Around 70% of change programmes fail. Often this failure is linked to employee resistance, poor management, and poor communication. If we know that so many fail due to, in part, poor communication, why is bringing in communication professionals still left until the last minute?
In this episode, Jenni talks broadly about communicating change inside organisations. She looks at why it goes wrong, three factors critical to success, six things that concern people about change and what to consider to communicate effectively and address those concerns. She also shares a quick-win approach, plus resources for further listening or reading.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Podcast: Chaos to calm podcast S1 E7 The Field Model™
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
Blog: The science of fear
Blog: Why employee engagement needs to be more than just campaigns and rewards
Addressing the 6 Staff Concerns of Organisational Change
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Hi, and welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about communicating change inside organisations. Now, when I created the field model a few years ago, I had no idea that it was a model for change. It was only when somebody referenced it as one that I questioned it and then realised that is exactly what I’d created. Now, this episode isn’t going to be about the field model. I cover that in detail in season one in episode seven. So, I’ve popped a link in the show notes for that if you want to go and find out more.
But all I will say is that the field model has got the three phases of understand, diagnose and fix. And really, one of the things I advise all of my clients to do is to diagnose the root cause of any issue that’s going on inside your organisation and then focus on fixing that, because otherwise you’re just wasting time and money.
But in this episode, I want to talk more broadly about communicating change. I want to talk about why it goes wrong. I want to talk about the three things to focus on. And I then want to talk about the six concerns for change for you to apply after you’ve listened.
Do your change programmes fail? Do you know why?
Now, it’s true that around 70 percent of change programmes fail. And so often that is linked to employee resistance, poor management and poor communication. You know, the frustration that is felt by communication professionals about change programmes has been felt for years. I cannot tell you the conversations I have had with people that work in the communications industry who are constantly talking about the fact they have not been brought into something early enough in order to help make the change programme a success. And if we know that so many fail due to, in part, poor communication, it’s a wonder it’s still so late in the day that communication professionals are brought in.
But nevertheless, organisations are going through change all the time. And I have a real issue with this kind of concept that change is the only constant. Because if it is the only constant, it makes me wonder why we have to have it as a specialist area in organisations. You know, if it’s what we always do, then surely all of us should have some skill in managing and communicating change. Because if it’s happening all the time, it’s something that we’re doing all the time. But for me, when it comes to understanding change and how to really shift organisations, we have to focus on three things, and that’s people, relationships and alignment.
And it’s those three things that I want to talk through now, especially as we look at business transformation and change on the back of a global pandemic.
1. People
You know, understanding people is so important. Knowing what makes us human, how our brains work, how we feel about fairness, are all such important areas for us to understand, especially when it comes to change. Now, whenever I talk about communication, whenever I talk about creating efficient and engaging organisations, I always talk about people. I’ve got a whole chapter of it in my book, because for me, it’s so important whether you’re going through change or not.
You know, once we understand and know that our brains are really much the same as they were when we were cave people, and that our brain’s core purpose is to keep us safe, then we can understand so much more about our behaviour and what drives us every day.
So, if we think about our brains and how they work and that sort of core need to keep us safe, to predict what’s going to happen so that we are safe, and we kind of map that into times of change, if we’re hardwired to do that, then we will always try and predict what’s going to happen, especially during change.
And it’s no wonder, really, when we don’t do so well, when there’s, you know, huge upheaval or lots of unknown outcomes, and when there’s a lack of leadership or communication, that leaves us in a state of ambiguity, as I call it. So we’re kind of just incredibly lost. We don’t know what’s happening. We can’t predict. And then we get into a bit of a state of threat.
Now, as I said, I’ve got a whole chapter on this in my book, so I’ve popped a link to that in the show notes. And I’ve definitely blogged about this in other places around the different elements of people and how we need to understand more. It’s a huge topic I’m interested in. So, if you want to chat more about it, then just let me know, because I could talk about it for hours. But we’ve only got 15 minutes, so I won’t waffle on any more about people. But they are the fundamental piece for change.
2. Relationships
Now, I’ve talked about relationships a lot during this season, because relationships at work is still a bit of a taboo word. It’s not a word that’s often used. But relationships should be built on, you know, mutual respect, fairness and trust. And if we don’t have those as foundations, we’re going to really struggle when it comes to managing change, communicating change or having an efficient and engaging organisation.
