Change management comms like you’ve never done it before.

McKinsey estimates that 70% of change programmes fail to achieve their goals, in large part due to employee resistance. It may be our inherent resistance to change or it may be change fatigue borne out of the frustration of constant flux experienced in organisations that are in an ever-shifting state of alteration. Whatever the reasons, it hardly matters because change, like tax and tele salespeople, can’t be avoided.

We need only look at the Kodaks or ToysRUs to understand the imperative for change. Given its inevitability and the opportunity that change brings with it, we should be rooting for it to succeed and for that to happen, our change communication needs to do more than overcome resistance. It needs to create a group of enthusiastic advocates who are clear on the strategy and able to execute it with a level of clarity and competence. To achieve that, here are the smash hits of change management best practices:

Be a boy scout. Go in prepared with a communication plan. Work with senior leaders to agree on a communication plan. Without a plan, it becomes too easy to let communication slide and when that happens, the rot sets in – rumours circulate, impetus is lost, understanding gets blurry and attention wavers.

Practice radical honesty. Don’t try and soft soap a change management initiative. Tell it like it is. Eventually your employees will find out that your ‘exciting change programme that will revitalise the way you do business’ is in fact just another disruptive restructure in sheep’s clothing. Out with it. Be clear and transparent up front. Similarly, if you’re asked a question, even, or especially, an unpalatable one, don’t duck and dive, answer it as honestly and transparently as possible. People would rather hear an ugly truth than a pretty lie.

Email is not your friend. It makes you look lazy at best and weak at worst. Meet with people face to face – especially if the news is not good, if you need to do some serious convincing, or if the change you’re embarking on is complex and needs clarifying or unpacking. In fact, for any one of a thousand reasons, email is just about the poorest communication choice you can make.

Get out of your office. Yes, it’s nice in there but you need to be accessible to people to answer questions and clarify understanding. Make time to regularly discuss the change management initiative, field questions, take the hits, deal with the issues and handle any objections. Being able to deal with any resistance allows change initiatives to move on; ignoring them creates impasses that are hard to recover from.

SPUGS. Be gone with your BHAGS (big hairy audacious goals) and roll out the red carpet for your small puny underwhelming goals. The problem with BHAGS is they’re almost impossible to achieve and while working on them, you feel like you’re going nowhere. Break your project into lots and lots of small milestones and celebrate achieving each one so that there is a sense of achievement and progress.

Let go Joe. If you treat it like your project, it will be. If you own the communication and treat both the channels and content as something you control, then you’ll be solely responsible for driving the project. By decentralising communications and using channels that give everyone a voice, you’ll create a greater sense of ownership in the group and give the project a much higher chance of success. Create platforms that give people a voice – to speak to leadership, to each other and to the rest of the organisation. Communication structured in this way has many benefits – it’s more authentic, more honest and more transparent and because of this, better at connecting with a broader audience.

Engage often and then some more.  There’s a laughable belief that if you write an email with a reasonable rationale for the change and hit send, it’ll be read by everyone, understood and voila, there will be no resistance. If you believe this, or anything close to this, then you’re tripping. You need to communicate often and regularly – even if you don’t have all the answers. Rather say ‘we don’t have all the details yet but what we do know is…’ and come back to them when you do have more information. Only regular, consistent and honest communication will be effective in overcoming resistance.

Know your audience. A spray and pray communication approach will result in your audience turning off and tuning out and if they do that, you’ll be unable to connect with them and an audience you can’t find, is an audience you can’t convince. Tailor your communication to your different audiences by considering who your different target groups are – what do you want each different group to think, feel and do, what language will connect with them and how will you reach them? Then ask what does it mean for each audience, what’s in it and most importantly, what do you want them to do (call to action)?

One man’s village green is another man’s poison. Different audiences need to hear different messages and want to hear them via different channels. You need to segment your audience to ensure a right audience, right message, right channel mix. Remember when developing your channel strategy that face-to-face, followed by video, are the preferred channels so include:

• Workshops
• One-on-one meetings
• Focus groups
• Team meetings
• Audio visuals
• Video conferences
• Hack-a-thons or problem-solving groups

It’s a bloody boring cliché but if change is truly the only constant, we need to ensure we’re effectively equipped to communicate our way through it successfully, or find ourselves on the midden of brand relics alongside those that have eschewed change for the comfort of the familiar.

