Teams & Organizations
Vivian Zhou
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25 mins read
Wed, May 17, '23
This week’s expert insights article is written in consultation with Jesse Bourgeault-Trickey, Global Deployment Manager at Happeo, and former Digital Communications Manager at ATB Financial and Digital Communications Lead at Shaw Communications.
Maybe you need to adapt to a new technology, react to a new competitor in your industry, or shift your branding to attract a new type of customer. Maybe you’ve always been an in-person organization, and need to adopt a new culture that’s suitable for long-term remote work after the pandemic.
Or maybe you started life as an ambitious startup with just a handful of employees, and need to adapt your systems, processes, and structure to reflect your new status as a growing organization.
The point is, change is inevitable. But despite how often we experience it, it can still be confusing, stressful, and even scary for your employees. That’s why you need to make sure you’re communicating effectively about change so your employees understand not only what needs to happen, but why.
Read on for our full guide to managing change through internal communications — even if you don’t (yet) have a fully developed IC function.
Change management describes the techniques, processes, and tools organizations use to implement changes to their structures, systems, and ways of operating. That’s a lot of words, so let’s put it more simply: change management is everything you do that enables your employees to understand, embrace and make change happen at your company.
Four out of five Americans have felt frustrated by poor workplace communication. And a recent Gallup poll found that only 13% of respondents strongly agreed that their company’s leadership team communicated effectively with the rest of the organization.
The fact is, most organizations are not very good at communicating with their employees. And that could be one of the biggest reasons why 70% of organizational change initiatives fail to meet their objectives.
When it comes to communicating with your employees, there’s always room for improvement. And effective communication is especially important when it’s tied to key changes in the workplace.
So what’s the solution? How do you effectively implement change in your organization? Well, there’s no one answer — and there’s no magic button you can press to automatically get your employees on board with change.
What you can do is work to incorporate internal communications principles into your change management process. After all, you need your employees to embody the changes you’re trying to implement — and that starts with making sure they understand them.
To get us started, here’s our basic, step-by-step guide to communicating effectively around change in your organization (we’ll dive deeper with some specific tips to get the most out of the process below).
There’s no one correct way to communicate about organizational change. You need to account for your organization’s particular industry, size, challenges, culture, and quirks, and develop a communication plan that makes sense in that context.
It’s also a good idea to consider previous enterprise-wide changes that have been implemented — successfully or otherwise. By reaching out to the people who led those changes, you can borrow techniques that worked well, and make sure to avoid those that didn’t.
Here are our tips for effectively using internal comms to manage change in your organization.
Too often, internal comms aren't considered until way too late in the change management process. This is because many organizations think of internal comms’ role as tactical and implementation-focused. In other words, they’re just the messenger, responsible for distributing pre-determined information to your employees.
But if you’re thinking this way, you could be missing out on a big opportunity. Thinking about how you’ll communicate about the change early in the process means you can make sure that communication is effective from the get-go. This helps you to get your employees on board with — heck, excited about — the changes you’re trying to implement.
So, how does this work in practice? Try it this way: early on in the process, sit down with your leadership team, and have a conversation about the best way to implement your planned changes.
If your organization has an internal comms manager, they should be invited to the conversation too. But even if you don’t, you can still work with leaders to determine the best ways to deliver your message — and how to make it relevant to each group of employees and stakeholders. This way, communications will be baked into the process — rather than considered as an afterthought once your plans are underway.
Working with your leadership team, build a plan for communicating your planned changes to your team. It’s important to remember that communications around change aren’t a one-time thing: you’ll have to repeat, reiterate and build on the message throughout the process. Having a concrete plan from the start helps you ensure everyone is aligned on the key messages and how they should be delivered.
Here are some of the things an internal comms plan should include:
Humans have always loved a good story. It was true thousands of years ago when our ancestors traded word-of-mouth stories around the campfire. And it was true last night when you stayed up past your bedtime to squeeze in just one more episode of that Netflix show. For our purposes, that means that if you want to achieve meaningful change in your organization, you need to craft a narrative to go with it.
If that sounds intimidating, think of it this way: every change has a reason behind it, and explaining that reason to your employees is the first step. You don’t have to meticulously outline every single detail about what you’re trying to achieve. After all, hit TV shows don’t show the protagonist putting their socks on or deciding what to have for breakfast.
But you do need to come up with a compelling narrative that tells your employees how you’ll get from where you are now to where you need to be — and why it’s important that you do. If you do it right, your employees shouldn’t just understand the change you’re proposing — they should be invested in it and excited for the future.
In a 2020 episode of our Internal Comms Podcast, we spoke with Rum Ekhtiar, founder and partner at Rum & Co, a collective of brand consultants that get s**t done. Rum spoke about a campaign he led for CitiBank, which brought together more than 1000 employees from 50 countries to create a video arrangement of the song Proud.