Relationships work best when there is good, honest, clear communication. So when that’s missing, it’s incredibly difficult for us to thrive. And when there is a foundation of trust between those involved, when there is respect for the skills and the insights each party brings, relationships will work incredibly well. So when they’re not there, we can’t really expect change to work. You know, without those foundations of trust, our brains aren’t going to feel particularly safe. So they can’t predict what’s going to happen. And then we’re back to feeling threatened and in a bit of a state of ambiguity.
3. Alignment
So they kind of nicely build on each other because we have to have alignment. And this, for me, is really the core issue when it comes to the failure of change. Sometimes, when we’re looking at a change program, we start to implement that. That could be, you know, a technology change. It could be business ownership. It could be strategy. And we could do that without considering how aligned everyone is.
Do we really talk about, you know, does everybody understand why we’re doing what we’re doing? Is everybody clear about what we’re doing? Are the leadership team aligned to what’s about to happen? Is there dysfunction in a team with people focusing on their own agenda or their own goals?
Because if there’s no alignment of people heading in the same direction, focusing on the same goals, then we’re going to really struggle to be able to change things. And if we go straight to implementation, straight into the change, without looking at the alignment, then it’s going to be really difficult to do that successfully, because you haven’t got everybody all going in the same direction. And that’s what’s going to make any implementation of any change really difficult.
What are the six concerns of change?
Now, there are lots of models around change out there, which I’m not going to go into today. But there are six concerns of change, really. And I’ll pop a link to the source of some of this information into the show notes so you can read a bit more. But there are six concerns of change that we need to look at to be able to communicate effectively.
Information concerns: what is the change about? Why do we need to change?
Personal concerns: what’s in it for me? And what’s in it for me right now? So that’s about kind of the immediate what’s happening at the moment.
Implementation concerns: how is it going to work? How is it going to be implemented? So some of those core things about the impact, really, which is then the next concern.
Impact concerns: does this change make any difference? That’s a question I often ask when going through change. Does this change make any difference? But that’s another subject.
Collaboration concerns: how does everyone get involved? There’s no point in changing if no one else is going to change. That’s often what we can think. I can do all this work and I can make it if I can start using this new platform. But if no one else is going to use it, why would I bother? So we’ve got to have the sort of collaboration concerns addressed so that it’s everyone getting involved.
Enable voices to be heard: It’s called refinement concerns. And it’s about kind of continually improving or refining the change.
Now, I really like the simplicity of these six because I think it’s a nice framework to allow you to work through when you’re going through change. Like I said, there are other models. There are things like the change curve and the eight steps of change. But actually, when it comes to looking at change, given that communication professionals are often not involved at the early stages, these are things that we can look at no matter what our role is if we’re looking at change. Whether you’re a project manager, whether you’re on the board, whether you’re leading a team, whatever it might be, these are all things to consider when you’re going through any kind of change. And then you can map these to the three points I made earlier around people, relationships and alignment. And just kind of think about where you are.
You know, how well do you know your people? How well do you understand people? How well do you understand what people might be, you know, sort of thinking about in terms of how our brains work, how we’re hardwired to respond to things? What are your relationships like with your team? Are they good relationships? Do you have trust between everybody, not just hierarchically up and down, but across the whole team? And then do you have alignment? Is everybody aligned in terms of where you’re going and what you’re doing?
Because if you haven’t got those things in place as a foundation, and then you want to start changing things, that’s just going to be very difficult.
So, I’d always encourage people to have a longer term view and also make sure that you’re spending time on those three things before you go to the implementation of change.
What is the think, feel, do model?
Now, one of the other really good tools to map to this is the think, feel, do model. Now, it’s something I often recommend really quickly to clients going through rapid changes. I was talking to a president of a company recently and they are looking at how to improve their internal communication without any resource in place.
So, as a quick win where you’ve kind of got people maybe running along with projects that need communication, but they’re running along and focused on the tasks, then if you can ask them to just think about what do you want people to think? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? Then it will start to change that sort of focus in those conversations that are very task based about change to being more about the people.
So it’s quite a nice, simple addition to add in for project management teams to help them just bring that focus onto people. Now, it might not be all three of those. Think, feel, do. Just for people. That might get really fixed on that model that think you’ve got to have all three of those. You might not. You might not have anything you want them to think, but you need them to feel something or do something. But it’s just a really good framework to just take that project focus off and focus more on the people.
Thank you for listening!
Now, in my next and final episode, I’m going to be talking about influence and persuasion, and we’ll explore a bit about influential internal communication. We’ll talk about the art of persuasion and how it can help us when we’re navigating chaos inside organisations.
As always, thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So, please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, and details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