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So, here’s a scenario, tell me if any of it sounds familiar (names have been changed to protect the guilty).

Clyde sees Craig providing really great customer service (obviously this scenario isn’t happening in a bank). It’s not the first time Clyde has seen Craig do this. Bizarrely, it happens all the time. What can we say, Craig’s a helluva guy.

So, Clyde logs onto the intranet and nominates Craig for a Service Heroes award. Nice going Craig. If, and it’s quite a big if, Craig wins, he gets to go on an incentive trip to Mauritius. Over the next few months they gather a bunch of nominations and in October a panel sit together and review all of them. And they’re pretty much what you’d expect – a line-up of the best and brightest employees shooting the lights out, going the extra mile, providing service excellence and a host of other boring clichés (I’m not making this shit up, I’ve read these nominations).

In November, Craig bags the prize and off he goes. It’s blue skies, golden beaches, overpriced cocktails and failed recognition programmes all the way, and here’s the five reasons why.

1. Programmes like this ‘skim the cream’ and reward the people already giving good service. They fail to shift the dial for the vast majority of people middling along – but that’s what you want. You want to bring everyone along on the ride. Basically, they get what they already got and they pay a lot for it.
2. The people offering the worst service know they’ll never crack the nod and so it does nothing to elevate your service bottom feeders – the people who most need it.
3. Too few people are rewarded which disincentivises the majority. Almost everyone goes ‘meh, what are the chances?’
4. There’s a massive lag between behaviour and reward. Between the action and the incentive months can go by – months where even the best employees feel unrecognized for their efforts.
5. It shifts the emphasis from recognition to reward and in doing this from abundance to scarcity.

If you want to drive better strategic alignment across a team or organisation, your reward and recognition programme is an excellent lever. Here are some strategic principles to consider that’ll ensure you get the most from it:

We use the 50/30/20 rule of recognition. 50% of your efforts should go towards peer-to-peer recognition. Allowing colleagues to acknowledge and recognise each other’s efforts plays a significant role in creating a culture of appreciation.

41% of companies that use peer-to-peer recognition have seen marked positive increases in customer satisfaction. (SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Survey, 2012)

The same survey also showed that peer-to-peer recognition is 35.7% more likely to have a positive impact on financial results than manager-only recognition.

30% of your time, effort and budget should go towards manager-driven reward and recognition. And only 20% of your resources should be business driven.

In addition to that:

• The recognition should occur as close to the performance of the actions as possible, so the recognition reinforces the behaviour you want to encourage.
• Tiered reward and recognition programmes that include formal, informal, non-financial and financial rewards allow for flexibility and different reward options suitable to different situations.
• Public reward and recognition increase the value of the reward. It’s just much better to score a hole-in-one when it’s in front of a crowd than when you’re on your own.
• Recognition works – it’s not the financial reward but the feeling of being acknowledged that drives behaviour. Rather have fewer rewards (a lower reward value) and more rewarded people. Praise and commendation from managers was rated the top motivator for performance, beating out other noncash and financial incentives, by a majority of workers (67%) (McKinsey Motivating People, Getting Beyond Money, 2009)

If we boil things down to sticks and carrots and we acknowledge the truth that sticks don’t work (not to mention the grey legal area they leave us in), we’re left with carrots. We need to ensure that we use those carrots to effectively engage everyone in the organisation because sending Craig and a handful of his mates to Mauritius next year is going to leave the other 99% of the organisation, the 99% that we really need to engage, out in the cold with your customers for company.

Need help to create change in your organisation?

As George Bernard Shaw famously said of company values ‘fuck this shit’. Okay he didn’t actually say that but if he had to walk past a poster every day that said Honesty, Integrity, Teamwork or Innovation, I can pretty much guarantee he would have.

Values can act as the bedrock for an organisation offering clear direction on how the business behaves, but there are two important caveats that can’t be ignored.

The first is that if you want your values to be taken seriously, you need to take them seriously enough to choose values that are unique to you. Another set of generic McValues screams we couldn’t really give a shit and if you can’t, then don’t expect your employees to either.

The next is that heads must roll. I’ve seen employees at every level openly flout the values of an organisation and nothing happens. When that happens, your values become a joke not worth the wall space they take up. When you write your values, spend some time agreeing on the consequences of not towing the values line.

Values – first makes them mean something, then make them mean something.

Need help to create change in your organisation?

Need help to create change in your organisation?