Today we can communicate with people easier and faster than ever before. Yet I consistently hear leaders and employees talking about feeling overwhelmed with information, but under informed about what is actually going on in their organization.

Most of the new communication tools are passive: they leave little opportunity for the conversations needed for change. A great example of this is email.

In most organizations email is the default way of communicating. However, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard Business School noted in a recent blog post  our expectations of email may be too high. She states, “Managers of the 21st century send an email and they think they’ve taken care of everything”.

Email and other forms of passive communication can be effective ways of conveying your message, but not alone. They need to be used in conjunction with more active communication like conversation. During change it can be challenging to get your message heard and understood. By being prepared to communicate frequently, and repeat the message in a variety of ways you can increase the effectiveness of your communication.

1. Repeat the message.  A good rule of thumb is six times in six different ways.
2. Use email to reinforce key aspects of the change, or follow-up a previous communication, but avoid using email to announce a change initiative.
3. Introduce and enable more face-to-face and other forms of active communication to ensure that you are also getting information about how the change is being received.

Regards,

Dawn-Marie

Helping you launch, lead and live change more successfully.

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“I like change, but the people that work for me don’t”, that was comment a CEO recently made to me when we were talking about organizational change.  I have heard this comment or similar “people hate change”.   I understand why some leaders think their employees dislike change. Although most of us dislike the discomfort associated with change, I don’t think the problem is that leaders fundamentally like change and employees don’t. I think the reason it appears employees dislike change is because they are often not ready and excluded from its implementation. Involvement is key to increasing your employees’ readiness for change.

I notice a dramatic shift in the conversation when employees stop talking about change generally and start talking about specific organizational changes.  I will often hear employees (including leaders) say things like; “I don’t understand this change”, or “this change doesn’t make any sense, or “I don’t know where they came up with this brilliant idea” and eventually I will hear someone say, “people hate change”.  You can easily interpret these comments to mean your employees don’t like change.  However, that would be a mistake and you would be ignoring the real problem.

The real problem is that no one, not you, or me, or your employees likes change done to them. Unfortunately too many organizational change initiatives are simply done to the employees. When it comes to organizational change, there is a direct correlation between involvement and success. The more change recipients are involved the more change you have for success.

Several months ago I was talking with an employee who was trying to cope with a significant organizational transformation. He was angry, frustrated, tired and quite obviously not working to move the change forward. I would not have been a surprised if his manager had labeled him “resistant”.

When I asked him if he was opposed to the changes the organization was trying to make, he stated a categorical NO. On the contrary, he thought the changes made sense and were needed. The reason for his opposition was the way his organization was implementing the changes. From his perspective the employees most affected were being ignored and the changes were being pushed through without any regard for  the customer, employees or the organization.

Avoiding this problem and increasing your organizations’ change capacity requires you to actively involve  the people most affected (the change recipients). Stephen Covey said, “no involvement no commitment”.

Here are three things that you can do to increase employee involvement in your change initiatives:

1. Conduct a change recipient analysis to identify which areas and people will be most important to your success.
2. Define a framework that will enable maximum involvement. The framework should be based on the number of people   affected by the change, the available and needed resources, and your organizational structure. A good rule of thumb is at least 5% of the total change recipients should be involved in enabling the outcome.
3. Share the framework with the your employees. Let the change recipients know where, when, and how they will be involved in shaping their destiny and the destiny of the organization.

In January, at the 2012 HR Business Summit I will be conducting a Master class to help leaders address the growing problem of organizational change fatigue.  One of the strategies I will share is involvement.  Enabling active involvement of your employees, in a coordinated and sustained manner is a key strategy to reduce your organization’s risk of change fatigue.

Regards,

Dawn-Marie

Helping you launch, lead and live change more successfully.

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