I don’t often make bold statements without first building up to them in an orderly way.

But – I am going to cut to the chase here and say that without getting your communications planning sorted and activated, your change or transformation program will fail.

Dead in its tracks.

Or, worse still, it will continue going well in the eyes of those in the know and everyone else will be screwed by their lack of awareness and their imminent surprise when things change that they don’t know about.

As John Kotter says, “without credible communications, and a lot of it, employee’s hearts and minds are never captured”.

Explaining the vision, how the journey will work and the expected benefits

The crucial thing that communications supports is your vision and how you are tracking against that. In simple terms, Change Management compares a current state (which should be well understood) with a future, desired state and sets a plan to make the journey or transition through completing a set of complimentary actions.

Communications is pivotal in many ways during this journey. Not only does it paint a powerful picture for the future, it informs efforts, updates on progress and notifies participants when and how they need to apply their efforts. In simple terms, you are covering of the what, why, who and when in a way that is inherently linked to the change vision and a very accurate and clear description of the expected benefits.

In this situation, communications play a key role in closing the transactional loop that occurs many times during a change program. This loop involves the change leaders asking the organisation to do something, they respond (hopefully positively), the program progresses and the leaders let everyone know how the program has moved forward. There is a gap that many leaders miss in this loop and that is the follow up after action, feedback of decision making. Whenever your people are requested to do something and they act, their actions/contributions/decisions need to be recognised and respected to build their sense of participation and recognition.

If you want to make your overarching vision story successful, it’s worth considering how you can use imagery to tell the story visually through infographics, animation, or short films. Your people take in so much straight text each day, you need your change story to stand out and be attractive in a way that rivals their communications outside of work (i.e. almost as interesting as their Instagram feed).

Keeping all the arms and legs moving in the right direction

By its nature, regular communications plays a huge role in keeping each player updated on the program and where each work stream is up to. Given your change program should be run underpinned by a rigorous project management approach, the functional communications that occurs through meetings, briefings and updates will keep the project activities on track, while supporting the wider, more colorful communications work you do.

Frequent updates also provide a paper trail (of sorts) and a demonstrated intent to engage and involve. Sometimes people just don’t want to be part of the team and that’s fine, but a good communications schedule can show that you tried, you listened and you acted in the best interests of the wider group.

Building ownership

Fundamentally, a successful change requires not only awareness and buy-in to the process, but also ownership.

Ownership of what? That’s a good question because you need to build ownership outcomes at a number of points along the journey.

Ownership represents:

• The employees understanding the vision and what it means for them.
• The steps to be taken to get there and how they contribute to that.
• The conversations they need to have or encourage to help build momentum during the hard times.
• The feeling of satisfaction and contribution they have when the goal is realized.
• The way they can look back in the future and say that they helped make that thing a whole lot better.

So, how do you build ownership?

Ownership, like building a partnership, requires a genuine connection that is built through open, honest, proactive and straight-forward communications and engagement.

Creating a genuine connection

By “a genuine connection”, I don’t mean having 15 too many beers with each member of your team on a Thursday afternoon and slipping into a deep and meaningful conversation.

Instead, I mean a well-planned and targeted set of communication and engagement activities that connect with your people on their level, using the right words, the right channel (or tool) and at the right time.

One of my old bosses had a quote that always stuck with me and it explains the process well. “Match your message to your medium to your audience”.

Of course, this also needs to be based on a strong awareness of how your target audience ticks and what they will see as the pros and cons of the change. Equally, your communications actions need to occur at the right time to get the right result.

The timing discussion is interesting and while it can be tricky in terms of how you align your plan to a schedule, the golden rule is to communicate before you need to and immediately when an issue arises. There can be a tendency to under communicate when all of the elements are not know and this is flat out dangerous. We have all seen great examples of information being supplied too slowly and the vacuum being filled by all-to-willing speculators. There is an ongoing need to weigh up the benefits of your message versus the risks, but keep in mind that not knowing all of the answers is not a risk and if you’re honest about that (while showing that you are working hard on it), you may actually win more respect than you started out with.

If you don’t know everything at that time, be honest and say that, but give people the golden nuggets of information you have – get them going, build momentum and get on their level by being honest and saying there is more to come. You want people to relate to you (the leader) and your message, so it’s critical to build respect by being honest.

Building momentum

Finally, a change program relies heavily upon quick wins and benefits realisation to build momentum, which means your communications activities need to be proactively planned and ready to roll out while they achievement news is still hot. With this in mind, you need to have your messaging and tool selection ready well in advance of hitting your benefit milestones and you always need to connect any achievement back to the vision, the journey and the contribution your people are making.

So, all told, there is a lot that hangs off your communications activities during a change or transformational program. Just to make it easy for you, I have compiled a set of steps to guide communications during change and what they should look like. As always, contact me on benjamins@stockwellbretton.com if you would like to know more or to debate my theories. I am happy to entertain either.

Checklist for communicating during organisational changes