FYI: the result is super cool and well worth four minutes and thirty-seven seconds of your time. If you do watch it, you’ll notice something interesting: it doesn’t look like an internal comms project. It looks like something a creative agency would come up with.
“I think about the way I communicate to employees the same way I would create a marketing campaign for a consumer brand,” Rum says. “How do they want to hear the message? What format do they want to see it in, and what’s going to trigger that change? How do I hit them more than two or three times, so they remember?”
The point is, when we’re talking about something as important as implementing organizational change, it’s not enough to send out a few reminder emails and stick a poster on the staff noticeboard. Instead, you need to get inside your employees' heads and think about their pains, thoughts, and desires — just like a marketing team.
This gets much easier when you reach out to employees at the beginning of the process and communicate continuously throughout. This way, you’ll start a feedback loop that extends throughout the project and beyond.
What’s more effective: a boss that commands their underlings to get things done “because I said so” or one that takes the time to explain why a task is important and what it will achieve for the business? Sure, employees might do the work either way — but they’re not going to be invested in it or excited about it if they don’t understand the reasons behind it.
Unfortunately, not all organizations seem to understand this. A 2017 Quantum Workplace survey found that almost one-third of employees were uncertain about the “why” behind the changes at their organizations.
To properly get employees on board, you need to present a viable, positive vision of the future. Then, use storytelling to help them to connect the dots between your organization’s current situation and that ideal vision of the future.
Listen: we’re sure your employees are good people, and we’re not here to call anyone selfish. But we all have to think about our own workloads, processes, pains, and challenges when it comes to our jobs. So instead of just talking about broad, high-level outcomes for the organization as a whole, try to dig down further and determine exactly what will change for each employee. We call this the “WIIFM” factor, which stands for “What’s in it for me?”
To do this, you’ll need to segment your audience (your employees) and figure out what will change for each group — then use that to drive your messaging. After all, an employee is much more likely to get fully on board with a project if you make your messaging as relevant to them as possible — so they understand how it’s going to make their life easier in the long run.
Organizational change projects are usually led from the top down. And while senior leadership teams can be great at shaping the overall direction of an organization, they don’t always understand the granular details of its day-to-day operations. That means that you could be missing out on crucial insights about how your organization actually works if you’re not talking to the people who understand that best.
Also, unforeseen circumstances that arise during the roll-out of a change might mean you have to shift your approach — but you’ll never know about them if you’re not asking for feedback on how things are going. That’s why it’s a good idea to include regular surveys from the very beginning of your change management process, so you can understand:
One way to think of this is through a know/feel/do model. Employees have to know about the change in order to feel excited about it and do what’s needed to bring it about. If you spot that one of these elements isn’t being fulfilled (e.g. your employees know about the change, but they’re not feeling excited about it), you might have to shift your approach to get the results you need.
Of course, surveys aren’t the only way to gather feedback. And they’re probably not the best way to determine engagement in a project, since those who are less engaged are less likely to respond. Depending on your situation, you might want to experiment with one-on-one meetings, focus groups, town halls, and intranet discussion forums.
Have you ever been part of a big, ambitious project that just… fizzled out after a while? Even when your intentions are good, it’s easy to forget about the radical transformation you’re supposed to be making to your work practices if you’re not being reminded.
That’s why communication about change is not a “one-and-done” situation. You need to build opportunities for continued communications into the change process, keeping employees informed and making sure that the transformation stays top of mind. And there’s hard evidence that this works, too: a McKinsey study found that company-wide change efforts are 12.4x more likely to be successful when senior managers communicate continuously with the workforce.
So, what should this look like? You should repeatedly bring employees back to the story you’re trying to tell so that they can more easily see the impact of the changes they’re making. For example, you could highlight employees who are already embodying the change in your regular newsletter or on a dedicated intranet page for employee shout-outs.
So, how exactly should your communications around change go out to your employees? There are a few answers: you could send information, surveys, and documents out by email. You could use your regular all-hands or team meetings to share progress updates. And you could even provide information to your in-office colleagues via physical notice boards and virtual signage.
But if you’ve visited this blog before, you’ll know that we’re firm believers in the company intranet as your main method of communication, collaboration, and connection with your workforce. With a modern intranet, you can create a Page dedicated to the change you’re trying to implement. Then, you can feature the page in articles and high-traffic areas, like your homepage, and use this area to store and share all of the documentation, guidance, and information that teams will need. This way, your teams can easily refer back to the information they need without having to search through a cluttered inbox.
And remember how we said you should communicate continuously about your change project, and regularly ask for feedback along the way? Both of these can be done through a dedicated communication Channel, where employees can come together to learn about progress, discuss the future, and provide their feedback on what’s happening so far.
Want to find out more about how an intranet solution like Happeo could help you to manage change? Book a demo or start your free trial today.
