Considering change? Change your comms strategy first

We’ve reached the time of year when many business leaders begin to look to the year ahead and consider how their organisations might need to change to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

This is probably especially true in the current climate of rising costs, disrupted supply chains, uncertain financial markets and the continuing political fluctuations around Brexit and our wider trade agreements.

A new year feels like a fresh chapter, and whether it’s in January or the start of the new fiscal year in April, it’s likely that you’re considering making changes to the way your business operates in the future.

The changes we have seen politically and economically over the past 12 months have been unsettling, but they provide us with a good reference point for any corporate transformation that we may be aiming to implement.

Generally speaking, employees get nervous around significant change, and there are a number of reasons why.

First – and probably foremost – they worry that any change (and especially change that’s designed to reduce or streamline costs) may have a personal impact through potential redundancy or a realignment of their role or duties.

Second, employees are often excluded from the planning stages of any change and are instead presented with a fait accompli.

This is made worse because those implementing the change have already moved along the change journey to acceptance of a new reality while the employees themselves have yet to experience the various change states of shock, grief, anger and denial.

What that means is that some very excited people tell some very shocked employees about what they consider exciting news, expecting those employees to share in their excitement – and then can’t understand why everyone seems so upset.

Third, and this relates to the second point, businesses are generally notoriously bad at communicating change.

Communication is the key to seamless transformation. Without it you’ll waste a lot of important effort and resources convincing people to buy into a new vision at a time when you want to be implementing the changes themselves.

So, what’s the best way to communicate change? Here are 6 tips to bear in mind.

1. Communicate early and communicate often

As soon as you have a broad plan of what you want to achieve and how you plan to do it, bring your employees on board through clear communication that focuses on the key principles – why change is needed, what process you will follow to achieve it, and how employees can have a stake in shaping the outcomes.

After that, communicate often. Make it as easy as possible for your people to be able to find timely and up to date information about where in the process the organisation has got to.

Where possible, answer the obvious questions:

Who will be impacted by the change?

Who is or will be in charge of leading it?

What has changed or will change?

When will things change?

Why is change needed?

2. The right message to the right people at the right time in the right way

Achieving buy in for any new idea or process is easier if your communication strategy is designed with the people receiving it in mind.

Email, meetings, informal conversations at the coffee machine, intranet, newsletters, screens and more are all valid ways to get your message through. Some of your comms might be formal and require formal delivery, other messages may be more informal or anecdotal.

It’s important to ensure every message gets to the people who need to hear it in a way that suits them either collectively or individually.

Choosing when to communicate is also essential. Unveiling bad news at 5pm on a Friday is never a good idea – always time communications for a period when your people will have the opportunity to engage with you on the detail.

3. Answer the key question: what’s in it for me?

It pays to adapt your communication strategy based on the impact and involvement of team members or employees. Different teams may need different approaches because some of the benefits (and disadvantages) of any change may be unique to them

Once people understand what it means to them on a personal or team level, they will be more ready to engage with the process behind it.

4. Prepare for resistance

Change will always be resisted, no matter how rational it may be, because change causes an emotional reaction that triggers fear, prompting an instant reflex to reject it.

This is where that change curve comes into play. By being ready for an emotional response and having a plan to deal with it, you can ensure your communication is measured, appropriate and empathetic.

In turn this should help – over time – to evolve a more rational response.

5. Build what you hear back into future messaging

A key mistake that some businesses make in effecting change is that they become defensive when they’re challenged on the need for transformation or the intended outcomes and as a result fail to listen to what they’re being told.

That doesn’t mean you have to act on every piece of feedback you get, but you should be sure to reflect and address the feedback given when communicating in the future.

This tells your employees that they have been heard and that you either agree their feedback has been incorporated into the planned change or explain why it has been disregarded.

6. Keep doing it

Repeated communication is necessary for change management. Received wisdom has it that before they take any action people need to hear a message at least 7 times. The same is true in change management.

The why and how of the change are easier for employees to understand when you repeat your message. Use the aforementioned communication strategies repeatedly.

If you get your communication approach right, you’ll find the transition you’re hoping to achieve will be smoother, more amicable and more collaborative.

If you’d like to know more about how Constantia Consulting can help you to devise a change communication strategy that works, please get in touch – we’d love to talk to you.