO forums and Staff Information Bulletins via email stop right there. Your efforts are focused on information, not communication and the likelihood of engaging employees in change is remote.
My interest in employee communication is to distinguish between the tools communicators use that inform and those strategies that engage employees and therefore impact business outcomes. The concern is that there seems to be confusion in the market place where roles are advertised for "Change Managers" when the organization is really looking for an internal communication professional not a change practitioner.
So what's the difference?
Well clearly both information and engagement tools are important. An internal communication professional focuses on tools to impart information and in some cases create dialogue including:
- the corporate intranet
- staff information bulletins
- emails
- providing information for managers to brief their teams face to face
- organising staff forums for the CEO
- briefing kits for supervisors and team leaders
Whilst all of this activity is important and provides the support that employees need to find out what is happening. But, and it is an important distinction, so what if you tell people what is happening, will it change their attitude and therefore change their behaviour? In my experience which is across many sectors, industries, professional roles and all types of change programs I have to say no. And this is the problem, when a CEO and senior executive team think "change" will happen because they have hired someone to communicate the changes taking place and then when there is no impact on the business or the outcomes they were looking for they are disappointed.
Think of it this way. Smokers buy a packet of cigarettes, the health warnings are featured on the packet and yet we see intelligent, literate people continue to smoke, packet after packet. The only time they truly become engaged in changing their attitude toward smoking and therefore behaviour is when they are in the doctors office and are personally facing a health risk. And then Aha! they finally get it.
So how do we use this analogy when we are tying to communicate change? Let's look at this example. An organization wants to communicate the financial results to employees and the usual approach is to post the employee annual report on the intranet. But this time they need to do something different, they want employees to understand why the company needs to improve and what shareholders base their decisions on. So they decided to run free lunchtime information sessions for their employees on how to invest in the share market and held them for one hour each week for four weeks. The topics progressed from understanding the share market, categories of companies listed etc till the final week they examined annual reports. So in this final session they were reviewing annual reports and came to the last one for the session and after reading through the data the question was asked of employees, so who would invest in this company, few put their hands up. And you guessed it, the company was their company and with a collective Aha! the employees finally got the message.
As in this instance, a large transformation program including HR, training and operational initiatives was developed to build on this.
So here is the important message for any change program. Information is important, employees need to know what is happening, when, why, who, what and by whom. However, equally as important when it comes to organizational change, employees need to be involved in the process to be truly engaged. This is where change professionals need to focus on the Aha! moments and engage their employees in the process of change.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on employee communication and business transformation and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.changemanagementtips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
One of the things that continues to surprise me is that when times are bad organizations still spend money on employee engagement surveys. A general look around the office or factory and tea room discussions would make it obvious to all that wanted to see it that employees are not so much engaged as they are worried about their jobs. This leads us to two major issues to consider during tough times, the first is how we inspire confidence and innovation in an organization that appears to be in freeze mode. The second is what you should measure as an indicator of employee engagement.
Let's deal with inspiring confidence and innovation in your organization. Well this boils down to a change management strategy that focuses on getting employees actively involved at all levels in understanding the business and how their ideas can have a positive impact. Here's an example of what you could do.
1. Take real business data and share it with groups of employees at all levels that deal with customers in specific sectors.
2. Ask employees for ideas on improving or innovating just one aspect of your service offering or product line and test in a specific market segment on a small scale, say a sales territory or state.
3. Then after testing those ideas for a six week period ask employees to examine the business results.
4. Take those ideas that have shown a substantial improvement in sales and implement either state wide or nationally depending on your organization.
5. Design a reward and recognition program around the impact of these ideas on the business outcomes and start to energise your workforce.
It really is that simple, treat employees with respect, stop telling them what to do instead listen to what they have to say, put some rigor around the framework for ideas and reward outstanding results. This is how innovation happens and how you can energise an organization to respond quickly to changing market conditions.
Another key is to ensure that whatever change management strategy you design it has specific activities and responsibilities for management. Often we forget that managers are just as concerned during tough times about their job security, but their team members are looking at them for direction and support. So when we design change strategies ensure that there are key responsibilities and clearly defined activities for all levels of the organization. So practically what does this mean with our example above? Well you would design specific activities such as;
1. Managers would identify the real business data and share it with their teams
2. Managers would be responsible for selecting which ideas would be selected for testing in a specific market and they would decide which test market
3. Managers would obtain the business results at the end of the six week test period and organise briefings with their teams
4. The hierarchy of managers would then decide which tests produced the best result and decide which to implement and project plan that implementation
5. Together with human resources the management team would decide on a reward and recognition program and share it with their teams.
So what about employee engagement surveys? I say save your organization the tens of thousands of dollars they cost and invest your time in a well thought out change management strategy like that outlined above. This will ensure a climate where communication is open, ideas are valued and actions are implemented. All these steps are indicative of a workforce that is focussed, has purpose and feels a greater level of confidence about the future of their organization and therefore their role because they are actively involved in designing the future, not being told what do and when to do it. If you just change the paradigm from budget cuts, budget cuts and budget cuts to opportunities, growth and involvement your organization's business results will be your barometer of employee engagement, no survey required.
Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on change management and has spoken at conferences around the world. For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.changemanagementtips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.
